Power Game (75 page)

Reagan’s video managers embellished the pageantry of the White House and lured the TV networks into partnership by staging irresistible visuals. Their goal was to imbed Reagan in public consciousness as the personification of the nation. They made dream productions impossible to edit by timing Reagan’s most dramatic comings and goings for live coverage in prime time or for the morning news shows.

One rule of the image game is to attract viewers by taking them on trips. With Bill Henkel, the chief of advance (trip preparation), Deaver produced a Michener presidency which, like James Michener’s immensely popular novels about Hawaii, Poland, Spain, or Texas, plunged a nation of viewers into new worlds and took them on glossy adventures that outdid
National Geographic
. Often the policy purpose seemed secondary to the travelogue. President Reagan not only went for business at economic summits in London, Tokyo, and Venice, but he took highly photogenic journeys to Versailles, Bali, Normandy’s beaches, the Korean demilitarized zone, the Great Wall of China—all great box office staged by Deaver, Henkel, and Company.

Henkel, who came from the Nixon team, had a formula for “presidency-by-photo-op”
(photo opportunity). He called it H-P-S, meaning headline, photo, story. This was the distillation of the story line, the intro of the television anchor, the single memorable snapshot event. As Deaver said: “You’re always looking for a picture you don’t ever have to explain. The picture tells the story regardless of what Ronald Reagan says.”

Reagan’s trip to the demilitarized zone in Korea in 1984 was a prime example. Deaver and Henkel wanted to place Reagan at the most exposed American bunker, Guardpost Collier, peering into North Korea—evoking John F. Kennedy’s standing at the Berlin Wall in June 1963. But the Secret Service tried to veto that photogenic moment, fearing for the president’s safety from North Korean sharpshooters or infiltrators. After days of haggling, Henkel got the Army to string thirty thousand yards of camouflage netting from specially erected telephone poles to protect Reagan. And to get the most dramatic camera shots, Henkel made the Army build camera platforms on the exposed hill just beyond Guardpost Collier, so photographers could snap Reagan surrounded by sandbags. Another camera platform was behind Reagan for the most celebrated video shot: looking over the president’s shoulder as he raised binoculars toward North Korea. This was Reagan at the front—echoes of General Douglas MacArthur.

Again, to heighten the drama, Henkel wanted Guardpost Collier’s sandbags low enough—waist-high—for a clear picture of Reagan in Army parka and flak jacket. The Secret Service wanted sandbags virtually up to Reagan’s neck; Henkel compromised on four inches above Reagan’s belly button. As if staging a play, Henkel’s team put down red tapes showing Reagan precisely where to stand for the memorable picture. “This was it, the commander in chief on the front line against Communism,” Henkel said. “It was a Ronald Reagan statement on American strength and resolve.”
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It was also textbook image game—one picture carried the message.

On another trip, to Normandy, Henkel battled the pride of French President François Mitterand in order to get Reagan the right to fly directly from Britain to Normandy’s Pointe du Hoc—for stunning visual impact on television. Pointe du Hoc was an isolated cliff overlooking the beaches and the sea, chosen by Henkel as a vivid symbol of strongholds wrested from German troops on D day at cruel cost by American Ranger commandos.

Mitterand wanted all foreign leaders to follow normal protocol, flying first to a common welcoming point as they landed in France. For him, the climax of the fortieth anniversary of the June 6, 1944, D-day
landing would be a joint ceremony at Utah Beach. But the White House wanted Reagan appearing alone first; the French plan did not fit the American TV schedule. Henkel timed Reagan’s air landing at Pointe du Hoc for live coverage by the American morning TV shows—that was the jackpot, a riveting moment on camera with millions watching at home. Henkel got around Mitterand’s protocol by the legal technicality that American battleground graves were American territory, and Reagan had a right to go there first before officially “entering” France. In public relations terms, the stakes were so high that Henkel risked offending the French with the threat that Reagan might not appear at Mitterand’s ceremony on Utah Beach—unless Reagan got his separate early arrival at Pointe du Hoc.

In an even more moving moment, at Omaha Beach, Reagan read the letter of an American woman, Lisa Zanatta Henn, whose father, Private, First Class, Peter Zanatta, had been on the first wave landing at Omaha Beach in 1944. “He made me feel the fear of being on that boat waiting to land,” she wrote the president. “I can smell the ocean and feel the seasickness. I can see the looks on his fellow soldiers’ faces, the fear, the anguish, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. And when they landed, I can feel the strength and courage of the men who took those first steps through the tide to what must have surely looked like instant death. I don’t know how or why I can feel this emptiness, this fear, or this determination, but I do. Maybe it’s the bond I had with my father.… All I know is that it brings tears to my eyes to think about my father as a twenty-year-old boy having to face that beach.”

When Reagan had received her letter months before, he wrote back offering to pay her way personally and fulfill her dream of going to Normandy for her father. As he read her moving words that day, she sat among graying Normandy veterans, television cameras tracing the glances between them. For part of Reagan’s political genius is to make such moments personal for everyone by speaking to one person. The scene made a powerful visual symbol of Reagan the patriot-president, identifying him with the heroism of the common man, though Reagan himself had never seen combat.

At moments of supreme gravity, the Reagan team masterfully employed symbolism to give shape and meaning to events of uncertain outcome, such as Reagan’s 1985 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva. From policymakers and from their own intuition, Deaver and Henkel divined the proper symbolic message for the summit and then scouted months in advance to locate the right symbolic settings. Henkel
found an elegant old château, the Fleur d’Eau, as a site for Reagan to host Gorbachev. But what caught Henkel’s eye was a garden walk-way leading to a pool house with a big fireplace—the symbolism of a warm get-together.

“I knew Fleur d’Eau was the right place for the summit as soon as I saw the pool house where you have the classic roaring fire,” Henkel recalled. “I know Mrs. Reagan was very keen on it. I think the president, at first, wasn’t as receptive.”
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Both Mrs. Reagan and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane encouraged Reagan to use the pool house for private, man-to-man talks by the fire. So the public relations outcome was set before Reagan and Gorbachev met. It became the “fireside summit.”

Overall, the Geneva summit was an image-making triumph. As Ronald Reagan’s first encounter with the top Soviet leader, it broke the ice, and that was important. But otherwise there were no agreements, no breakthroughs, no real progress.

Beforehand, the administration had shrewdly lowered public expectations, a critical image-game task—to protect the president from mass disappointment. Virtually every advance briefing or press conference predicted nothing would happen. The press and public were conditioned. A news blackout imposed during the summit was an imagemakers’ delight, heightening the mystery and giving greater value to little scraps about how the two leaders got along. The lack of substantive information magnified symbolic details: Reagan, the ruddy seventy-three-year-old going bareheaded in a bit of one-upmanship to meet the young Soviet champ in a topcoat; the fireside chat itself. A postsummit stop was inserted in Brussels—theoretically to brief NATO leaders, but actually, Henkel told me, to retard Reagan’s homecoming and to synchronize it with the evening news shows. The live coverage, arranged by Deaver and Henkel, created a magnetic effect: helicopters ferrying the president from his encounter with the Kremlin boss on the final leg home to report to Congress and the nation. It was a production to inspire envy in Hollywood and to project an aura of success, however modest the reality.

The President as Storyteller

Reagan obviously brought formidable talents to the image game. He has the dramatic voice and the confident, jaunty air of Franklin Roosevelt, the warm optimism and aw-shucks smile of Dwight Eisenhower, the easy masculinity and glamour of Jack Kennedy. Reagan is a leader
operating powerfully at the level of visions, dreams, and legends, the most magnetic ingredients of political imagery. He has the lure of a pied piper.

Especially at moments of triumph or despair, Reagan has sensed instinctively how to bond himself with the emotions of others and how to draw them into bonding with him. After the explosion of the
Challenger 7
and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Reagan masterfully gave voice to the nation’s grief and outrage. And as he identified with the nation’s feelings, the public identified with him.

Reagan is so natural onstage that unlike most politicians, he creates the illusion of not being onstage. He is so practiced in using Tele-PrompTers that many viewers have mistakenly thought he knew his script by heart. And he has known so well how to create a sense of familiarity by tossing a smiling wave at an isolated camera crew that millions of folks back home felt he was sending them a personal greeting. Reagan’s ideology is divisive, but he knows how to soften it with a mellow TV style. Years ago, other politicians mistakenly dismissed Reagan as “just an actor.” But he has been so successful at the image game that acting experience is now reckoned an asset, not a handicap, in the new politics. Reagan has understood that politics for the millions—in the television age—is not rational, but emotional.

The storybook presidency is a form of political artistry for which Reagan was naturally suited as a born storyteller. Hence his reputation as the “great communicator.” Some of his most compelling political speeches are masterpieces of narration: his report to the nation after the invasion of Grenada, his tragic story of the truck bombing in Beirut, his angry tale of the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner. The storyteller’s skills were honed by Reagan during years of radio announcing, when he created the crack of the bat, the cheers of the crowd, the close plays at home plate from a skimpy wire-ticker report of baseball games. He created flesh-and-blood reality from a skeleton, drawing others into his special blend of fact and fiction. That same blend of wish and reality lies behind some of Reagan’s most wayward policies, and that same storyteller’s art lies at the heart of Reagan’s power as a political leader.

Reagan loves to retell the story of how he landed his first radio job in 1932 as a sports announcer, at WOC in Davenport, Iowa. One afternoon in the Rose Garden, four of us gathered around as he recalled how the station manager, a crusty old Scotsman named Pete MacArthur, had asked whether he could make a game come alive. MacArthur led young Reagan into a studio and told him when the red light came on to broadcast a football game as if he were watching it. Reagan
picked one of his college games, so that he could use familiar names and plays.

“I didn’t want to start with the opening kickoff but with something else,” he told us. “We won in the last few minutes of the game. Our star halfback, Bud Cole, had taken the ball near the end of the game and had come around my side. You see, I was a running guard then, and I was running interference for him. But I missed my block, and Bud had to reverse his field and zigzag his way through the secondary and then over to the opposite sidelines and went all the way for a touchdown.” By this time, Reagan was tracing Bud Cole’s run with his finger in the air. “So, that’s the play I decided to broadcast, and when the light went on, I began.…” The president was rolling now, reliving the memory, his voice deepening, picking up tempo and excitement:

“Here we are late in the fourth quarter. The shadows are falling over the stadium. The Eureka Golden Tornadoes are deep in their own territory, trailing by six points. On the snap, the ball goes to Cole, who begins a sweep around right end. Ron Reagan, the running guard, pulls out of the line and leads the way into Western State’s secondary and throws a key block on the opposing halfback.”
Interrupting his own replay, the president admitted, “And in that version, I made the block, and it was the best block you’d ever seen.” Then he resumed his broadcast voice:
“And Bud Cole streaks down the sideline with the fans cheering wildly, and scores, to tie the game for Eureka.”
The president smiled again. “And of course we made the extra point to go ahead and win the game. So that’s how I got the job.”
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Hugh Sidey of
Time
asked Reagan whether he had ever wanted to broadcast sports live, rather from the ticker. “Oh, no.” Reagan shook his head. “You see, the thing about doing it from the wire was that you could create the scene on your own.”

The moment was revealing, for it showed how Reagan relies on his imagination, to picture life in Nicaragua, in the Soviet Union, or how Star Wars will develop. Moreover, in the revisionism of his block as a running guard, Reagan displayed his politician’s bent for varnishing the truth. Like others, Reagan has done that often, enthusiasm getting the better of his memory. One incident, tracked down by Lou Cannon of
The Washington Post
, stuck in my mind. According to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Reagan, expressing his sympathy for the Holocaust, told Shamir at the White House in late 1983, that near the end of World War II he had served as a photographer in an American Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. That contradicted what Reagan had told his staff. Reagan, who spent the war with an Army
Air Corps motion picture unit near Hollywood, had said that he never left the country during the war.
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The President as Salesman