I first met Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago, when he was governor of California and I was chairman of the Republican National Committee. A few years later I knew him as a competitor, when we both sought the nomination in 1980. He was a great campaigner, hard to run against, obviously, since he won and I didn’t. But he was fair and gracious. There was never great hostility. I had pulled off an upset in Iowa, and we thought we could ride that into New Hampshire for a victory, but we were wrong. Nineteen-eighty was his moment, and I was proud to join his team as vice president.
Watching him up close in the White House, I learned that a president could be adversarial without being mean-spirited, that politics did not have to be so partisan, so bitter. You could disagree, of course–that’s the nature of the game–but you did not have to be personally rough. He was always thoughtful, always courteous.
We had lunch once a week for eight years–Mexican food, in the small dining room off the Oval Office–and we would talk about what was going on, what was on our minds, and there was a great sense of humor. President Reagan was always saying, “Hey, did you hear this one?” He would tell stories and jokes, and laugh. He could argue with Tip O’Neill and Tip would fume out of there, but then Tip would call later and they’d tell each other Irish jokes–they could be friends. I had the same kind of experience with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Everybody points to the famous debate in New Hampshire, when he brought the other candidates on the stage and said, “I paid for this microphone,” but we talked right after that. It was never personal, and I appreciated that.
It’s early to judge him in terms of history, but I think President Reagan will rank very high. He had a handful of principles, and he stuck to them. Communism is bad, high taxes are bad, free enterprise is good, and he stayed with those, even when there were some necessary variations when he had to compromise with a hostile Congress. But he used these strong, strong beliefs to shape his presidency, and I think most people now will see that. Some will argue about the tax cut, or about this or that, but no one ever questioned where Ronald Reagan stood. Freedom was essential. That was one of the reasons he was so close to Margaret Thatcher: they were committed to the large idea of freedom.
There are some common traits between the incumbent President Bush and President Reagan. I think 43 states his positions, as President Reagan did, and he doesn’t stick his finger up in the wind to see which way it’s blowing. To some degree Reagan did exactly the same thing. Neither of them gets his way all the time, but there is a common thread. The president’s view of promoting democracy around the world is very much in keeping with Ronald Reagan’s view. They react the same way. Though I believe this president’s problems in terms of war and peace are more complicated than the ones President Reagan faced, the common ground between 43 and 40, if you will, would be a willingness to get out front, to say, “This is what we’re going to do,” and then going about doing it. That’s what great leaders have to do.
KIRK DOUGLAS: ACTOR
‘I sold hot dogs with Ronald Reagan.’
It was over 40 years ago, to raise money for our children’s school. The future president was so cheerful to our customers. He was a great communicator even then. We sold a lot of hot dogs.
He retained that cheerful, optimistic disposition all of his life–as president of the Screen Actors Guild, governor of California and president of the United States. Even at the end, his handwritten memo telling the world that he had Alzheimer’s was devoid of any self-pity.
He gave validity to the theory that a poor American boy has a chance to grow up to become president. During his eight years in that office, he radiated that optimism to the world. Hollywood is often thought of as a home of liberal Democrats. But Hollywood’s most important contribution in the political arena was Reagan: the man who won the cold war.
DENNIS LEBLANC: FORMER AIDE AND RANCH HAND
‘His relaxation was hard physical labor.’
He bought the ranch in 1974, his last year as governor. So when he went to the ranch, I went to the ranch. When he left the governor’s office, I ended up going to the ranch all the time. It was just myself, Barney Barnett and the future president. It was over a 100-years-old adobe house. It was pretty rustic. We called in a guy to do framing, but we did all the other stuff. We did the roofing, we did the flooring. And Mrs. Reagan helped out, especially on the flooring. And she did an awful lot of the painting, too.
He felt rejuvenated after doing a lot of physical labor. When we went up to work, he went up to work. There was never a day that we took off to relax. He did not like to stay in the house. He was up there to work, so he was going to be busy.
He never asked Barney or me to do something that he couldn’t do. He wouldn’t slough off something hard. He did everything that we did. Everything. He and Mrs. Reagan, at least toward Barney and me, were very inclusive. Barney and I ate our meals with the Reagans. We stayed up there. It was a unique experience to have someone of that stature–and Mrs. Reagan, too–treat you as sort of a member of the family.
A. C. LYLES: HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER
‘You missed me. '
I remember just after he recovered from being shot, in 1981, we were flying to Washington and we stopped off in Denver for an event. We taxied up to a hangar and the hangar was beautifully decorated, and they had 800 people or so for this luncheon for Ronnie. He’d just been shot, and I think this was his first trip after that. And the people were very worried about his being shot again. In the middle of the speech, there was a “pow.” Everybody ducked. Ronnie just looked over in the direction of where the sound came from and said, “You missed me.” It was a backfire outside.
He was a very easy man to entertain. He was so human, such a down-to-earth, human, human person.
If you knew Elizabeth Taylor when she was a little girl, you knew she was going to grow up and be a beautiful young lady. And if you knew Ronnie, and talked to him and were around him a lot, you knew that he was destined some way, somehow, sometime, to get into politics and do well.
GERALD R. FORD: THE 38TH PRESIDENT
The Kent County Lincoln Day Dinner is a big deal in western Michigan, and one year in the late 1960s I invited the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to come speak. I was in the Congress then, and this was my home district, and I figured he would be a big draw. We all knew him from his days as a spokesman for General Electric; he did a super job as a salesman for GE, appearing every week on television on Sunday nights, and I had guessed right about the Lincoln Day dinner: it was one of our biggest events ever, with about 1,500 people at a couple of hundred dollars a head, which was a good price back then. I was tremendously impressed with his presence, his style, his energy.
To be honest, I cannot say I was very pleased when Governor Reagan called me a few years later. By that time I was president, running in 1976, and Reagan told me that he was going to run against me in the primaries. But I said that’s the way politics is played, and we had a very difficult battle. My winning kept the party from going way over to the right, and it was a step in the right direction when we were able to win in the face of this very formidable challenge. From then on, we worked together to try to keep the party more or less in the middle of the road. People think of Reagan as much more conservative than I was, but I think Reagan actually moved more to the center than many appreciate–he would not have won two terms if he had not. He established that extremists on the left or the right could not be elected. They had to go down the middle.
I would have loved to have had him on my ticket as vice president in 1976. I thought he would have made a great, great teammate. I still think so. But we got the word–it came to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who were my principal advisers–that if I won the nomination, under no circumstances should we ask Reagan to run as my running mate. I was disappointed because I believe a Ford-Reagan team would have prevailed against the Democrats.
In March of 1980 I asked Governor Reagan to come down to Rancho Mirage to let him know that I was not going to be any kind of candidate in ‘80 and that I would be supportive of him if he got the nomination. Then, when we went to the Detroit convention, Governor Reagan and Nancy asked to see Betty and myself at our suite in the hotel, and he brought in this Indian peace pipe and offered it to me as a gesture that we were going to work together. At that time he asked me if I would be a vice-presidential nominee, and I was shocked. So we set up a six-man negotiating committee to see whether a Reagan-Ford administration would work. In 24 to 36 hours they came back and said there was no way it could be done. So we broke off the talks and I committed myself to campaigning for Governor Reagan, which I did.
I firmly believe the American people were the reason the cold war ended, with communism losing and freedom winning. I don’t think any one president can get all the credit. From President Truman on, everyone stood together, and the net result of this unanimity of the presidents and the people to defeat communism was why we won. In my judgment, the present president has a much more difficult challenge than we did in the cold war. When we negotiated against the Soviets, we were negotiating against a single ideology and a single challenge. President Bush has a worldwide challenge. Terrorism is much more complicated–and we need the same kind of unified strength now that we so often had under presidents from World War II forward.
BILL CLINTON: THE 42ND PRESIDENT
I first became aware of Ronald Reagan when he hosted “G.E. Theater,” which I watched every week as a boy, and I’m a huge movie buff, so I’ve seen a lot of his movies. I actually saw one about a month ago. In politics, President Reagan’s success in 1984 after GOP victories in three of the previous four presidential elections prompted Democrats to intensify our efforts to revitalize our own party with new ideas rooted in traditional values. The Democratic Leadership Council was a big part of that movement. In Reagan’s wake, New Democrats supported a strong defense, global cooperation, fiscal responsibility, welfare reform and a government that is less bureaucratic and more focused on giving citizens the tools to solve our own problems, faithful to our own roots as well as to modern conditions.
Ideology was important to President Reagan, but he was not inflexible. He did move his own party to the right, though he himself maintained a willingness to compromise as governor and president on issues like welfare reform and tax increases, and did not seek to demonize his political opponents or to question their patriotism, like some who followed him.
Presidents who come after Reagan can learn from him. I watched President Reagan closely over the years and was always impressed with his ability to use simple language with conviction and clarity, without closing the door to honorable compromise.
It was always a pleasure to be with him. I remember a dinner he and Mrs. Reagan hosted for the governors in which the president told stories of his movie career, a farewell luncheon he had with four governors in which he shared memories of his time as governor of California, and, of course, my wonderful visit with him in December 1992, in which he and I discussed the presidency and he gave me some good advice. In all these encounters, he was gracious, witty and generous.
Even when our policy differences were sharp, he was never mean-spirited about it. He always had a capacity to see beyond partisanship to our common belief in a brighter future for America and the world.
I especially admired his unmistakable belief that freedom is a universal value that would come in time to all people in the world, and that we all had a responsibility to help speed the coming of that day.
RHONDA FLEMING: REAGAN’S COSTAR IN FOUR MOVIES
‘Who knew I’d have these love scenes with the 40th president of the United States?’
He was not one to upstage you or fight you for the mirror or anything. He was a very comfortable man to work with. He was a very good actor, but with some of the parts he was given, he really couldn’t display the innate talent that he had. He was such a good speechwriter that I wish he had fixed up some of the scripts we did.
One of the films we did together was “Tennessee’s Partner,” with John Payne. I didn’t have the love scenes with Ronnie in that one. Well, we were invited to the White House when Ronnie was president, and I thought, “What am I going to say to him? He’s president now.” And I’m standing in line, and I got up to the front and all I could think to say was, “Hi, Tennessee’s partner,” because that was what he played. And he laughed and he gave me a hug, and it was just so dear.
