Starring: |
Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd |
Directed by: |
Robert Zemeckis |
Viewed by the Reagans: |
July 26, 1985 |
The Film That Left Us Speechless
At 11:28 a.m. on Saturday, July 13, 1985, Ronald Reagan ceased, for the second time, to be president of the United States. At that moment, he was placed under anesthesia for nearly three hours of surgery to remove a two-inch cancerous growth from his colon. A letter he had signed earlier that morning transferred power temporarily to Vice President Bush.
Just minutes before, the president had been transported on a gurney down the gleaming white corridors of Bethesda Naval Hospital toward the operating room as the First Lady kept pace alongside, holding her husband’s hand. The growth in his large intestine had been discovered only the day before during a colonoscopy exam. The decision had been made to perform the surgery right away. At the door to the operating room, the president and First Lady exchanged a final “I love you” and squeezed each other’s hands once more. Then the medical team took over.
Reagan’s wit shone through just before he underwent anesthesia. He told the surgeons that after his colonoscopy the day before, “this ought to be a breeze.”
And, as colon cancer surgeries go, that’s what it was. President Reagan emerged two hours and fifty-three minutes later after a complication-free procedure, minus all traces of the problematic growth—along with two feet of his large intestine. In another few hours, once the anesthesia and pain medication had worn off, he resumed his presidential duties after an absence of less than eight hours altogether.
The summer of 1985 was a happy time for the Reagan presidency. He had just been inaugurated for the second time, having carried every state but one in the November 1984 election. The economy was improving impressively. The sky-high rates of unemployment, interest, and inflation that President Reagan had inherited when he took office were quickly being replaced by record prosperity. On the international front, there was also cause for optimism. In Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan found a Soviet leader with whom he could work; a worthy partner in the games of statecraft that would characterize the last stages of the Cold War.
In the summer of ’85, the momentum was all Ronald Reagan’s. “Morning in America” was turning into a brilliant high noon. “Morning in America” was the opening line in a television commercial used in Reagan’s campaign for reelection. It was designed to highlight how much progress had been made during the first Reagan term—that the country went from darkness to light. When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, coverage of funeral arrangements was sometimes referred to as “Mourning in America.”
The surgery was only a minor hiccup. Everything had been taken care of so quickly and easily, with no complications, that it seemed nothing was going to slow down the Reagan revolution—not a would-be assassin’s bullet and not a little bit of cancer. Reagan himself was fond of saying, “I did not have cancer. I had something that had cancer in it, and it was removed.” I was understanding but always felt that this was an unrealistic denial. Only many years later, when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, did I understand what he meant.
In fact, in a strange way, Reagan’s cancer surgery in 1985 eerily foreshadowed my own treatment in 2007. The day of the president’s colonoscopy, with the surgery looming over us the following day, I rode back to the White House from the hospital in the limousine with Mrs. Reagan. She was understandably upset. At one point on that ride, in what was clearly an effort to minimize what was happening, she said to me, “Anyone can get cancer. Even you, Mark.” I didn’t think much of it at the time—the young always think they’re invincible—but it flashed back to the forefront of my mind when I received my diagnosis. At the time, I told my wife, Erin, “Well, Mrs. Reagan was right.” When she found out, Mrs. Reagan was extremely supportive and wrote us letters often. Thanks to some very talented doctors at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the disease is no longer a part of my life.
After President Reagan’s successful surgery, everyone wanted to get as far away from thoughts and talk of cancer as possible. It was important for the president to have time to recover, but there was a lot of work to be done, and the business of running the country could hardly be paused or even slowed down. In the weeks following the surgery, Reagan continued his recovery, gradually increasing his daily schedule of meetings and events. His vital signs were monitored every day by the White House physicians, and he spent time working from the residence, sometimes walking in the hallways for exercise. On rare occasions, he took a nap. Mrs. Reagan was vigilant on this point. If all went well in the first two weeks of recovery, he (and the rest of us) had a treat to look forward to: a weekend at Camp David scheduled for July 26.
Among the items on the schedule during the week leading up to that trip were a state visit by Chinese president Li Xiannian; meetings on a variety of topics, including the deficit and budget, sanctions against South Africa, and the case of John Anthony Walker Jr., an officer in the US Navy who’d recently been arrested and charged with having operated as a Russian spy for more than twenty-five years. He’d even turned treason into the family business, recruiting his own son, a navy seaman, into his spy ring; as well as a Cabinet meeting and an interview with Hugh Sidey of Time magazine.
After such a busy week, we knew it was a possibility that the president’s physician would veto the Camp David visit and order him to remain at the White House to rest. Nonetheless, we hoped and planned to go. On Thursday evening of that week, the White House physician approved the trip, saying, “It will do him a world of good.”
Midmorning on Friday, the day we were due to leave, I left the office to collect one last provision. At a candy store across the street from the White House, I bought a big box of chocolates with smooth, creamy centers. We had been advised by the president’s physicians that he was not allowed to eat anything with nuts, seeds, or kernels anymore. Movie nights would no longer include popcorn. I hoped these chocolates would make for an acceptable substitute.
By the time he boarded Marine One on the south grounds of the White House that Friday afternoon, Ronald Reagan was tired and ready for a relaxing weekend. But he hardly showed it. When he and Mrs. Reagan emerged from the diplomatic entrance, he beamed—clearly happy to be on the way to a place that remained one of his favorites throughout his eight years in office. A larger-than-usual press contingent had gathered to witness their departure.
As Marine One took off, the feeling set in that everything was back to normal. On the helicopter with the Reagans were the president’s personal aide, Jim Kuhn; his army aide; a physician; two Secret Service agents; and me. After we landed at Camp David, we traveled in a mini-motorcade to Aspen Lodge, and just before the president entered, someone suggested that maybe he would prefer to have a quiet evening off instead of inviting the rest of us over for the usual movie showing. None of us wanted to tempt fate or tax President Reagan as he continued to recover from major surgery less than two weeks earlier.
Nothing doing. “No, no,” the president said. “I’ve been looking forward to this and want you all to come.”
“Yes sir,” we said almost in unison, and that was that.
Even though the “call time” for the movie was 8:00 p.m. as usual, we gathered at the front door of Aspen at 7:45. It was a typically warm, muggy July evening. As always, Ronald Reagan opened the door at 7:50.
Everything about the seventy-four-year-old seemed to glow with vitality unheard of in most men his age, or any age. Instead of screening a movie, the man before us could have been preparing to star in one. Though six foot one, he seemed to tower above us with an easy confidence that allowed him to command a room and put everyone in it at immediate ease.
I always thought that was because he genuinely liked people and was comfortable in his own skin. Ronald Reagan was fundamentally a happy man who enjoyed life. He was rarely ill at ease, and not given to being uncomfortably self-conscious. Those qualities served him well. He was just as comfortable going head-to-head with Gorbachev as he was riding the perimeter at his California ranch. He made both look easy to anyone watching. He had played many roles in his life. Tonight he was obviously delighted to play host.
Dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt, blue jeans, and comfortable moccasin-type shoes, the president beckoned everyone in. “How do you do?” he said with a smile, and we all assembled near the unlit fireplace.
Mrs. Reagan, wearing a denim shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers, came over and welcomed everyone. It was clear she was very happy that everything was back to normal.
We made our way to our usual seats. Jim and I made a point of watching the president closely to see if he moved with any obvious discomfort or more slowly than usual, but he did not. It was confirmed: he was back to himself. Just before the movie began, Mrs. Reagan stood up and told everyone that “tonight we won’t be having popcorn, but I think Mark brought something else you will enjoy.” The lights dimmed, and the movie started.
The Reagans were looking forward to seeing Back to the Future, maybe because its star, Michael J. Fox, was already well known for playing a precocious Republican teenager on one of their favorite television shows, Family Ties, then entering its fourth season. They were far from alone in their admiration for the NBC comedy. Between the 1984–85 and 1985–86 seasons, it jumped in the Nielsen rankings from number five up to number two in its prime-time slot.
Fox played Alex P. Keaton, the son of two aging hippie parents growing up with his two sisters—and in the final seasons, a brother—in suburban Ohio. Young Alex, to the bafflement of his liberal mother and father, had grown up into a staunch conservative, fond of quoting the economist Milton Friedman (a Reagan favorite), wearing tailored suits and carrying his schoolwork in a briefcase. He yearned for the day he could take his place among the “yuppie” class. Though Alex’s political views could certainly cause chagrin among other members of his family, by the end of most episodes, their mutual love and respect for one another had smoothed out any domestic fissures.
The popularity of Alex P. Keaton was itself very much a reflection of the Reagan era. Alex personified the resurgence that right-of-center ideology was making among young people at the time, thanks in no small part to President Reagan’s own capacity for inspiring leadership. The Reagan Revolution had made it “cool” to be Republican.
Twenty minutes or so into the movie, the two Aspen presidential food service coordinators came into the darkened living room. They crouched down so as not to block anyone’s view of the screen as they made their way to the couch. One handed the president the big box of chocolates I had brought, and the other handed him and Mrs. Reagan water in crystal glasses etched with the presidential seal. They then handed the rest of us water in plain glasses. No presidential seals.
The president and Mrs. Reagan each took some pieces of chocolate, and we all passed the box around until it wound up on the coffee table, once again in front of the Reagans. The chocolates, I noted thankfully, had proved a success.
In the film, which had just been released three weeks earlier, Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a high school student from a loving but struggling family. Through his friendship with a local scientist, inventor, and all-around eccentric, Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown, Marty is transported from the present year of 1985 back to 1955 in a time machine made from a converted DMC DeLorean sports car. As he adjusts to the shock of living in his hometown of Hill Valley, California, thirty years in the past—and falls in with a younger but no less wacky Doc Brown—Marty’s unexpected mission is to help the teenage incarnations of his parents meet each other and fall in love before Marty and his siblings vanish from the face of the earth.
Both Reagans appeared engrossed in Back to the Future, often laughing heartily. The president got a kick out of the fact that when Marty first goes back to 1955 and walks past Hill Valley’s movie theater, the marquee shows Cattle Queen of Montana, the 1954 film starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan.
At the time, Roger Ebert compared Back to the Future to Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life and speculated that executive producer Steven Spielberg was “emulating the great studio chiefs of the past.” The timeless quality of the storytelling was not lost on the two veterans of old Hollywood sitting with us in the darkened living room.
But beyond that, I could not help but wonder if the president may have seen parts of himself in certain aspects of the film. Marty journeys back to a simpler time—when patriotism mattered, when the town square was kept a little cleaner, when everyone seemed to smile a little easier, and the music the kids listened to was just a little softer. Reagan often implored us to embrace the simple values that informed this earlier era, to recapture the grit and spirit of togetherness that helped win World War II and usher in the prosperity of the 1950s. Indeed, America’s booming economy at home and unrivaled standing abroad, which characterized Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, in some ways mirrored the country’s similarly strong footing in the 1950s.
Of course, the 1950s were far from perfect—in reality or in the movie. Marty’s goal is always to get “back to the future,” back to 1985. It would have been far more difficult to make a movie chronicling a character’s struggles to get back to the eve of Reagan’s election in 1980, with its gas lines, stagflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis in full swing. Or even worse, back to the mid-1970s, when the Watergate scandal had ratcheted up national tension to nerve-wracking levels.
Marty knows he must get back to 1985 because his future is there, and while he can’t see what it holds, he knows he must return to experience it. But to do that, he has to make sure his future parents get together so that Marty himself can be born in the first place. Marty’s future father, George McFly, is a loner and a bit lost, but he is madly in love with Marty’s future mother, Lorraine. When Marty encourages George to tell Lorraine that “destiny”—or as George famously flubs the line, “density”—has brought them together, he is speaking literally as a part of that destiny himself.
Ronald Reagan believed in the concept of destiny and the guiding hand of providence. It was plain to see in their everyday interactions that he and Nancy believed they were destined for each other. But he also had a long-standing vision of destiny for America and its people. As early as 1952, Reagan said to a graduating class at William Woods College that he “always thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land.”I
It was this unshakeable belief in the boundless future of that promised land that drove Ronald Reagan throughout his presidency. In his disdain for limits and his endless capacity to look ahead, he resembled the movie’s Doc Brown. Like Brown, Reagan was a visionary, a dreamer, a man whose imagination was among his greatest assets—yet always a realist. As it turned out, both Brown and Reagan were right: there is such a thing as destiny, though sometimes it needs a little push.
In only one brief instance did the mood in the room darken. It was during a scene after Marty McFly arrives in 1955 and meets the younger Doc Brown:
DOC: |
Tell me, Future Boy, who’s president of the United States in 1985? |
MARTY: |
Ronald Reagan. |
DOC: |
Ronald Reagan? The actor? [Rolls his eyes.] Ha! Then who’s vice president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady? |
MARTY: |
Whoa, wait. Doc! |
DOC: |
And Jack Benny is secretary of the Treasury! |
The movie continued, but for me—and, I suspected, those around me—it felt as if the air had gone out of the Aspen Lodge. Something lingered in the room. A discomfort. That evening was only the second time in all eight years of my service in the White House that I ever heard Jane Wyman’s name mentioned or her referred to by anyone other than reporters. Mrs. Reagan rarely mentioned her husband’s first wife, to whom he was married from 1940 to 1949, though she did once recall going with the president to Jane’s house to visit their children, Michael and Maureen. “Jane was perfectly nice to me,” Mrs. Reagan said, “but those visits were awkward. Not only had she been married to Ronnie, but she was the star, and it was her house and her children. I felt out of place, and I was a little in awe of her.” She also noted that Jane “knew how to play on Ronnie’s good nature” and had somehow managed to convince him not to remarry until she did. (Nancy convinced him otherwise: the couple wed on March 4, 1952, eight months before Wyman tied the knot for the fourth time.)II
Still, the unspoken “taboo” about mentioning her was pretty clear. In 1983 a staffer was riding in the limo with the president after some routine event. For reasons that I will never understand, my colleague happened to ask the president if he had ever seen Falcon Crest, the popular 1980s prime-time soap opera that starred Wyman as the conniving wine baron Angela Channing. Falcon Crest, which began airing on CBS in 1981, the same year Reagan took office, was routinely a top-ten show in the Nielsen ratings. It was hard to imagine that it escaped either of the Reagans’ attention.
The president did not get easily riled. But when he did, we knew to watch out.
He stared at his aide with an intensity the man had never seen before and said, in the iciest tone imaginable, “No. Why do you ask?”
There was no good answer to that question. The aide attempted none. The staffer told me later that he wanted to jump out of the moving car but instead resigned himself to shrugging his shoulders and looking out the window for the rest of what seemed like an interminable ride back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
That was the weird thing about Jane Wyman, at least to the Reagan staff: it was as if she didn’t exist to the president anymore. He seemed as though he had willed himself to forget about that period of his life, and was startled and resentful when asked to return to it. Throughout his administration, he never mentioned her name publicly, and she never mentioned his, even though Ms. Wyman was given ample opportunities to do so over the years. Nonetheless, she let it be known that she voted for him both in 1980 and 1984.
Only once in all the years that I knew Ronald Reagan did he mention Jane Wyman to me. Shortly after he left the White House, we were in the back of a car in Los Angeles, on our way to some event. He was reminiscing about Hollywood, and particularly about the disparity between actors’ salaries in his day and now. At one point, he said, “That’s back when I was married to Wyman.” Wyman. I was struck that he mentioned her at all and by the fact that he said just her last name. Never did I hear even that from him again.
Fortunately, at the Back to the Future screening, Doc Brown’s reference to the president’s first wife passed without comment, and our breathing returned to normal. The discussion after the movie was pleasant, and the Reagans seemed particularly impressed by Michael J. Fox’s performance. The president commented on how clever the movie was and how this was the type of movie that Hollywood should be making, as opposed to some of the more controversial, violent, or adult-themed films that seemed all too common at the time.
Mrs. Reagan brought up Jack Benny, who had been a friend of hers. As Jane Wyman had been mentioned in the movie in almost the same breath as Benny, some of us were a bit perplexed. But Mrs. Reagan did not say anything about Ms. Wyman. Instead, she recalled a conversation she and Jack Benny once had about worrying.
“Jack told me,” she said, “ ‘I don’t understand when people say “Don’t worry.” If you’re a worrier, you’re a worrier, and it’s okay.’ ”
“Well, Mrs. Reagan, you are a worrier,” her husband said with a smile.
Perhaps with the president’s recent surgery lingering in her mind, Mrs. Reagan replied, “Yes, honey, I am.”
We filed out into the still-warm July air and went our separate ways. Jim Kuhn and I hung back and talked in front of the now-closed Aspen front door.
“He seems great,” Jim said. “Back to normal.”
“I know. It’s amazing. The guy is seventy-four. I hope I’m like that at sixty-four,” I replied.
Six months later, on February 4, 1986, President Reagan channeled Doc Brown in his State of the Union address, as he exhorted Americans to remember that the sky—not the street—was the limit.
“Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive,” the president said, “a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ ” That was how Ronald Reagan saw America. It is how those of us who knew him and loved him see it still.
It turned out, however, that we weren’t quite finished with Back to the Future. In 1989 I was working for the former president at his office in Los Angeles when the movie mogul Lew Wasserman, Reagan’s agent many years earlier, contacted him. Wasserman told the president that the director Robert Zemeckis was working on the second sequel to the film, Back to the Future III, and apparently was considering Reagan to play the 1885 mayor of Hill Valley. Would he be interested in the part?
It would have been his first role since the historical TV Western Death Valley Days and part of me hoped my boss would take it. How fun it would be to see him on a movie theater screen once more, doing a job he had loved. And how much fun he would have, hitting his mark and delivering his lines, one last time. But part of me worried that it would be beneath the dignity of the Office of President of the United States. My opinion was neither sought nor offered.
The president, flattered, thought about Zemeckis’s offer for a while. I suspect that a part of him wanted to do it. Perhaps he, too, worried about the optics. Or, just maybe, he figured that returning to his Hollywood past carried more risk than reward. After all, time travel hadn’t worked out all that well for Marty McFly.
In the end, he declined. Ronald Reagan loved the past. But he never needed to live in it.
I. David Brooks, “Reagan’s Promised Land,” New York Times online, June 8, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/reagan-s-promised-land.html?mcubz=3.
II. Nancy Reagan with Novak, My Turn, 100.