Mrs. Gorbachev, as Mrs. Reagan saw it, “condescended” to her, and “expected to be deferred to.” Mrs. Gorbachev accepted an invitation from Pamela Harriman before she answered one from Mrs. Reagan. The reason Ben Bradlee called Iran-contra “the most fun he’d had since Watergate” was just possibly because, she explained in My Turn, he resented her relationship with Katharine Graham. Betty Ford was given a box on the floor of the 1976 Republican National Convention, and Mrs. Reagan only a sky-box. Mrs. Reagan was evenhanded: Maureen Reagan “may have been right” when she called this slight deliberate. When, on the second night of that convention, the band struck up “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” during an ovation for Mrs. Reagan, Mrs. Ford started dancing with Tony Orlando. Mrs. Reagan was magnanimous: “Some of our people saw this as a deliberate attempt to upstage me, but I never thought that was her intention.”
Michael Deaver, in his version of more or less the same events, Behind the Scenes, gave us an arresting account of taking the Reagans, during the 1980 campaign, to an Episcopal church near the farm on which they were staying outside Middleburg, Virginia. After advancing the church and negotiating the subject of the sermon with the minister (Ezekiel and the bones rather than what Deaver called “reborn Christians,” presumably Christian rebirth), he finally agreed that the Reagans would attend an eleven o’clock Sunday service. “We were not told,” Deaver wrote, “and I did not anticipate, that the eleven o’clock service would also be holy communion,” a ritual he characterized as “very foreign to the Reagans.” He described “nervous glances,” and “mildly frantic” whispers about what to do, since the Reagans’ experience had been of Bel Air Presbyterian, “a proper Protestant church where trays are passed containing small glasses of grape juice and little squares of bread.” The moment arrived: “… halfway down the aisle I felt Nancy clutch my arm…. ‘Mike!’ she hissed. ‘Are those people drinking out of the same cup?’”
Here the incident takes on elements of I Love Lucy. Deaver assures Mrs. Reagan that it will be acceptable to just dip the wafer in the chalice. Mrs. Reagan chances this, but manages somehow to drop the wafer in the wine. Ronald Reagan, cast here as Ricky Ricardo, is too deaf to hear Deaver’s whispered instructions, and has been instructed by his wife to “do exactly as I do.” He, too, drops the wafer in the wine, where it is left to float next to Mrs. Reagan’s. “Nancy was relieved to leave the church,” Deaver reports. “The president was chipper as he stepped into the sunlight, satisfied that the service had gone quite well.”
I had read this account several times before I realized what so attracted me to it: here we had a perfect model of the Reagan White House. There was the aide who located the correct setting (“I did some quick scouting and found a beautiful Episcopal church”), who anticipated every conceivable problem and handled it adroitly (he had “a discreet chat with the minister,” and he “gently raised the question”), and yet who somehow missed, as in the visit to Bitburg, a key point. There was the wife, charged with protecting her husband’s face to the world, a task requiring, she hinted in My Turn, considerable vigilance. This was a husband who could be “naive about people.” He had, for example, “too much trust” in David Stockman. He had “given his word” to Helmut Kohl, and so felt “duty-bound to honor his commitment” to visit Bitburg. He was, Mrs. Reagan disclosed during a “Good Morning America” interview at the time My Turn was published, “the softest touch going” when it came to what she referred to as (another instance of somehow missing a key point) “the poor.” Mrs. Reagan understood all this. She handled all this. And yet there she was outside Middleburg, Virginia, once again the victim of bad advance, confronted by the “foreign” communion table and rendered stiff with apprehension that a finger bowl might get removed without its doily.
And there, at the center of it all, was Ronald Reagan, insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, “badly served”) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping “into the sunlight” satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious of (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence and for his benefit. What he had, and the aide and the wife did not have, was the story, the high concept, what Ed Meese used to call “the big picture,” as in “he’s a big-picture man.” The big picture here was of the candidate going to church on Sunday morning; the details obsessing the wife and the aide — what church, what to do with the wafer — remained outside the frame.
From the beginning in California, the principal in this administration was operating on what might have seemed distinctly special information. He had “feelings” about things; for example, about the Vietnam War. “I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war than the people have been told,” he was quoted as having said in the Los Angeles Times on October 16, 1967. With the transforming power of the presidency, this special information that no one else understood — these big pictures, these high concepts — took on a magical quality, and some people in the White House came to believe that they had in their possession, sharpening his own pencils in the Oval Office, the Fisher King himself, the keeper of the grail, the source of that ineffable contact with the electorate that was in turn the source of the power.
There were times, we know now, when this White House had fairly well absented itself from the art of the possible. McFarlane flying to Teheran with the cake and the Bible and ten falsified Irish passports did not derive from our traditional executive tradition. The place was running instead on its own superstition, on the reading of bones, on the belief that a flicker of attention from the president during the presentation of a plan (the ideal presentation, Peggy Noonan explained, was one in which “the president was forced to look at a picture, read a short letter, or respond to a question”) ensured the transfer of the magic to whatever was that week exciting the ardor of the children who wanted to make the revolution — to SDI, to the mujahadeen, to Jonas Savimbi, to the contras.
Miss Noonan recalled what she referred to as “the contra meetings,” which turned on the magical notion that putting the president on display in the right setting (i.e., “going over the heads of the media to the people”) was all that was needed to “inspire a commitment on the part of the American people.” They sat in those meetings and discussed having the president speak at the Orange Bowl in Miami on the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s Orange Bowl speech after the Bay of Pigs, never mind that the Kennedy Orange Bowl speech had become over the years in Miami the symbol of American betrayal. They sat in those meetings and discussed having the president go over the heads of his congressional opponents by speaking in Jim Wright’s district near the Alamo: “… something like ‘Blank miles to the north of here is the Alamo,’” Miss Noonan wrote in her notebook, sketching out the ritual in which the magic would be transferred. “‘… Where brave heroes blank, and where the commander of the garrison wrote during those terrible last days blank …’”