Starring: |
Pat O’Brien, Ronald Reagan |
Directed by: |
Lloyd Bacon |
Viewed by the Reagans: |
October 2, 1987 |
The Film That Created a Political Legend
The week of September 27, 1987, had been an interesting and unsettling one at the White House. On Tuesday, the president delivered a major economic address to the annual meeting of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group, and later signed a bill to increase the federal debt ceiling.
But the real focus of the week was on Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to become an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Lewis Powell. The nomination had been made on July 1, and it immediately brought equally strong support and opposition. No one doubted his intellect, but Bork’s ultraconservative (some would say unyielding) stance on many issues and his absolute certainty of the correctness of his positions both delighted and infuriated many. Throughout the summer, supporters and opponents were in high gear, and by October, it was clear the nomination was in deep trouble. President Reagan did everything he could to support Bork, then a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including speaking on his behalf on three different occasions that week. He had given Bork his word that he would do whatever he could to ensure his confirmation.
When Ronald Reagan gave his word, that was it. It was gold. You could take it to the bank. I learned that the hard, yet reassuring, way a year earlier. In late January and early February 1986, I was in Asia on a pre-advance for an upcoming presidential visit there. A pre-advance takes a small group of White House staff, State Department aides, Secret Service, military support personnel, and representatives of the White House press corps to wherever the president is scheduled to visit overseas, so they can evaluate their respective logistical needs for the actual trip. I was in Tokyo on January 28, the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I returned to Washington a few days later and went to work as usual. On my first or second day back, Larry Speakes, the chief White House spokesman, called me to his office. At first, he was chatty, asking me how everything was, if there were any interesting stories from recent Camp David weekends, and so forth. Then he told me to have a seat on the couch opposite his desk. I was nervous. And I became even more so when he closed the door. He sat on a chair near the couch, looked toward but not at me, avoiding direct eye contact, and said, “Mark, you gotta find another job.”
I thought I was going to pass out. I could not imagine my life without working in the White House for the Reagans. It was everything to me. I asked him what he meant, and he said that Don Regan, the current White House chief of staff, “told me you have to go.” Larry claimed that he protested and asked Regan why, but was given no information. Larry was upset by this, but that was of little consolation to me. He asked me if my relationship with Mrs. Reagan was still good, thinking that perhaps she was involved. I assured him that it was good, that our most recent weekend at Camp David was fun as usual, and that I could not imagine she had anything to do with my being fired.
It bothered me that there was the tendency of some on the White House staff to blame Mrs. Reagan first for anything bad. It was unfair and almost never the case. Larry went on to say that “the plan” was that I would be assigned to be the spokesman for the recently named presidential commission investigating the Challenger accident, during which time I would look for a job and ultimately never return to the White House. I did not know what to say. I left his office and returned to mine. I immediately called my closest friend on the staff, Jim Kuhn, the president’s personal aide, and asked if he knew anything. He didn’t, but Jim had the wisdom to ask me if I had said anything derogatory about Don Regan. I said it would take less time to tell him what I hadn’t said about Regan than what I had said.
I was among the very first people Don Regan met in the Reagan press operation. After he was announced as the incoming president’s choice for secretary of the Treasury in December 1980, I shepherded him through some Washington, DC, interviews before Reagan’s inauguration. I even remember going to the Treasury Department gift shop and buying a pair of cuff links with the Treasury Department seal and giving them to him one day, which seemed to delight him. On one of his visits to Washington, we had breakfast together at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel, and he offered me a job in the Treasury Department Press Office. I declined because I wanted to go to the White House Press Office.
I liked Don, but when he became chief of staff at the White House in 1985, switching jobs with James A. Baker III, he seemed to forget that he was on the staff and that it was the Reagan administration, not the Regan administration. I do not deny that I made some unflattering observations about his imperial style to reporters. I suspect some of that got back to him.
I turned out the lights in my office and went home, where I threw a small party with four of my friends: Jim Beam, Jack Daniel, Jose Cuervo, and Johnnie Walker.
I was loyal to the Reagans, knew that I had done nothing wrong, and that Donald Regan’s firing me was undeserved. I decided to fight back. First, I contacted Mike Deaver, told him what had happened, and asked him outright if I had done anything to offend the Reagans. Mike said, “No. If you had done anything to offend them, I would know.” I was relieved, but still perplexed. Mike said he would see what he could find out. What I did not realize at the time was that Mike was among those urging the president to replace Regan.
I also contacted Maureen Reagan, who was my friend and informal advisor. She, too, was shocked by what had happened and promised to raise it with her father and Mrs. Reagan. True to her word, she did. A couple of days later, before I actually went to the offices of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, I was in my office in the West Wing. The date was February 6, which happened to be President Reagan’s birthday. It was around five o’clock in the evening, and with me was Dennis Revell, Maureen’s husband. He had stopped by just to say hello, offer support as a friend, and urge me to hang in there. My phone rang, and I could tell it was a White House operator, as opposed to a call from outside the complex. I answered, and the operator said, “Mr. Weinberg, I have the president calling for you, sir.”
I held my breath. A split second later, that familiar voice was on the line. “Mark, first of all, thank you for your birthday present, but I’m calling today to say there must have been some misunderstanding. I just spoke to Don, and you aren’t fired.”
I said, “Well, sir, first of all, Happy Birthday, but I have to tell you that’s what I was told. Larry said that I had been fired and was no longer to be on the White House staff.”
The president said, “No, there must be some misunderstanding. I told Don that you are part of the family and that while it was fine for you to go over to the shuttle commission, and I would appreciate you doing that, I fully expected you to come back here where you belong.” I almost cried. I said, “Mr. President, it seems like on your birthday you have given me the greatest present, and, sir, if that is your wish, I will go over to the commission and do the best job I can, as long as I have your word that I can come back to my job here at the White House.”
“You have it,” he said without hesitation. That was that. I turned to Dennis and said, “You’re here, and you are a witness.” He smiled.
I walked up the hall to tell Larry what had happened. He seemed surprised by it. He went to Don Regan’s office, came back a few minutes later, and confirmed what I had told him. So off I went to the office of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, where I worked for a couple of months. But every day during that period, I made a point of stopping in my White House office to be visible, and I kept my White House pass. I did not want to be “out of sight, out of mind,” and I did not trust Don Regan not to try again. But just as Ronald Reagan had promised, after my stint with the commission, I returned full-time to my duties at the White House as if nothing had happened.
I arrived just in time for the political firestorm of the Bork nomination.
Ronald Reagan was the eternal optimist and loyal. Some would say to a fault. Yet he was also a realist, and when Marine One landed at Camp David on October 2, the president knew it was unlikely Bork would be confirmed by the Senate. The votes were just not there. But he wasn’t ready yet to give up, even though many on his staff urged him to do so. Mrs. Reagan, who had the best political instincts of us all, felt that the controversy surrounding the nomination had become something of a “circus,” and she did not like the fact that there had been a pro-Bork rally, complete with signs, on the South Lawn of the White House when Marine One lifted off for Camp David that day.
She was right, of course. And after the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination, Bork should have asked the president to withdraw his name. But he did not. Why Bork did not have the common sense to spare the president further embarrassment remains a mystery.
I doubt Bork or Washington politics were on the president’s mind when the lights dimmed and the screen lit up with the most iconic film of Ronald Reagan’s career.
Knute Rockne All American is the 1940 film biography of former Notre Dame University football player Knute Rockne (Pat O’Brien), who returns to his alma mater in 1918 as the football coach. With star freshman halfback George Gipp (played by none other than Ronald Reagan), Rockne quickly takes the once lackluster team to great heights. Two years later, just days after his final game, Gipp contracted a strep infection which led to a terminal case of pneumonia, and died a few weeks later. He was just twenty-five. Gipp ends up doing even more good for the team as an inspiration than as a player.
Sometimes certain roles identify an actor in the public’s mind. Sylvester Stallone will always be “Rocky,” just as Carol Channing will always be “Dolly.” Though not as successful as the Rocky series or Hello, Dolly!, Knute Rockne All American did the same for Ronald Reagan. His portrayal of Gipp earned him a permanent place in the nation’s mind as “the Gipper.” To this day, newspapers sometimes refer to Ronald Reagan by that nickname. It’s almost shorthand for his full name. Like most of his roles in the movies, he was proud of it.
So tied to the role of the Gipper was Ronald Reagan that “Win one for the Gipper” became a rallying cry at campaign events over the years. Not only did he invoke the phrase on his own behalf, but also he would often do so when campaigning for others. Only once do I recall that phrase becoming a potential issue. In 1989, as a former president, Ronald Reagan attended a University of Southern California (USC) versus Notre Dame football game in Los Angeles. He had been invited by both teams to visit their locker rooms before the game. Fred Ryan, the chief of staff and a proud alumnus of USC, was rightly concerned that the former president might urge the Fighting Irish to win one for the Gipper, which would have compromised his neutrality and been discourteous to the USC Trojans, who were his hosts.
Fred asked me to tell President Reagan not to utter the phrase when he visited the locker room, which I did, explaining why. The former chief executive nodded in agreement, but, truthfully, I was not certain he would comply. Fred and I were a little nervous when the president spoke to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, and did not relax until he was done, having not said the famous five words—as much as he probably wanted to.
Everyone knew how important making the movie and playing George Gipp had been to Reagan. He expressed that eloquently when he visited Notre Dame in 1988 to participate in the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp honoring Knute Rockne, who died in a 1931 plane crash. He shared how seriously he had taken the challenging role of George Gipp and how much it had meant to him to become part of the Rockne legend. “All I’d ever wanted was to play the Gipper if they someday made the film,” he said. As he told the audience in South Bend, Indiana:
[T]he role was a young actor’s dream: it had a great entrance, an action middle, and a death scene right out of the opera. But it was more than that. I know that to many of you today Rockne is a revered name, a symbol of greatness, and, yes, a face now on a postage stamp. But my generation, well, we actually knew the legend as it happened. We saw it unfold, and we felt it was saying something important about us as a people and a nation.I
The role, Reagan explained, hadn’t been handed to him. He went to the star, Pat O’Brien, who was playing Rockne, to put himself forward. His brazenness made an impression. “He told me bluntly that I talked too much,” Reagan remembered. O’Brien told him it didn’t look good. The studio wanted a “name actor” to play Gipp. But he decided to give Reagan a chance and put in a word with Warner Bros. studio head Hal Wallis.
But there were obstacles in Reagan’s path. “Hal was, to put it mildly, unimpressed with my credentials,” according to Reagan. He told the actor that he was too small for the role, but Reagan shot back with his knowledge of the George Gipp story. “I told him,” he said later, “you’re producing the picture, and you don’t know that George Gipp weighed five pounds less than I weigh right now. He walked with a kind of a slouch and almost a limp. He looked like a football player only when he was on the field.”
Reagan produced a picture of himself from his own college football days, where he played for coach Ralph McKenzie at Eureka College. McKenzie himself later described Reagan as “eager, aggressive, better on defense—overall, an average football player—but an outstanding talker.” Wallis felt Reagan at least looked the part of a gridiron star and agreed to give him a screen test.
In some ways, the screen test was the easiest part. Reagan got a key assist from Pat O’Brien, who agreed to play Rockne opposite him for the tryout instead of simply having a crew member feed Reagan lines off camera. But Reagan left nothing to chance and came prepared: “I had known George Gipp’s story for years, and the lines were straight from Knute Rockne’s diary.”
After filming was completed, Reagan brought an unexpected guest to the premiere in South Bend: his father. Jack Reagan, an alcoholic, had not been an easy man to grow up with, but in the run-up to the premiere, Ronald Reagan’s mother took her son aside and shared what Jack himself could not: that as a good Irish Catholic, he loved Notre Dame and Pat O’Brien and would love to celebrate the movie’s release. Ronald Reagan was concerned—he was still a young actor and he did not want his father to cause some drunken scene around the cast and crew and other guests. But Jack had vowed to stay off the booze during the trip, and so he accompanied his son to South Bend. Jack Reagan not only behaved himself but also shined on the Notre Dame campus. “His weakness was prosperity,” his son said later, “and this was prosperity in capital letters.” Jack even became fast friends with Pat O’Brien. After the whirlwind premiere, Jack came home and told his wife he’d had “the most wonderful time of his life.” Shortly thereafter, he died—and among the mourners at his funeral was his newfound friend Pat O’Brien.
Reagan never shied from the less polished sides of George Gipp’s character, admitting that “he played in some pool games and card games in his time.” But he made sure to highlight that the real-life Gipper had a good heart. The legend in South Bend was that “he used his winnings from those games to buy food for destitute families and to help other students pay their way through Notre Dame.” In fact, he contracted the pneumonia that killed him while doing a favor for a friend who was coaching high school football: Gipp had promised to give a special session to his friend’s young players, and as Reagan told it, “it was during that training session in Chicago that an icy wind blew in across Lake Michigan, and the Gipper first felt the ache and sore throat that would lead to the illness that would take his life.”
Being part of the Rockne story was important to Ronald Reagan. He maintained his deep admiration for the coach as an inspirational figure. “Rockne stressed character,” he said. “He knew, instinctively, the relationship between the physical and moral.” As a coach, he mastered the physical. Reagan observed that he was “remembered as the man who brought ingenuity, speed, and agility into this most American of sports.” As a man, he mastered the moral. This is what Reagan said, quoting Rockne himself:
“You know all this hurry and battling we’re going through is just an expression of our inner selves striving for something else. The way I look at it is that we’re all here to try and find, each in his own way, the best road to our ultimate goal. I believe I’ve found my way, and I shall travel it to the end.”
Reagan called Rockne’s career “a sermon in right living.”
He sought to use Rockne’s example at a time when Americans needed the inspiration it could bring. When he spoke at the ceremony in South Bend, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger two years before was still fresh in people’s minds. But Reagan vowed that the same grit that sustained Rockne would sustain the American Space Shuttle Program:
Rockne exemplified the American spirit of never giving up. That spirit is the reason why you and your generation are going to succeed. That’s why we’re not just going to compete, we’re going to win. And that’s also why this year we’ll see the return of the American space shuttle, symbolic of America’s tenacity. We never give up. And I cannot help but believe that the heroes of the Challenger will be cheering along with the rest of us when the United States reclaims its rightful leadership role in leading the conquest of this, the last frontier.II
When the movie ended in Aspen that night, there was applause, and then we had to shout over each other to ask questions. The president was more than happy to indulge us. He would tell the story of how he wanted the part and almost didn’t get it, of how much he liked playing football, and how honored he felt to work with Pat O’Brien. He told us how Mrs. Rockne was often on the set during filming, and he made the point that Rockne’s first name was pronounced “Ke-Newt,” in two syllables, not “Newt.” One of us asked him if he still remembered “the line.” Without hesitation, he recited it perfectly, as if in the film:
“Rock, someday when the team’s up against it . . . and the breaks are beatin’ the boys . . . ask them to go in there with all they’ve got . . . and win just one for the Gipper . . . I don’t know where I’ll be then . . . but I’ll know about it . . . and I’ll be happy.” For that moment, at least, the Gipper was back.
I. “Remarks at the Unveiling of the Knute Rockne Commemorative Stamp at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, March 9, 1988,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum online, www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1988/030988a.htm.
II. “Remarks at Unveiling of Knute Rockne Commemorative Stamp, March 9, 1988,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum online.