An American Life Read online

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1990 by Ronald W. Reagan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  This Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2011

  Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Eve Metz / Eric Ziman

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Reagan, Ronald.

  An american life: the autobiography/Ronald Reagan.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. Reagan, Ronald. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  E877.R33 1990

  973.927'092—dc20

  [B] 90-10093

  CIP

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-2073-3

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-4148-9 (ebook)

  Unless otherwise credited, all photos were taken by White House photographers and appear in the book courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

  Photo 1: AP/Wide World Photos; Photo 2: Ronald Reagan Home Preservation Foundation; Photo 3: 1926 Dixonian; Photos 5, 7, and 8: Reagan Family Collection; Photo 6: Photo courtesy of The Dixon Telegraph; Photos 9 and 10: Gene Trindl/Shooting Star; Photo 11: Michael Evans photo.

  To Nancy. She will always be my first Lady. I cannot imagine life without her.

  Acknowledgments

  Presidential memoirs have become somewhat of a tradition recently—a way for a president to tell his story in his own words. And while that is what An American Life does, I had a great deal of help, for which I am most appreciative.

  First of all, I thank my beloved wife, Nancy. There are really no words to describe what she means to me. Life with her is everything I always hoped it would be.

  Robert Lindsey, a talented writer, was with me every step of the way. Bob has a way with words that has rightly earned him a reputation as one of our country’s most gifted authors. Even though I am glad to have this book finished, I will miss my conversations with Bob. I’m also grateful to Bob’s wife, Sandra, for her tireless work in typing Bob’s notes.

  The wonderful and thoroughly professional team at Simon and Schuster, under the able leadership of CEO Dick Snyder, were there day and night, always cheerful and always helpful. Editor in chief Michael Korda patiently read every single word time and time again, dotted every i and crossed every t—no one could ask for a better editor. Charlie Hayward, Alice Mayhew, and Jack McKeown were also of invaluable assistance. And Mort Janklow, my literary agent, who assembled the whole group, played a key role in bringing this book to completion.

  The staff in my Los Angeles office worked with me from the very first—researching files, finding photographs, checking facts, jogging memories. Jeanine Chase, Dottie Dellinger, Kerry Geoghan, Cathy Goldberg, Peggy Grande, Jon Hall, Joanne Hildebrand, Selina Jackson, Bernadette Schurz, and Sheri Semon—loyal and competent, they are the best team anyone could field.

  Three persons in particular spent considerable time working with me on this book and deserve a special mention: Fred Ryan, my chief of staff, who came with me from the White House, where he skillfully managed my schedule and where he was the architect of one of my proudest achievements—the Office of Private Sector Initiatives; Kathy Osborne, who has been my personal secretary since Sacramento and always knows just what I need (sometimes even before I do!); and Mark Weinberg, my director of public affairs, who for over ten years has articulately and effectively served as my “ambassador” to the press.

  The dedicated team at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation—Doris Heller, Robert Higdon, Chuck Jelloian, John Lee, Suzanne Marx, Stefanie Salata, Marilyn Siegel, Pam Trowbridge, and Sandy Warfield—will always have my gratitude for the work they are doing on the presidential library being built in the Simi-Thou-sand Oaks area of Ventura County.

  And finally, I thank the men and women Nancy and I “left behind.” The question I am most often asked these days is whether I miss Washington. Although I enjoyed the presidency, I don’t miss the job. What I do miss is the people—the good and decent people from every state in the union, from all walks of life, black and white, Christian and Jew, rich and poor, military and civilian, political and civil service, who comprise the executive office of the president of the United States, joined only by the desire to serve their country. They do so with the greatest dedication and distinction. We miss them, we keep them in our hearts, and we will always be grateful to them.

  Ronald Reagan

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  From Dixon to Washington

  Part II

  The First Year

  A New Beginning

  Part III

  Staying the Course

  Part IV

  The Middle East, Lebanon, Grenada

  Part V

  Iran-Contra

  Part VI

  Arms Control:

  From Geneva to Reykjavik, Washington to Moscow

  Epilogue

  Index

  Prologue

  NANCY AND I AWOKE EARLY on the morning of November 19, 1985, and, at the first glimmer of daylight, we looked out from our bedroom at the long gray expanse of Lake Geneva. There were patches of snow along the edge of the lake and in the gardens of the magnificent lakeside eighteenth-century residence that had been loaned to us for a few days. In the distance we could see the majestic high peaks of the Alps.

  The lake was shrouded in mist that gave its rippled surface the look of burnished pewter. Above, the sky was a dull curtain of dark clouds.

  It was a dreary, yet strikingly beautiful panorama.

  I had looked forward to this day for more than five years. For weeks, I’d been given detailed information about political currents in the Soviet Union, the complexities of nuclear arms control, and the new man in the Kremlin. In my diary the night before, I wrote: “Lord, I hope I’m ready.”

  Neither Nancy nor I had slept very well since arriving in Geneva three days earlier. During the eight-hour flight from Washington, we tried to adjust to Swiss time by eating meals aboard Air Force One at the same hour Genevans were sitting down to theirs. Doctors said this would help reduce the effects of jet lag. Yet, as each night passed, I slept fitfully.

  Perhaps it was jet lag, but I found it difficult not to think about what was ahead of me.

  George Shultz told me that if the only thing that came out of this first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev was an agreement to hold another summit, it would be a success. But I wanted to accomplish more than that.

  I believed that if we were ever going to break down the barriers of mistrust that divided our countries, we had to begin by establishing a personal relationship between the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth.

  During the previous five years, I had come to realize there were people in the Kremlin who had a genuine fear of the United States. I wanted to convince Gorbachev that we wanted peace and they had nothing to fear from us. So I had gone to Geneva with a plan.

  The Russians were bringing their team of diplomats and arms control experts and we were bringing ours. But I wanted a chance to see Gorbachev alone.

  Since Gorbachev had taken office eight months earlier, he and I had quietly exchanged a series of letters that had suggested to me he might be a different sort of Russian than the Soviet leaders we had known before. />
  That morning, as we shook hands and I looked into his smile, I sensed I had been right and felt a surge of optimism that my plan might work.

  As we began our first meeting in the presence of our advisors, Gorbachev and I sat opposite one another. I had told my team what I was going to do.

  As our technical experts began to speak, I said to him, “While our people here are discussing the need for arms control, why don’t you and I step outside and get some fresh air?”

  Gorbachev was out of his chair before I could finish the sentence. We walked together about one hundred yards down a hill to a boathouse along the lakeshore.

  As we descended the hill, the air was crisp and very cold. I’d asked members of the White House staff to light a fire in the boat-house before we got there and they had: Only later did I discover they’d built such a rip-roaring fire that it set an ornate wooden mantelpiece above the fireplace ablaze and had to be doused with pitchers of water and then relighted a couple of hours before we arrived.

  We sat down beside the blazing hearth, just the two of us and our interpreters, and I told Gorbachev that I thought he and I were in a unique situation at a unique time: “Here you and I are, two men in a room, probably the only two men in the world who could bring about World War III. But by the same token, we may be the only two men in the world who could perhaps bring about peace in the world.”

  Borrowing a quotation, I continued: “Mr. General Secretary, ‘we don’t mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.’ It’s fine that the two of us and our people are talking about arms reductions, but isn’t it also important that you and I should be talking about how we could reduce the mistrust between us?”

  In the preceding months I’d thought many times about this first meeting with Gorbachev. Nothing was more important to mankind than assuring its survival and the survival of our planet. Yet for forty years nuclear weapons had kept the world under a shadow of terror. Our dealings with the Soviets—and theirs with us—had been based on a policy known as “mutual assured destruction”—the “MAD” policy, and madness it was. It was the craziest thing I ever heard of: Simply put, it called for each side to keep enough nuclear weapons at the ready to obliterate the other, so that if one attacked, the second had enough bombs left to annihilate its adversary in a matter of minutes. We were a button push away from oblivion.

  No one could win a nuclear war—and as I had told Gorbachev in one of my letters to him, one must never be fought.

  When I had arrived in the White House in 1981, the fiber of American military muscle was so atrophied that our ability to respond effectively to a Soviet attack was very much in doubt: Fighter planes couldn’t fly and warships couldn’t sail because there were chronic shortages of spare parts; our best men and women were leaving the military service; the morale of our volunteer army was in a tailspin; our strategic weapons—the missiles and bombers that were the foundations of our deterrent force—hadn’t been modernized in a decade, while the Soviet Union had created a war machine that was threatening to eclipse ours at every level.

  I wanted to go to the negotiating table and end the madness of the MAD policy, but to do that, I knew America first had to upgrade its military capabilities so that we would be able to negotiate with the Soviets from a position of strength, not weakness.

  Now, our military might was second to none. In 1981, we undertook a massive program to rebuild our military might while I began an effort—much of it through quiet diplomacy—that I hoped would lead the Russians to the bargaining table.

  I knew very well the Soviet Union’s record of deceit and its long history of betrayal of international treaties. I had met Gromyko. I had met Brezhnev. I knew every Communist leader since Lenin was committed to the overthrow of democracy and the free enterprise system. I knew about this strategy of deceit from personal experience: Many years before, I’d gone head to head with Communists who were intent on taking over our country and destroying democracy.

  I knew there were great differences between our two countries. Yet the stakes were too high for us not to try to find a common ground where we could meet and reduce the risk of Armageddon.

  For more than five years, I’d made little progress with my efforts at quiet diplomacy—for one thing, the Soviet leaders kept dying on me. But when we arrived in Geneva, I felt that possibly we had a chance of getting somewhere with the new man in the Kremlin.

  As Gorbachev and I talked beside the fire, it was clear he believed completely in the Soviet way of life and accepted a lot of the propaganda he’d heard about America: that munitions makers ruled our country, black people were treated like slaves, half our population slept in the streets.

  Yet I also sensed he was willing to listen and that possibly he sensed, as I did, that on both sides of the Iron Curtain there were myths and misconceptions that had contributed to misunderstandings and our potentially fatal mistrust of each other.

  I knew that he also had strong motives for wanting to end the arms race. The Soviet economy was a basket case, in part because of enormous expenditures on arms. He had to know that the quality of American military technology, after reasserting itself beginning in 1981, was now overwhelmingly superior to his. He had to know we could outspend the Soviets on weapons as long as we wanted to.

  “We have a choice,” I told him. “We can agree to reduce arms—or we can continue the arms race, which I think you know you can’t win. We won’t stand by and let you maintain weapon superiority over us. But together we can try to do something about ending the arms race.”

  Our meeting beside the glowing hearth went on for an hour and a half, and when it was over, I couldn’t help but think something fundamental had changed in the relationship between our countries. Now I knew we had to keep it going. To paraphrase Robert Frost, there would be many miles to go before we sleep.

  As we walked up the hill toward the house where our advisors were still meeting, I told Gorbachev: “You know, you’ve never seen the United States before, never been there. I think you’d enjoy a visit to our country. Why don’t we agree we’ll have a second summit next year and hold it in the United States? I hereby invite you.”

  “I accept,” Gorbachev replied, then, with hardly a pause, he said: “But you’ve never seen the Soviet Union.” I said, “No,” and he said, “Well, then let’s hold a third summit in the Soviet Union. You come to Moscow.”

  “I accept,” I said.

  Our people couldn’t believe it when I told them what had happened. Everything was settled for two more summits. They hadn’t dreamed it was possible.

  I understood the irony of what happened that morning under the overcast Geneva sky. I had spent much of my life sounding a warning about the threat of Communism to America and the rest of the Free World. Political opponents had called me a saber rattler and a right-wing extremist. I’d called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

  Now, here I was opening negotiations with the Kremlin, and, while doing so, I had extended my hand with warmth and a smile to its highest leader.

  Yet I knew I hadn’t changed. If anything, the world was changing, and it was changing for the better. The world was approaching the threshold of a new day. We had a chance to make it a safer, better place for now and the twenty-first century.

  There was much more to be done, but we had laid a foundation in Geneva.

  As Nancy and I flew home to Washington two days later, I had some time to look back on the journey that had taken me to Geneva.

  I had to admit that it had been a long journey from Dixon, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa.

  PART ONE

  From Dixon to Washington

  1

  IF I’D GOTTEN THE JOB I WANTED at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.

  I’ve often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go—and
a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression.

  They were cheerless, desperate days. I don’t think anyone who did not live through the Depression can ever understand how difficult it was. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the country was dying by inches.” There were millions of people out of work. The unemployment rate across the country was over twenty-six percent. Every day the radio crackled with announcements warning people not to leave home in search of work because, the announcer said, there were no jobs to be found anywhere. There were no jobs, and for many, it seemed as if there was no hope.

  In Dixon, the town in northwestern Illinois where I lived, many families had lost their land to crushing debt; the cement plant that provided many of the jobs had closed; on downtown streets there were perpetual clusters of men huddled outside boarded-up shops.

  I’d been lucky. In the summer of 1932, I’d been able to work a seventh summer as a lifeguard at nearby Lowell Park and had saved enough money to finance a job-hunting trip. I had a new college diploma that summer and a lot of dreams.

  Keeping it secret from my father—I knew he believed those daily announcements and would have said it was a waste of time for me to leave Dixon in search of a job—I hitchhiked to Chicago after the swimming season ended with visions of getting a job as a radio announcer. But all I got was rejection: No one wanted an inexperienced kid, especially during the Depression. And so I had hitchhiked back to Dixon in a storm, my dreams all but smothered by this introduction to reality.

  If there was ever a time in my life when my spirits hit bottom, it was probably the day I thumbed my way back to Dixon in the rain, tired, defeated, and broke.

  But when I got home, my dad told me he had some good news: The Montgomery Ward Company had just decided to open a store in Dixon and was looking for someone who had been prominent in local high school sports to manage the sporting goods department. The job paid $12.50 a week.