Reagan at First Glance: He was golden and were young (and foolish)
Freeman, Neal B.
Reagan at First Glance He was golden and we were young (and foolish). FIRST MET RONALD REAGAN IN THE early 1970s. It was not, as someone might have said in one of his Bmovies, an auspicious...
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...In the early days, we would send or satellite these tapes with quasi-apologies, stressing that only history-sized events had prevented the President from joining the fun that night in Omaha, or wherever...
...The lighting was lunch-bright and not dinner-intimate...
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...Just as Rusher and I sat down in the private roompersille to every pair of thin lips, would have chilled most dining rooms...
...Conversations with politicians, of course, tend to be heavily autobiographical and in this respect Reagan proved to be no exception...
...For some reason, no doubt providential, there followed nothing but silence...
...As I was to be reminded many times over the following years, Ronald Reagan brought with him to every encounter a charged field of personal charisma...
...But as it happens to all writers sooner or later, he had begun to repeat himself and, even more problematic for his boy editor (me), he had begun to make stuff up...
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...Sloan quickly became my model employee because, I now confess, Sloan did not exist...
...You have probably consumed a few of these messages yourself...
...At the time I was the editor of King Features, the Hearst-owned syndicate that then billed itself immodestly but not inaccurately as the "world's largest newspaper syndicate...
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...Reagan's forgiveness...
...Thus was born the career of Robin Adams Sloan, a saucier-than-thou gossip columnist who not only sucBY NEAL B. FREEMAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 ceeded Winchell but quickly became the rage of the syndication business, appearing in hundreds of newspapers around the country...
...I noted the item when it came across my desk, called Robin (I thought of my three sources as, respectively, Robin, Adams, and Sloan), and asked where she got the item...
...The sight of these two large, crewcut men with plugs in their ears, motionless except for darting eyes that followed every clam With that piece of business completed, I then joined the conversation in progress and was soon warmed by the toasty Reagan charm...
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...Only later did it occur to me that this arrangement amounted to a kind of moral hazard, a journalistic version of the S&L crisis of the 1980s...
...In a series of calls, letters, and public grovelings that will one day win me a footnote in the history of sycophancy, we finally secured Mrs...
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...The wide world has heard many of them, some more than a few times...
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...Nancy Reagan happened to be married to the governor of a state in which the Hearst Corporation owned major media, real estate, and other politically sensitive properties...
...But his ambition for the office As for the Governor, he and I began a long distance, very one-sided political courtship...
...It seemed scarcely man-bites-dog news that a middle-aged man with a background in Hollywood and a foreground in politics would color his hair...
...The private versions tended to be a little more politically incorrect and thus involved more horny girls, bibulous priests, and other unmentionables...
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...Toward the end of his career, and the beginning of mine, Walter had become a litigation-magnet and it became my unhappy duty to retire him after one of the most spectacular careers in the history of American journalism...
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...off the main dining area, Reagan strode in...
...We never became friends—this was a much larger episode in my life than hers—but we established a working relationship that carried on into her White House days when, by that time a television producer, I helped produce spots for her antidrug and Foster Grandparents programs.there remained for me only one more question to be answered about Ronald Reagan...
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...Thank you, waiter, I'll have the braised crow in a light mustard sauce...
...Toward me, she was in the end thoroughly gracious, as if we had worked together toward a mutual goal...
...Amid a cloud of bonhomie dotted with rosebud cheeks, with the hankie squared and his suit just back from the cleaners, you would have no trouble casting him as...
...Soon after the story was published around the country, however, the Governor's wife, Nancy, passed word to us that the story was untrue and that she would appreciate it if we corrected the record as soon as possible...
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...Reagan's objections with what I hoped was a polite but professional and case-closing note...
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...Walter had been a dominant figure in both print and electronic media for 30 years...
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...As the program rolled out, however, it was soon demonstrated that the impression he made by videotape was far more powerful than ifhe had walked on stage, appearing ant-size to those in the back row, and stumbled through a few weary remarks at the end of a long dinner tacked on to the end of a long flight...
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...First, I was hired to produce the President's video messages—everything from his New Year's greeting to the Soviet people to his salute to the newly elected president of Peru to his toast to JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 REAGAN AT FIRST GLANCE Mr...
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...BORqY , ---, I HAD BECOME A MEMBER of the administration, pleased to be offered a Presidential appointment to the Board of Directors of the Communications Satellite Corporation—or Comsat—which was the principal U.S...
...Every time that Reagan turned to speak to Bill Rusher, I would lean in and squint at the hairs on Reagan's neck...
...At a ballroom dinner—and not infrequently at simultaneous ballroom dinners at the far ends of this large country—the lights dim, a baritone voice intones, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States...
...She assured me that it had come directly from Reagan's barber...
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...IT WAS AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND that I received, out of the blue, an invitation to lunch with Ronald Reagan...
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...First, the jokes...
...It was not, as someone might have said in one of his Bmovies, an auspicious beginning...
...These well-informed sources were thus invited to let fly with their private furies, and it would be left to me to stand behind their copy...
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...Pressed for time in the presidential schedule—and always eager to avoid the marginal plane ride—Reagan began to travel to ceremonial events "by television...
...There was but a single gray hair peeking from his neck, just the touch to lend verisimilitude to Nancy's claim...
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...He greeted us as soonto-be old friends and introduced us to his two bodyguards, who then stationed themselves at the door to block unexpected visitors...
...America, as he called his audience, couldn't seem to get enough of his brassy, apparently inside dope...
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...By the time he was sworn in as President in 1981, Conversations with politicians, of course, tend to be heavily autobiographical and in this respect Reagan proved to be no exception...
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...Whatever his other vanities might be, Reagan was not dying his hair...
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...The Sloan column had also reported that Ronald Reagan, then recently re-elected as Governor of California, had taken to dying his famously chestnut-brown hair...
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...What was seen at first as a poor substitute for the President's personal appearance became in time what political observers regarded as still another brilliant innovation by the Great Communicator...
...I checked again with our source's source, the barber in question, and he reaffirmed his account...
...He was in politics, it seemed to me on first meeting, for the right reason: he saw his political career as an efficient vehicle for advancing important ideas...
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...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 NEAL B. FREEMAN After the jokes and the appetizers, we got down to more substantive talk of goals and tactics...
...Much to my surprise, the longer he talked the more plausible his White House ambitions began to sound...
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...William A. Rusher, the legendary pubJULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 REAGAN AT FIRST GLANCE Fisher of National Review, called to suggest that it might be good for me to meet the rising political star and, in a bit of forced symmetry, that it might be good for him to get to know me...
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Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
