Clouds hid the stars so the night was all murk, and the back canyon road was treacherous. Ronald Wilson Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were low on gas and uncertain, even lost. On the next turn, Reagan spotted a light in a ranch house. He was greeted at the door and instantly recognized. “Say,” the rancher said, “I know you! Tell me your name.” “Well,” Reagan said, smiling, “I will just tell you my initials—RR.” “Wow,” said the rancher. “Is your wife with you?” “Waiting in the car,” Reagan replied. With that, the rancher called upstairs: “Ma, come down. Roy Rogers is here! And Dale Evans is with him!”
—ANECDOTE FROM RONALD REAGAN’S 1976, CAMPAIGN
Reagan’s strongest attribute was his ability to make listeners laugh. Every Reagan audience during the 1976 presidential campaign would roar at the RR story or ones like it. As he often did, Reagan was poking fun at himself. Sure, he was a Hollywood actor, but never on the level of a Roy Rogers. Roy Rogers would be something to yell about. Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys. He could ride and shoot with his white Stetson bending in the breeze and a bandanna streaming from his throat. His noble steed was Trigger, a golden palomino, ears laid back, four hooves in the air, and a tail full and flowing like a silver banner. Gabby Hayes, mumbling through his nose and white whiskers, made you chuckle. Dale always sang along with Roy in the slower parts of almost a hundred movies and weekly television shows. And the cowboy quartet, Sons of the Pioneers, singing of two lost wranglers tortured by a desert mirage.
He’s a devil not a man
And he spreads the burning sands
When movies were a nickel in the 1940s, Roy and his troupe became part of American culture. Every Saturday afternoon generations of kids would gallop out of the theaters on an imaginary Trigger. And they would flock to the fairgrounds when Roy was on tour with Trigger, splattering mudballs in midair with his Colt. Roy Rogers was big. To this day, The Roy Rogers Show is broadcast on cable television.
No, Ronald Reagan was not a star. In 1976, he had been out of film and television for a dozen years. Older folks might recall him searching for his missing legs in Kings Row. Some saw him on television’s GE Theater. Still, the laughter took the edge off those in the crowd ready to dismiss and disbelieve Reagan as a B-movie actor.
A good sense of humor, voters thought. Wasn’t he governor of California?
With laughter, we sucked in oxygen, stimulating the heart and the lungs. Endorphins are released in the brain. With improved circulation, muscles relax. Stress ebbs. “A good, relaxed feeling,” says the Mayo Clinic in listing the physical and psychological benefits of laughter. Even inexperienced public speakers know that telling a joke is a great way to start.
Reagan’s use of laughter made him one of the most formidable American politicians of his day. From the outset of his career in 1966, the joke was the biggest in his toolbox. “He liked to leave them laughing,” said Caspar Weinberger, who was with him at the outset. What those crowds were getting was something far more than an aging actor. Reagan used his professional skills to enthrall voters and engineer astounding political feats.
In 1976, Reagan started to become even bigger than Roy Rogers. Against a sitting Republican president with all the political accouterments of White House power, Reagan waged a primary campaign that sometimes defied belief. Take the 1976 presidential primary in Texas. Reagan carried every county—all 254. It was a front-page shocking defeat of President Gerald R. Ford. Even after Air Force One and the presidential limousine visited the Republican state convention in Rolla, Missouri, Reagan swept the delegates; Ford’s local woman leader began sobbing as Reagan’s majority mounted. At the Kansas City National Republican Convention that year, Reagan came within 17 delegates of wresting the nomination from Ford. And he did it mostly with a warm and friendly manner before crowds big and small, with rarely a harsh word for his opponent. In public or private, Reagan’s manners were impeccable. Every speech was a production. Suits—even the brown ones—were tailored to emphasize broad shoulders. Weights, push-ups, and pull-ups gave him a leading-man torso. When surgeons sought to remove an assassin’s bullet in 1981, it took 40 minutes to cut through chest muscle blocking their access. Undyed chestnut hair that drooped below his nose was coated with Brylcreem and molded into a pompadour that crested a collection of hills and swales around his ears. His complexion was so rosy that some suspected rouge. It was just that Hollywood glow. The actor’s posture made his six-foot-one seem closer to six-foot-four. The gaze was direct except for the tilt to the left with a bashful, disarming grin. Contacts overcame terrible vision. Hearing aids and lip reading also compensated for the infirmities of old age. Even for a handful of voters, the sound system’s mike seemed always perfectly tuned to amplify a clear, calm tenor. The voice was often booked by Hollywood directors no longer interested in his face. They wanted the perfect voice-over narration. The rhythm of speech flowed until a delay of two beats—just before the rancher yelled the punch line about Roy Rogers—were evidence of endless rehearsals. Cryptic notes—he used coded abbreviations—on a stack of soiled 3" × 5" cards prompted lines honed by decades on what Reagan called the rubber-chicken circuit. He spilled those cards to the platform floor during one event. It was akin to a teleprompter going haywire for today’s politicians. Hastily rearranged, the cards threw Reagan out of sync. Punch lines came before the setup. “I’m getting ahead of myself,” he apologized. That was a rare mishap. With only notes on the cards, Reagan’s speeches would enter the minds, the hearts, and the souls of the faithful and enlist them to his cause. Oh, he did Republican dog whistles for blacks and the poor.
“Doesn’t it make you angry when you see a strapping young buck ahead of you in the checkout line using food stamps?” he asked at a Florida rally. In speech after speech, he deplored welfare cheats. “In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan said. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” Some gasped. Others shook their heads. It was part of Reagan’s relentless assault on the very governments he would lead, Sacramento and Washington. As a spokesman for General Electric, Reagan articulated the corporate assault on taxes, big government, and federal safety and air pollution regulations. Social Security, Reagan said, was nothing but a welfare program. To him, Medicare was socialized medicine. Even so, Reagan’s mellifluousness seemed to remove the sting of his remarks’ inherent meanness toward the elderly and the ill. He took the edge off the hostility of the Republican right wing. Instead of disapproving of the hooded racism, voters tended to enjoy the performance. In 1980, he was the first presidential candidate to ask how you could spot the Pole at a cockfight. “He’s the one with the duck,” Reagan answered with a smile. How can you spot the Italian? “He’s the one that bets on the duck.” How do you know the Mafia is there? “The duck wins,” Reagan said. Such ethnic jokes can be political poison, but Reagan defiantly repeated it for television reporters.
For all his hard-right baggage, Reagan was surprisingly mild on the stump. In his 1980 battle with President Jimmy Carter, Reagan was portrayed as an irresponsible ideologue who could get the United States into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. At the time, Carter’s reelection bid was saddled with soaring inflation, double-digit interest rates, and pain at the neighborhood filling station. “I will accept being irresponsible,” Reagan said, “if President Carter accepts being responsible.” In another exchange, a reporter challenged Reagan’s recurring charge that Democrats were responsible for budget deficits and the national debt. Aren’t you responsible as well? the reporter asked. “Yes, I too am responsible,” Reagan said. “I was a Democrat for many years.”
For Reagan, evoking laughter was a skill that tapped a human instinct so basic that it crossed both political and international boundaries. A 10-year study by Robert Provine found that laughter is a universal human vocabulary recognized by people of all cultures. “We somehow laugh at just the right times, without consciously knowing why we do it,” Provine wrote in 2001. “Laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together.… It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play.”
Something like that happened on March 30, 1981, just two months after Reagan’s inauguration. That day, his knees buckled and his eyes rolled back at the entrance to George Washington University Medical Center as he fainted from the effects of John Hinckley’s .22 caliber Röhm RG-14 pistol. One of the six bullets Hinckley fired shattered on the armor plating of the presidential limousine door. A ricocheting fragment entered below Reagan’s left armpit, punctured a lung, bounced off a rib, and came to rest three inches from his heart. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” Reagan messaged Nancy before being wheeled into the operating room. Before anesthesia, Reagan looked at the surgical team. “Please tell me you’re Republicans,” he said. These one-liners were fed to reporters while surgeons were still digging for the bullet fragment. Other gags followed. His mouth clogged with tubes, Reagan scribbled them out in the recovery room. “I’d like to do this scene again,” said one note. “Send me to L.A. where I can see the air I’m breathing.”
His three top advisers arrived at his bedside. The White House was running smoothly without him, said one. “What makes you think I’m happy about that,” Reagan wrote.
The global shock wave of the attempted assassination was quickly tempered by almost universal smiles and admiration for Reagan’s bravado in the face of death. Mike Deaver, who had been molding Reagan’s image since his first days as a politician, was in the middle of the shooting. When Hinckley fired, Deaver ducked and then hit the ground outside the rear entrance of the Washington Hilton. At the hospital, it was Deaver who checked the bleeding president in with an intern holding a clipboard. R-E-A-G-A-N, Deaver spelled. First name? Ron. Address? 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “His pencil stopped in mid-scratch,” Deaver said. “He finally looked up. ‘You mean…?’” Deaver, in charge of all pageantry affecting the president’s approval rating, was quick to grasp the impact of the day’s events. Looking back years later, Deaver viewed the turmoil and the jokes as the seminal moment for the fortieth president. “The popularity of Ronald Reagan, the remarkable acceptance of at least the first six years of his presidency, began to take shape that day, driven by his grace and aplomb under circumstances hard to conceive,” Deaver recalled.
Laughter bailed Reagan out of one of his worst moments as president. It happened as he sought reelection in 1984 during a second debate with the Democratic candidate, former vice president Walter Mondale. In their first meeting, the 56-year-old Mondale seemed sharper and quicker. The 73-year-old Reagan was slow, fumbled facts, and was declared the loser by even the Republican media. To Speaker Tip O’Neill, Reagan was just running to form.
“Many people were shocked by how poorly the president performed during the first debate, in the 1984 campaign, but to me, that was the real Reagan,” the Boston congressman said. “Reagan lacked the knowledge he should have in every sphere, both domestic and international. Most of the time he was an actor reading lines, who didn’t understand his own program. I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Reagan ever became president.”
Speculation focused on damage caused by the attempted assassination three years earlier. Polls showed Mondale had cut into Reagan’s lead but was still behind. For their second debate, in Kansas City, Mondale laid the 1983 Marine massacre at Reagan’s podium. Through slick media manipulation, the White House had hidden Reagan’s culpability in the Marine disaster. Using new facts from a Nation magazine article, Mondale drew a portrait of presidential incompetence and miscalculation that led to the Beirut massacre of 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three Army enlisted men. Reagan’s support of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon resulted in a series of US disasters in 1983 including the single biggest Marine death toll since Iwo Jima in World War II. Mondale punched relentlessly with the facts: Despite repeated pleas, Reagan refused to move the Marines to safety aboard ships offshore in Beirut. Because the Marines were indefensible, both Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Reagan to withdraw a week before the terrorist attack.
“They went to him five days before they were killed and said, ‘Please, take them out of there.’ … He did not do so,” Mondale said. Reagan refused to join in retaliatory air strikes on the terrorist targets by France and Israel, who also suffered troop losses. “The President told the terrorists he was going to retaliate. He didn’t. They called [his] bluff. And the bottom line is that the United States left in humiliation, and our enemies are stronger,” Mondale said. The Mondale assault was reinforced by columnist Morton Kondracke, one of the panelists questioning the debaters. He included the Americans killed when the US embassy was destroyed by the same terrorists six months before the Marines were slaughtered.
“Mr. President, four years ago you criticized President Carter for ignoring ample warnings that our diplomats in Iran might be taken hostage,” Kondracke said. “Haven’t you done exactly the same thing in Lebanon, not once, but three times, with 300 Americans, not hostages, but dead? And you vowed swift retaliation against terrorists, but doesn’t our lack of response suggest that you’re just bluffing?”
French and Israeli forces were also bombed during the same period. They staged fighter-bomber reprisals on terrorist camps, but Reagan refused to join the retaliation. His refusal to unleash Navy carrier warplanes off the coast of Lebanon caused widespread and public anger among the surviving Marines in Beirut.
“The president is called the Commander in Chief,” Mondale said. “He’s called that because he’s supposed to be in charge.” Mondale’s pummeling had clearly wounded Reagan. “As Groucho Marx said: ‘Who do you believe? Me or your own eyes?’” Mondale said.
Reagan’s response reflected more panic than rehearsal.
Throughout his political career, he repeatedly sought to identify himself with the sacrifice of military heroism. In his inaugural address in 1981, he singled out the bravery of a dead Army messenger and listed the famous battlefields from Belleau Wood to the jungles of Vietnam. He gestured to Arlington Cemetery across the Potomac with its rows of white crosses and the Stars of David. “They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom,” Reagan said. Suddenly, in the heat of the debate with Mondale, Reagan abandoned his responsibility as commander in chief. He turned the sacrifice of 241 young men—21 are buried in Section 59 in Arlington—into military bungling.
Moderator Edwin Newman asked: “Your rebuttal, Mr. President?”
Reagan slyly shifted the issue from the pleas for a timely withdrawal to the barracks where the 241 were sleeping. “Yes. First of all, Mr. Mondale should know that the President of the United States did not order the Marines into that barracks. That was a command decision made by the commanders on the spot and based with what they thought was best for the men there.”
For Silver Screen Six, the words were somewhere between dastardly and despicable. Before a watching nation, Reagan singled out—not by name—the commander of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit. That was Colonel Timothy Joseph Geraghty, who had already suffered all the humiliations the Marine Corps and Department of Defense could assemble. Reagan knew better than most that Geraghty had been ordered to violate almost every military edict to comply with the White House’s dubious, conflicting, and shifting policies. Reagan had made the Marines take the low ground in Beirut. When they started to be killed by snipers on the hills above, Reagan secretly telephoned Geraghty in Beirut. He promised presidential support—“whatever support it takes to stop the attacks,” Reagan pledged—and ordered Geraghty to use air and sea power against Muslim forces despite the colonel’s objections that it would lead to slaughter for his Marines. Construction of better defensive positions by Navy Seabee crews was denied. To minimize artillery attacks on Marines in outlying foxholes on weekends, Geraghty moved most of them into the concrete and steel Battalion Landing Team quarters where so many died. As he was still hunting body parts of the 241 dead, Geraghty realized that he—not Reagan—would take the blame. That night, Reagan made sure Geraghty took the fall on prime time.
To Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, the escaping of responsibility showed Reagan’s ruthlessness.
“He does what he has to do to survive, even if it means contradicting himself and history,” McGrory wrote. “He has the true killer instinct, as he demonstrated when he meanly put the blame for the Beirut massacre on the ground commanders. In his most reprehensible moment, he defended himself at the expense of Marine officers, who were following his orders and trying to carry out the murky mission he gave them.”
In the presidential debate, Reagan sought to escape the results of his earliest decisions as president-elect. Reagan and his most senior advisers were lightweights, uninterested in and largely ignorant of the world outside the United States. His entire foreign policy was based on unrelenting attacks on the Soviet Union, which was already in steep decline and headed for collapse. Reagan’s untutored national security team produced a series of fiascos and disasters.
Mondale sought to portray Reagan as irresponsible and incompetent. “I want to quote … Harry Truman,” said Mondale. “He said, ‘The buck stops here.’ … Who’s in charge? Who’s handling this matter? That’s my main point.” It was clearly the most dramatic part of the presidential debate.
As in the first debate, Mondale was ahead on points. Was Reagan, then 73, too old for a second term? The issue was raised by Hank Trewhitt of The Baltimore Sun. “You already are the oldest president in history,” Trewhitt noted, “and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function?”
It was the slow curve Reagan was waiting for. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Mondale shook with laughter. The audience roared. Millions watching on television joined in. It was the instant highlight for network news reports, where editors repeated the clip for days. America’s dean of political reporting, David Broder, dismissed the Reagan culpability in Beirut. In The Washington Post, Broder focused on how Reagan laughed away fears that he was addled by age. “He delivered the perfect rejoinder,” Broder wrote. Once again Reagan had left them laughing. And once more the Marines were buried lower in national reporting.
Two weeks later, Reagan won voters in 49 states, leaving Mondale only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. It was his second straight landslide victory.
Ronald Reagan and Thomas P. O’Neill were political archenemies. But you wouldn’t know it when the Republican president and Democratic Speaker of the House started swapping stories.
It was a tragedy at the brewery. Michael O’Brien tumbled from the rafters into a vat of Guinness and drowned. Mrs. O’Brien shrieked at the news. “Oh, Michael! He couldn’t swim. Not a stroke. He had no chance.” The brewery manager paused as her tears flowed. “Well, Mrs. O’Brien, he did have a chance,” he said. “He came out twice to pee.”
That was just one Reagan exchanged with Tip O’Neill, who represented North Boston but controlled power that often exceeded that of the president of the United States. Any laws the new president might have in mind would have to pass through the fingers of the silver-haired soldier of the New Deal. O’Neill slaved for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. As a defecting Democrat, Reagan was a traitor to O’Neill’s cause. Tip O’Neill’s disdain for the Reagan agenda could be seen in the early banishment from the Speaker’s Lobby of White House lobbyist Max Friedersdorf. So Friedersdorf expected a cool, even tense initial private meeting between O’Neill and Reagan at the White House family quarters. Drinks loosened both men. In adult life, Reagan limited himself to just one—orange juice and vodka. O’Neill had no such restrictions. The laughter began. “It was just hilarious,” Friedersdorf said. O’Neill “had a real repertoire of jokes, but each one he would tell, Reagan would come right back—just two old Irishmen—and top his story.” The night ended with warm exchanges between Tip and Ron.
The depth of O’Neill’s affection for Reagan would be on display after Reagan was shot. In the hospital room, where Reagan was still sedated, O’Neill went to his knees and held the president’s hand. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” O’Neill prayed. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Two days later O’Neill returned with a gift—a book of Irish humor. “I was shocked by his condition,” O’Neill said. “This was three days after the shooting. I suspect that in the first day or two he was probably closer to death than most of us realized. If he hadn’t been so strong and hardy, it could have been all over.”
Their relationship began on Inauguration Day 1981, when Reagan slipped into the Speaker’s office at the Capitol to change from formal wear to street clothes. The new president admired O’Neill’s desk. It once belonged to President Grover Cleveland, O’Neill said. “That’s very interesting,” Reagan said. “You know, I once played Grover Cleveland in the movies.” No, O’Neill reminded him, you played the baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. O’Neill had seen the old Reagan movie a month earlier. O’Neill was a television viewer in the evenings, and in the 1950s he and his wife, Millie, used to watch Reagan as host of GE Theater. When the Speaker tried to explain to the president the importance of chemistry with Congress, Reagan’s eyes seemed glazed. “I could have been speaking Latin for all he seemed to care,” O’Neill said. Yet Reagan’s White House team was adept at pushing an agenda of tax breaks, as well as cuts in welfare and education programs that O’Neill had spent a lifetime building. “Even with our many intense political battles we managed to maintain a pretty good friendship,” O’Neill said.
Over the next six years, O’Neill and Reagan had a love-hate relationship. More than once Speaker O’Neill quelled his Democratic majority to protect Reagan during the darkest moments of his presidency. When Democrats were demanding enforcement of the War Powers Act when Marines came under fire in 1983, O’Neill worked out a compromise.
One of the most effective Democratic opponents on the Marine deployment was Congressman Sam Gibbons of Florida, a World War II veteran who had parachuted into Normandy on D-day in 1945. “If we are there to fight, we are far too few,” Gibbons told the House. “If we are there to die, we are far too many.”
Instead of an embarrassing forced withdrawal of the Marines embattled in Beirut, there was a narrow agreement engineered by O’Neill to extend their stay for 18 months. O’Neill was elected Speaker in part because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. In supporting Reagan, O’Neill argued that bipartisan support on foreign policy was best for the nation. A majority of Democrats voted against their leader, but enough Republicans made up the difference. The Democratic Speaker, ostensibly the archenemy, saved the Republican president from humiliation.
For Reagan, in the year following reelection in 1984, his personal performance overcame any setbacks abroad or with Congress. According to Gallup voter surveys, Reagan was astounding. “Reagan continued to soar in 1985, routinely receiving [approval] ratings in the 60% range,” Gallup reported. “In May 1986, Reagan received a 68% job approval rating—tied for the highest of his administration.” Suddenly, five months later, Reagan’s rating suffered a 16-point drop. The slide was precipitated by a few lines that appeared on the bottom of page 11 in Al-Shiraa, a Beirut newspaper that specialized in events in Tehran. On November 3, 1986, Al-Shiraa reported, “A secret U.S. envoy, Robert McFarlane, visited Tehran secretly” and conducted extremely important talks with the Foreign Ministry, the Consultative Assembly, and the army. This resulted in a deal that brought four American planes “carrying spare parts” for Iran’s air defenses in its six-year-old war with President Saddam Hussein and Iraq. “These contributed to a large extent of improving the Iranian air defense system which last week downed three Iraqi planes, one a Sokhoi and two MiG23a.” That blurb ripped the cover off Reagan’s $50 million ransom attempt to free seven Americans held by the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah militia. The president supplied Iran with Hawk antiaircraft systems and 2,004 tank-killing TOW missiles. Only three hostages were released. And six more were captured. They were held by Iran’s Hezbollah in Baalbek, the “terrorists” who blew up the US embassy in Beirut and bombed the Marine barracks—the very same terrorists Reagan had vowed to destroy. The revelations opened a wound in Reagan’s presidency that would bleed for two years.
While the Al-Shiraa report had few details, it was enough to produce such hysteria at the White House that 10 days later, on November 13, 1986, a rattled President Reagan looked Americans in the eye during a nationwide broadcast to refute charges that he said were “utterly false.” “You’re going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name,” Regan began. As professional actors often have to do, he read lines that turned out to be preposterous—a series of distortions, twisted facts, and tortured logic that instantly achieved an historic status in presidential speech annals. The whopper came early on, when Reagan said, “For 18 months now we have had underway a secret diplomatic initiative to Iran. That initiative was undertaken for the simplest and best of reasons: to renew a relationship with the nation of Iran, to bring an honorable end to the bloody 6-year war between Iran and Iraq.” He did add “and to effect the safe return of all hostages.” But if anything, the new American weapons were to bolster Iran’s battlefield prowess against Iraq in that bloody six-year war. At a news conference a week later, Reagan had to deal with a crush of facts showing he shipped arms to Iran in hopes of the release of hostages. It was so bad, reporters suggested he quit dodging the truth.
Q: What would be wrong in saying that a mistake was made on a very high-risk gamble so that you can get on with the next two years?
The President: Because I don’t think a mistake was made. It was a high-risk gamble, and it was a gamble that, as I’ve said, I believe the circumstances warranted. And I don’t see that it has been a fiasco or a great failure of any kind.… We got our hostages back—three of them.
A Los Angeles Times poll showed only 14 percent of those surveyed believed the president.
The level of lying by Reagan in that first speech reflected an unskilled and untutored writer with the integrity of a pirate. Patrick Buchanan, a longtime Republican hatchet man, did the final draft, according to Reagan Presidential Library records. But the detailed content was the work of two brilliant and accomplished men—John Poindexter and Donald Regan. Poindexter, top of his class at Annapolis, was an admiral in the US Navy and Reagan’s fourth national security adviser. Regan, White House chief of staff, prevailed in the rough world of Wall Street to make millions and direct the fortunes of Merrill Lynch stockbrokers. But both were political nitwits. They were convinced Reagan could talk his way out of a scandal that had more legs than a centipede. They had conned the president into a stonewall defense. Shultz recalled one meeting where he condemned every aspect of the hostage recovery with realistic facts.
“The president was unmoved by my words,” Shultz said. “The president was in a steamy, angry mood clearly directed at me: get off my back. He was angry in a way I had never seen before. Ronald Reagan pounded the table. ‘We are right!’ he said. ‘We had to take the opportunity! And we were successful! History will never forgive us if we don’t do this! And no one will talk about it.’”
But eventually, everyone did talk. That one Reagan speech turned out to be the launchpad for four separate Washington investigations and a special prosecutor who produced 11 indictments that would accuse five senior Reagan administration officials of criminal wrongdoing—Defense Secretary Weinberger, Admiral Poindexter, Assistant Secretary of State Eliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, and Marine Major Oliver North. All escaped jail with a presidential pardon from Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush. As Reagan’s vice president, Bush had endorsed the plot. A federal court overruled North’s conviction.
McFarlane, Reagan’s third national security adviser, was blamed as the father of the fiasco. Once more, he was striving to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger. McFarlane would later argue that overtures from “moderates” in Iran led him to reestablish ties with the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To ignore Tehran “would be have been as grave a mistake as ignoring Chinese overtures to reestablish relations in the 1970s.”
McFarlane was harking back to his time as a military aide to Kissinger, who became celebrated for secret missions to Beijing that led to President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China. But a closer look shows it was Nixon—not Beijing and not Kissinger—who initiated the resumption of diplomatic relations. McFarlane’s hero was in fact opposed to Nixon’s outreach to China. According to Alexander Haig, Kissinger thought Nixon mad. During the second week of Nixon’s administration, Haig was the top assistant to National Security Adviser Kissinger.
“Henry came back from the Oval Office and said to me, ‘Al, this madman wants to normalize our relations with China.’ And he laughed. And I said, ‘Oh my God.’”
A secret mission to Tehran had become an obsession with McFarlane. He had resigned his White House post but pushed Reagan for the Iranian opening. It worried Secretary of State Schultz. “Bud was always tempted to go off on a ‘secret mission’ and negotiate backroom deals,” Shultz said. “He seemed to want to pull off something akin to a Henry Kissinger–China deal.” Shultz and Defense Secretary Weinberger were the most vehement opponents of McFarlane’s scheme once it was put on paper. The “overtures” from Iran were in fact proposals from Israel, which had had a thriving arms trade with Iran for decades. But the trade had ebbed after the United States made aggressive efforts to cut off arms supplies to Iran in 1983. Shultz led an effort to freeze shipments to Iran from the always-thriving weapons black market between nations. It was Israel who assured McFarlane that the seven US hostages would be released once American arms reached the Tehran government—an assurance that McFarlane quickly gave to Reagan. McFarlane’s “contact” with Tehran was, Manucher Ghorbanifar. He had been an Iranian intelligence agent under the shah but was strictly an arms dealer when McFarlane met him. It was a replay of McFarlane being taken in during the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign by an Iranian who promised to engineer the release of US embassy hostages in Tehran. Ghorbanifar had been such a river of lies and betrayals in the backroom of intelligence that the Central Intelligence Agency had singled him out for a “Burn Notice”—do not touch. Ghorbanifar handled the details of the weapon sales to Iran and, in most cases, doubled the original $50 million price tag. Despite promises of freedom, only two of the seven hostages were released. And six more Americans were grabbed from the streets of Beirut. Meanwhile, Ghorbanifar sold 1,408 TOW missiles to Iran in 1985.
Ghorbanifar paved the way for—at last—McFarlane’s secret mission in May of 1986. When Kissinger slipped into Beijing in 1971, Zhou Enlai and other leaders greeted him as a VIP with a series of elaborate dinners. In Tehran, no one showed up to greet the secret emissary from the president of the United States. McFarlane sat in the Tehran airport waiting room for two hours.
“This was, of course, the first bad omen,” McFarlane said.
It was the first of a series. Ghorbanifar finally showed up and took the unofficial party in two beat-up cars to a rundown hotel, where he and McFarlane had a quick exchange. McFarlane asked when he would meet with the prime minister and the speaker of the Iranian parliament. “It wasn’t clear,” Ghorbanifar said. Another bad omen.
“The alarm bells went off in my mind,” McFarlane said. He had been duped. Instead of senior officials who could talk about an eventual reestablishment of relations with the United State—the opening—there were only rude bureaucrats, “led by a strident young functionary who insisted there had been no prior commitment to release the hostages and launched into repeated diatribes for not having brought enough Hawk spare parts,” McFarlane said. On his plane from Israel, McFarlane carried 240 spares for the antiaircraft Hawk system. Only after hostages were released were the parts to be transferred. But the Iranians grabbed the cargo shortly after his plane landed. “To my chagrin,” McFarlane said. Another 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped later.
It was North who provided the highlights of the trip. He delivered an Israeli-baked chocolate cake in the shape of a key, to symbolize the unlocking of US-Iranian relations, and a bible Reagan signed and inscribed from Galatians 3:8. “All the nations shall be blessed in you.” According to McFarlane, it was on that trip that North first alluded to using money from the arms sales to finance the president’s pet project—the right-wing Contra guerrillas trying to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan had been financing them throughout his presidency, despite prohibitions from the Democratic Congress. North got a $15 million kickback from Ghorbanifar that was later funneled to the Contras.
As details of the disastrous trip leaked, the cake and the bible added a bizarre, even silly twist. McFarlane found it increasingly hard to cope with the ridicule of what he planned to be an historic mission. “I believed the Iran-Contra scandal, which had in the last three months all but engulfed the Reagan administration, and by extension the country, was all my fault,” he later wrote. He swallowed 30 Valium in hopes of dying but survived what friends later said was only a “cry for help.” To McFarlane, his survival marked another failure.
As Nixon was the instigator with China, Reagan was the real instigator of Iran-Contra. It had little to do with moderates or overtures from Iran. That was merely a cloak of rationality contrived by McFarlane. What drove Reagan was the hostage families’ gushing emotions that almost drowned him. In a series of 1985 meetings with the families, Reagan was challenged about his refusal to negotiate with terrorists. At a White House session, Terry Anderson’s sister Peggy Say made a fiery appeal to Reagan. At the end of another meeting in Chicago Heights, Illinois, Reagan was choked and teary.
After months of silence, Reagan offered something close to the truth in a March 4, 1987, broadcast to the nation.
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.… What began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake.…
“I let my personal concern for the hostages spill over into the geopolitical strategy of reaching out to Iran. I asked so many questions about the hostages’ welfare that I didn’t ask enough about the specifics of the total Iran plan. Let me say to the hostage families: We have not given up. We never will. And I promise you we’ll use every legitimate means to free your loved ones from captivity.” My colleague, Terry Anderson, was not unchained until December 4, 1991; he had been the last hostage captured, on March 16, 1985, after a tennis match in Beirut.
Reagan told the nation he had learned from his mistakes. “Now, what should happen when you make a mistake is this: You take your knocks, you learn your lessons, and then you move on. That’s the healthiest way to deal with a problem.” That was enough for the Democratic Congress. Impeachment was discussed by the new Speaker, Jim Wright of Texas. But Watergate and Nixon’s resignation smeared the body politic in Washington, not just the Republicans. And a series of Iran-Contra investigations seemingly unearthed all the dirt. Declassified documents trickled out a series of Presidential Directives showing Reagan’s signature on all the worst decisions. But there was no appetite for impeachment. “We just decided not to do it,” said House Majority Leader Thomas Foley.
It was Richard Nixon who noted a crucial aspect of American politics. He was tape-recorded during a session with aides moaning about the lasting effects of Watergate: Voters quickly forget, Nixon said. Reagan’s popularity improved during his final year in office. Just before he left office, Gallup reported 63 percent of those interviewed approved of the president.
January 18, 1989—two days before his second term ended—was particularly pleasant for Reagan. He welcomed to the White House the college football national champions, the University of Notre Dame. The players presented him with a sweater that had belonged to Fighting Irish football great George Gipp—the role Reagan played in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. Almost every reporter in Washington referred to the president as “the Gipper.”
The Notre Dame football team provided the ideal audience for Reagan to repeat an anecdote about the famous coach that he had used a year earlier at a fundraising reception for Pete Dawkins of New Jersey.
“Knute liked … spirit in his ballplayers…,” Reagan said. “Once when he was working with the four backfield stars who became known as the Four Horsemen, the fellow named Jimmy Crowley just couldn’t get it right on one play.… Rockne, who, by the way, was Norwegian, but was commonly called the Swede—he finally got irritated after Crowley muffed a play again and hollered, ‘What’s dumber than a dumb Irishman?’ And without missing a beat, Crowley said, ‘A smart Swede.’”
The White House Rose Garden echoed with laughter.