Another Life (77 page)

Reagan told this story as if it were a scene from a movie, with vivid detail and real feeling—indeed, his sincerity was so plain that all of us were touched. He was obviously right—it was the perfect way to start the book. There was only one problem, I whispered to one of his aides. Since Reagan spoke no Russian and Gorbachev spoke no English, they could not have been alone for the discussion.

The aide nodded. “They
weren’t
alone,” he whispered back. “There were interpreters, security men, a whole bunch of people. That’s just the way the president likes to remember it.”

I nodded. This was a problem that had arisen before. Reagan’s memory was selective. Rather like Woody Allen’s Zelig, he had a tendency to place himself in events. He also was known to confuse fiction and reality. There had been the anecdote he had told Medal of Honor winners about the Eighth Air Force bomber pilot, who, when his B-17 was mortally hit by flak, ordered the crew to parachute out. Just as the pilot was about to jump from the flaming aircraft himself, he discovered that the ball gunner was trapped in his turret, wounded and unable to get out of the hatch above him, terrified of dying alone. The pilot took off his parachute, went back to the ball-turret position behind the wings and lay down on the floor so that he could put his arm into the turret and hold the dying boy’s hand. “Don’t sweat it, son,” he told the gunner, “we’ll go down together,” as the plane plunged to the ground.

This brought tears to Reagan’s eyes and to the eyes of the Medal of Honor winners. The only problem, as the press soon discovered, was that it had never happened. It was a scene from a movie, which the president had unwittingly transposed to real life.

He had the ability, rare even among actors, to convince a listener that something had happened the way he told it when it hadn’t, and he believed it with complete sincerity himself. Thus, we had to argue Reagan, with considerable embarrassment, out of the story about how he
had been the first American soldier to enter the German death camps and record the atrocities there (a story that he is said to have told to Yitzhak Rabin, bringing tears to Rabin’s eyes), because it turned out that Reagan had never left the United States during World War Two—he spent the entire war in Hollywood, in fact, recruiting personnel for army film units. He had seen some of the first death-camp footage taken and somehow convinced himself that he had been there. There was no intent to deceive on his part, he was simply one of those born raconteurs who told the same stories over and over again until they
became
truth.

We moved on to other subjects. The title had long been a problem, since Reagan had clung to the idea of calling the book
Trusting the People
, which didn’t even
sound
like an autobiography, but we managed to persuade him to accept
An American Life
, which he quite liked. On three other subjects he was intractable, however. He would not add a single word more to his rather hermetic account of the Iran-
contra
affair (in fact, it was the only subject on which I received a brief, stiff note from Reagan, via his chief of staff, declaring that while the president shared my goal of making the book “an open, frank account,” he had made his decision on this matter, and we were to “move ahead promptly in accordance with his instructions”), nor did he wish to explain in any detail how he had formed his views on abortion or how the savings-and-loan crisis had begun.

I pointed out to him that most people regarded the savings-and-loan crisis as having occurred on his watch, rightly or wrongly, and that he should therefore address it somehow in the text. He shook his head patiently. A lot of people supposed that, he said, but it wasn’t true. The problems with the savings-and-loan organizations had begun in California and Texas, had they not? I agreed. Well, the president went on, that was just the point. In both of those states, state law precluded federal intervention—there was nothing the federal government could have done. It simply wasn’t his responsibility.

I got up to stretch my legs and was followed by the aide who had been sitting next to me. Surely federal law supersedes state banking laws, does it not? I asked him. The aide shrugged. “Well yes, technically,” he said. “But he’s always believed that, you see.”

I saw all right. Reagan was so persuasive, so gentle, so convincing a father-figure, so
charming
, that nobody wanted to argue or disagree with him. Besides that, his ideas were deeply entrenched, and sincerely
held. Even when he was wrong, it was easier to go around him than to face the fact head-on.

We returned to the table just as coffee was served. Reagan, whose mind was already on his golf game, gave the paper bag to an assistant, who came back a few minutes later with a handsome china plate on which were neatly piled some homemade cookies. The president took the plate and held it up so that we could admire them—for a moment I thought he was going to say that he had baked them himself, but no, they were chocolate-chip cookies that had been baked for him by the Reagans’ Hispanic maid. He described with pride how she had risen at the crack of dawn to bake them and had given them to him to bring to the office as he was getting into the car.

I glanced at the plate. The cookies looked as if they had been baked by a child or somebody to whom the idea of a chocolate-chip cookie was basically foreign. They were lumpy, with a crisply burned crust, and rather thick for cookies. Still, Reagan was beaming at them as if they were culinary works of art, and it was impossible not to be touched by his pride and by his genuine gratitude that somebody who worked for him would go to this much trouble on his behalf. He took one off the plate, then passed it to the person on his right, and so on around the table. Chuck Adams, I noticed, put his in his pocket. I tasted mine, found it too sweet (but I totally lack a sweet tooth), and put the remainder in my pocket, where I was to find it later in the day. Lindsey took a cookie and put the plate back in front of the president, who repeated, with exactly the same degree of pride and emotion, that they had been baked for him by the maid.

Some minutes elapsed while we sipped our coffee and discussed various points—my notes include questions such as “
Why
did RR pick Haig (or the rest of his cabinet)?”; “What did RR think of Begin personally?”; and a mysterious one that reads simply, “Cut the nutmeg story?”—but it was becoming increasingly apparent to me that we no longer had Reagan’s full attention.

At first I thought he was probably thinking about his golf date—as an outdoor man, he cannot have relished spending the morning indoors with a writer and two editors. Then it dawned on me that his gaze was fixed not on some far horizon visible only to him but directly on the plate with one cookie. His expression was determined but mildly guilty, as if he had been caught in the act of some misdeed. The truth struck me
like a thunderbolt. What he wanted was the remaining cookie, but of course he couldn’t take it. The lesson had been drummed into him during his childhood and was now ineradicable: You do not take the last cookie on the plate, you offer it around.

Every child is taught some version of that, of course, but I had no doubt in the poor-but-honest household in Galesburg (and later, Dixon), Illinois, where the Reagan family often made do with “oatmeal meat” (a mixture of oatmeal and hamburger, served with gravy), the lesson was drummed into him harder than most, for the family lived precariously on the knife edge of respectable poverty. Reagan’s father was a shoe salesman who went on binges whenever things were going well for him, and while Reagan’s descriptions of his childhood tend to be sentimental and affectionate, one has an underlying sense of just how important it was to his mother to keep up appearances and how seriously both parents took the teaching of good manners, which was the main thing that kept them in the middle class. There were a good many things that Reagan had done since his days in Illinois that must have surprised and discomforted his mother—getting divorced, for one thing—but he had remained, as she surely had wished, an essentially decent and truthful man who saw people as individuals and treated everyone with courtesy. Given who he was, taking the last cookie on the plate was out of the question, and he knew it; yet the more he looked at the cookie, the more he wanted it.

I was tempted to ask Chuck Adams to put his cookie back on the plate, but I didn’t think that he would get away with it, and, being good-mannered himself, he would hardly want to admit that he had only pretended to eat his cookie, despite the fact that it had been made for a president. Mine had a bite taken out of it, so that was no use.

Eventually, it became evident that Reagan’s mind was elsewhere and that nothing could be accomplished until it was returned to the matters at hand. I coughed and, once I had his attention, said how much I had enjoyed my cookie.

Reagan nodded vigorously. They
were
good, weren’t they? They had been baked for him only this morning by the Reagan maid, who put them in a paper bag and handed it to him as he was getting into his car. Reagan’s face was as full of emotion the third time he told this story as it had been the first, while Lindsey, Adams, and I smiled as if we had never heard any of it before. Only Reagan’s aides looked glumly at their hands, presumably wondering how many more times they would hear about the maid before the end of the day.

Now that I had given Reagan a cue, he picked up on it instantly. Lifting the plate, he pointed to the remaining cookie. Would anybody like the last cookie? he asked. One of his aides took the plate from his hand and passed it on. The aides, I noticed, knew better than to reach for the last cookie. Chuck Adams passed the plate on to me, and I passed it on to Lindsey, the last man in the circle. I caught a glimpse of the president’s face. His eyes were hopeful and bright, his whole expression that of somebody who has done the right thing and seen it pay off. He was already reaching for the plate when Lindsey, who had been bent over a copy of the manuscript, oblivious of the small drama taking place at the table, absentmindedly grabbed the cookie and bit into it without even looking up.

Reagan’s face crumpled, his expression that of a man who has just staked the farm on one card and lost. His eyes turned humid, almost welling up with tears—I have seldom felt so bad for anyone. Then his stoicism returned. He took the empty plate from Lindsey’s hand, placed it back on the table, and directed his gaze to the far horizon, leaving us to get on with the details.

I
T WAS
hardly surprising that the question of who had actually written the book came up in the press from time to time. Everybody knew that Reagan wasn’t writing it all by himself, but Bob Lindsey’s name was not to appear on the jacket or the title page—even if it had been supposed to appear there, his taking the last cookie would probably have made the president want to take his name off it. I came up with a quick answer to such questions that seemed to satisfy everybody: “Of course the president wrote the book—it’s his book—but with the editorial assistance of Robert Lindsey.”

This seemed to solve the problem, so far as reviewers were concerned, and it did not erupt again until Reagan himself came to S&S for a press conference in October 1990, shortly after the book had been published. After being introduced to the people at S&S who had worked on the book, Reagan and I posed for photographers, each holding a copy of the manuscript and pretending to edit it, then Reagan stood up, walked to the door, and waved to the photographers jauntily. Pausing at the threshold, he called out to them cheerfully, “I hear it’s a terrific book! One of these days I’m going to read it myself,” and was gone.

•  •  •

I
HAVE
always remembered him that way, cheerful, upbeat, good-natured, and even when the book didn’t sell—for by the time it came out it had, quite unfairly, become fashionable to put down Reagan, even among those who had been his supporters—I looked upon it as one of my happier publishing experiences.

Who else would tell the story of the dead goldfish at the summit? It appears that during the first summit meeting, when the president was staying in the home of my old schoolmate the Aga Khan, he was informed that one of the goldfish in his host’s aquarium had died. Feeling responsible, Reagan sent the Secret Service out to search through Geneva for a replacement, and placed the dead goldfish in a matchbox in his pocket, which he then forgot to discard, so that during his initial meetings with Gorbachev, on which hung the fate of the world, he was carrying a dead goldfish in his pocket. From whom else, after all, would you get that kind of candor? What other president would have had that sense of old-fashioned good manners toward his host? And in an age of faked emotions in politics, how nice to look back on somebody who, whatever his faults,
genuinely
believed in what he was saying. Even when it was wrong.

*
Another drawer in Nixon’s desk was filled with dog biscuits, since King Timahoe, the red setter that Nixon’s aides had urged him to buy to make him seem more warm and human to the public, in fact hated Nixon and would growl and back away every time Nixon tried to pet him for the camera. John Ehrlichman, who had led the research group that decided that a red setter would have the most appeal for voters, came up with the idea of the dog biscuits, so that Nixon could surreptitiously palm one from the drawer and hold it out to King Timahoe whenever the president wanted to be photographed interacting with his dog.

CHAPTER 32

F
ew people in book publishing ever learn much from experience—or to put it another way, almost everything that experience teaches them eventually turns out to be wrong. This is not because of stupidity or even stubbornness but because every book is a different product. Even when books fit (or appear to fit) within a given genre or category (“presidential memoirs,” for example, or “women’s novels”), books and authors differ. No sooner has somebody said that science fiction is dead than a science-fiction novel—the late Carl Sagan’s
Contact
, for example, or Michael Crichton’s
Jurassic Park
—proves the statement untrue. The reverse holds good, which is that any attempt to capitalize on successes like these by publishing similar books will invariably fail.
Historical novels were said to be dead until
The Clan of the Cave Bear
demonstrated that it was only necessary to find a new way of writing one; many people in publishing will look you in the eye and tell you that romantic fiction is dead, despite the fact that every book Danielle Steel writes is a best-seller, as are those by Anne Rivers Siddons. Many publishers believe that the glamorous, glitzy novel is dead, despite Judith Krantz. For that matter, hardcover mystery novels were thought by many publishers to be in such a bottomless decline that most of them got rid of their mystery imprints at just about the time when Mary Higgins Clark was writing her first novel.
*
(Mary would go on to write an uninterrupted string of twenty-one best-sellers and to become and remain one of my closest and dearest friends.)