Between You and Me (7 page)

President Reagan’s landslide victory in the fall of 1984 was still fresh in everyone’s minds when I flew down to Georgia the following March to interview the Carters for a 60 Minutes story that we called

“Plain Talk from Plains.” When I sat down with the former president,

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I promptly referred to the man who had ousted him from the White House.

W A L L A C E : You must be very jealous, ina sense, of Ronald Reagan.

C A R T E R : Not really.

W A L L A C E : Jealous of the fact that he is— I mean, if his is the

“Teflon presidency,” nothing sticks—

C A R T E R : Mine was the opposite.

W A L L A C E : Yours was the “flypaper presidency.”

C A R T E R : I think that’s true. When I was there, there was no doubt who was responsible. I was responsible. And now there is a great deal of doubt about who’s responsible, and Reagan has been extremely successful, more than any of his thirty-nine predecessors, in not being responsible for anything that’s unpleasant or not completely successful.

W A L L A C E : How does he manage that, Mr. President?

C A R T E R : Well, he’s blamed me for his two-hundred-billion-dollar deficits. He’s blamed me and Ford and Nixon for his lack of understanding of the Lebanon crisis, saying that this intelligence network was not adequate for him. He’s blamed the Congress for his withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon under, you know, very damaging circumstances, and—and he has never accepted responsibility for lack of progress in Middle East peace or a lack of progress on alleviating the problems of the poor and so forth. . . .

Throughout our interview, the former president kept coming back to what he regarded as Reagan’s lack of moral leadership in foreign policy, and that led to the following exchange.

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W A L L A C E : You think we’re closer to war today than we should be?

C A R T E R : I think we have let the world know that our country is no longer the foremost proponent or user of negotiations and diplomacy, and that our country’s first reaction to a troubled area on earth is to try to inject American military forces or threats as our nation’s policy.

W A L L A C E : Human rights under Ronald Reagan.

C A R T E R : Well, Reagan has basically abandoned our nation’s commitment to the human rights policy that we espoused.

W A L L A C E : Why? Because he’s a callous man?

C A R T E R : I don’t know what his motivations are, but the result has been that the world now sees our country as not being a champion of human rights, but as being dormant, at best, in the face of persecution.

The plain talk in Plains became even more pungent when I interviewed Rosalynn Carter. On the subject of Reagan, she was even more critical than her husband had been.

M R S . C A R T E R : I think this president makes us comfortable with our prejudices.

W A L L A C E : That’s not very nice, what you’re saying.

M R S . C A R T E R : But it’s the way I feel, and I think it’s true. . . .

I think he’s been devastating to the country and—

W A L L A C E : How? How has he devastated the country?

M R S . C A R T E R : Well, I wouldn’t trade places with him in history, with Jimmy and Ronald Reagan, for anything in the world.

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As she spoke, her face was clenched in anger. She obviously despised Ronald Reagan, and to judge from her frosty response to my presence, she didn’t care much for me, either. (Perhaps she’d heard that Nancy Reagan was a friend of mine.) Whatever the case, on that day Rosalynn Carter was pure steel; the magnolia facade had disappeared. But that was not my last encounter with the former First Lady, and the next few times I saw her, the context had nothing to do with partisan politics.

At the time of my 1985 visit to Plains, I was recovering from a severe bout of clinical depression. Thanks to a wise and caring psychiatrist and the medication he prescribed, I was able to break out of that terrible darkness. I’ll be writing more on that episode in a later chapter, but for the moment let me just say that for years afterward I didn’t tell many people about my affliction. Except for my doctor and family and two very close friends, nobody knew what a painful ordeal I had gone through. And there was a reason for such reticence; given my fishbowl line of work and my reputation for being a tough and abrasive reporter, I was ashamed to be identified as the sort of “pathetic wimp” who had suffered from depression. For that, I knew, was the popular (though completely erroneous) perception of the disease.

But as time passed, I gradually came around to the view that if I talked about my experience in public, it just might help others come to a better and more accurate understanding of depression. Thus, for the past ten years or so, I’ve done just that, on Larry King’s television show and similar interview programs, as well as at other public forums. Though I’ve resisted the various efforts to depict me as a poster boy for depression, I have agreed to speak at occasional fund-raising events, and it was at these fund-raisers that I began running into Rosalynn Carter. As I soon learned, she has been vigorously engaged in programs to eradicate the stigma attached to depression and simi-

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lar afflictions ever since her years in the White House, when she served as the honorary chairperson of the president’s Commission on Mental Health.

I should point out that her dedication to helping the less fortunate is a moral imperative she shares with her husband, who is living testament to the belief that presidents can go on to serve their country with impressive distinction even after they’re voted out of office.

In fact, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have been such paragon role models that they may have set the gold standard for conduct and achievements by former first families. Since leaving Washington, the ex-president has been in the forefront of the vigilant effort to assure honest elections in emerging democracies around the globe, and that is only part of his larger commitment to the cause of human rights. In addition, he has brought his own hammer-and-nails labor to the task of building habitats for humanity.

As for the commitment I shared with Mrs. Carter to combat the ordeal of depression and other threats to mental health, I must say that the more we saw of each other, the warmer and more cordial our relationship became. The last time our paths crossed was at a fund-raiser in Atlanta. In what can only be regarded as an eerie, even morbid coincidence, two of the best friends I’ve ever had—Art Buchwald and William Styron—were stricken with depression around the same time that I was. Their ordeals were just as harrowing as mine, and because Art and Bill and I enjoy a certain celebrity status, we’re sometimes asked to appear together at fund-raising events as a kind of depression team or trio, and that was what the three of us were doing in Atlanta in the spring of 2004. By then we had begun to bill ourselves as “the Blues Brothers.” That, I grant you, is not the most clever pun ever coined, but it did help to attract attention. About eight hundred donors showed up that night to hear us relate our tales

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of woe, and as we walked out on the stage, I spotted Rosalynn Carter sitting in the front row. I still find her attractive, so I waved to her and said, “Hi, good-looking.” She rewarded me with a radiant smile: On that occasion, she was all magnolia.

Ro n a l d a n d N a n c y R e a g a n W H I L E R O S A L Y N N C A R T E R W A S A relatively new friend, the woman who succeeded her as First Lady was a dear old friend. In fact, I’m certain I was the only working journalist who could boast that I had known Nancy Reagan longer than her husband had.

Throughout most of the 1940s, when I was in the early phase of my career in broadcasting, I had lived and worked in Chicago, where I jumped around quite a bit from one radio job to another.

One of my regular assignments was to announce and narrate programs at the CBS station WBBM, and there I was befriended by an actress named Edie Davis, who performed on various network soap operas that originated from WBBM. She was not only talented but versatile; on one show called Betty and Bob, Edie played both the society grande dame and the black maid Gardenia. And though she was old enough to be my mother—I was then twenty-four and she was forty-six—we became close pals. Edie was gregarious and high-spirited and, at the time, the bawdiest woman I had ever met. I frequently ran into her in the station’s green room, where we all gravitated for coffee and gossip, and invariably, she would greet me with some choice obscenity and then proceed to relate, with lip-smacking glee, the latest dirty joke she had heard. She was a pip, and since I was a new kid on the block of big-time broadcasting and

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still a little intimidated by the challenge, I treasured her warmth and friendship.

Edie was married to an eminent neurosurgeon, Loyal Davis, and she had a daughter from a prior marriage to a car salesman. In fact, six-year-old Nancy had been the flower girl at her mother’s wedding to Loyal. By the time I met her, Nancy Davis was a student at Smith College, and I remember her as a prim and proper young lady who often wore white gloves and Peter Pan collars. Although I didn’t know her well in those days, she struck me as being shy and reserved—

almost the opposite of her exuberant mother—and so I was rather surprised when I later learned that “sweet little Nancy” (as I then thought of her) had gone off to Hollywood to seek her own fame and fortune as an actress. While she managed to land a few roles in minor films, her dream of becoming a star didn’t pan out, at least not in the conventional Hollywood way. But the path she chose did lead to real-life romance. The next thing I heard, she was getting married to the well-known actor Ronald Reagan. I didn’t give much thought to that at the time except to harbor the hope, as I would for any friend, that her marriage would bring her a lifetime of happiness.

Years passed. I moved on to New York, where I continued to bounce from one news job to another, among other chores, until I finally settled down in 1963 as a correspondent for CBS News. In California, meanwhile, Reagan’s acting career lapsed into decline. The more it languished, the more time and attention he devoted to politics. By the early 1960s, he had become an eloquent spokesman for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. For a long time, Reagan’s political speeches were largely dismissed as another ego trip by a Hollywood star who believed his celebrity gave him the authority to pontificate on Soviet aggression and other burning issues of the day.

Then came his 1966 campaign for the governor’s chair in California.

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It was Reagan’s first run for public office of any kind, and he con-founded the experts by defeating the two-term Democratic incumbent, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. Just like that, a rank political amateur had become governor of our largest state and, by definition, a political force on the national stage.

Still, I didn’t imagine Reagan had much chance of capturing the White House, or even had the ambition to run. For one thing, his brand of conservatism had been thoroughly discredited in Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. For another, there was the question of credentials, or lack of them. Reagan’s professional identity may not have been viewed as a liability in California, where actors are as plentiful as geezers in Florida or oil barons in Texas, but I found it hard to envision voters across the country entrusting the nuclear trigger and complex questions of foreign policy to a man who was known primarily as “the King of the B Movies.”

Needless to say, I kept those reservations to myself when I ran into Edie Davis and her daughter at the 1968 Republican convention in Miami Beach. They were there to voice support for Reagan’s eleventh-hour effort to wrest the nomination from Nixon. Our brief reunion took place on the convention floor, and with the CBS cameras rolling, I asked Edie if she offered Nancy and her husband advice on how to raise their children.

“Oh, heavens no,” she replied. “I want them to still speak to me.”

“Well,” I reminded her, “you did such a good job yourself.”

“You helped me.”

I have no idea what she meant by that, because as I said, I hadn’t met Nancy until she was a college student, and even then I didn’t really know her well.

Reagancompleted his second term as governor in1974. That was also the year the Watergate crisis reached its boiling point and brought

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the end to Nixon’s presidency. That disruptive change did not deter Reaganfrom going ahead with his planto runfor president in1976, even though such a move now meant challenging the new White House incumbent, Gerald Ford, for the Republican nomination.

In the fall of 1975, shortly after he announced his candidacy, I did a profile of the Reagans for 60 Minutes. Part of the story dealt with such predictable matters as Reagan’s campaign strategy and his political philosophy. At the time, most Americans didn’t know very much about the Reagans as a couple, so most of what we filmed was a family portrait. We showed them relaxing at their 640-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, where I talked to them at some length about the life they shared and their rapturous devotion to each other. I had heard a charming story about the circumstances that first brought them together in Hollywood, and so I asked Nancy about that.

W A L L A C E : Mrs. Reagan, I understand that you met this fellow first about twenty-four years ago because you were a subscriber to the Daily Worker. The Communist Party newspaper?