Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

On the platform the party elders buzzed with gabby relief. Unity! A microphone picked up Rockefeller’s words of congratulation to Reagan—“Beautiful! Just beautiful!”—and Nixon heard them in San Clemente. A network floor reporter, one hand to his ear, shielding it against the din, declared with professional courtesy to the defeated that “nothing in Ronald Reagan’s political life became him like the leaving of it.” Richard Nixon, named like his brothers for English kings, vaguely recognized the quotation as being from Shakespeare. He also suddenly recognized what no one else seemed to: that this blankly genial, overappreciated son of a bitch, two years older than himself, was heading not for a pasture but a short stretch of wilderness, on the other side of which lay something vast.

Through the open window Nancy heard five revs of the chain saw, his signature warm-up. Even before the tool could bite into the madrone’s trunk, she knew that it had to be Ronnie — not Barney Barnett, out there with him — who was felling this particular dead tree. In no time at all he would clear three or four more from the property. Chopping them down remained his favorite form of exercise here at the ranch.

She liked the sound of the saw, found it as soothing as Ronnie found the company of Barney, the California highway patrolman who’d been his driver during their years in Sacramento. The neatened-up grounds always pleased her, the way the saw left the healthy trees standing, just as Dr. Davis, her neurosurgeon father, would leave the sound matter intact after removing the bad.

Today’s Washington Post had already arrived, brought up the mountain by the government car that delivered the documents and the letters from ordinary people, a sampling of which Ronnie, still the softest touch, insisted upon seeing, even while here on vacation. The newspaper now rests, with a stack of others, atop a pool table not far from the couch she’s sitting on. The house is so small there isn’t even a proper rack for magazines. When visitors see how modest the space is — nothing but two little fireplaces to heat it — they always express surprise, intending a compliment ( It’s so down-to-earth! ) that somehow comes out as an insult, as if they’re really saying I didn’t imagine a spoiled bitch like you would put up with anything this primitive.

In fact the house is too small and rustic. After all this time it remains Ronnie’s idea of escape, not hers. She’s not Marie Antoinette, the way people claim, but at the ranch she can never fully shake the sense that she’s wearing that shepherdess’s outfit the queen would don in order to go play in a little hut behind Versailles. She tries to remind herself that Ronnie and Barney have made a lot of improvements to the property, however rough it might still feel. The mission-tile roof they’ve put on never leaks, which is more than you could say for the ceiling of that arena in Kansas City a decade ago. Collapsed! Just a few years after they’d all been standing under it.

Ronnie’s laughter, softer than Barney’s, now came in on the breeze. It was always hard to tell if he was in an especially good mood, since his disposition was generally so good to begin with. But this summer, more than half a decade into his presidency, things have been going along in a way that’s pleased — if not calmed — even her. George Shultz, to everyone’s relief, has decided to stay on, so there’s no danger of having to replace him with someone who might turn out to be like his predecessor, the preening, excitable Al Haig. And there’s supposedly technical progress being made on SDI, though she herself cares more about making sure there’s a follow-up to last year’s meeting with Gorbachev and Raisa. If they’re ever going to name a bridge or an airport after Ronnie, it’ll be because he’s signed a treaty, not because he’s thrown some light beams into the sky, like Jack Warner staging a premiere in the parking lot at Grauman’s.

There’s been more good news besides. The tax-reform bill would probably get through the Senate in another month or so. She might not know much about its contents, but if even the liberals were calling it a “reform” bill, then it would be good for Ronnie politically — and postpresidentially, if that was a word. More and more that had become her focus — the “legacy”—and she didn’t care how many concessions they made to Gorbachev, not if that’s what it took to get Ronnie cast as a peacemaker. She’d sit here if need be, part of a cozy summit by one of the two fireplaces, listening to that dame lecture her on Marxist whatever-it-is — a small price to pay, like the hour spent on the Fourth of July standing beside that waxen philanderer, Mitterrand, when they all rechristened the Statue of Liberty and created the most spectacular photos of Ronnie’s presidency, the heaven-sent backdrop beyond anything even Mike Deaver had been able to arrange during the first term.

Mike’s current troubles, a small black cloud above the generally sunny landscape, were something she wouldn’t think about now.

Of course, Ronnie’s fine mood came mostly from the fact that they were here , at the ranch, although the amount of time he was spending here had just become a new source of worry to the first lady. She would have to banish that thought as well. In fact, before she even skimmed the Post she would call Mother, still slowly dying in Phoenix.

But as she reached for it, the telephone began ringing. The Signal Corps operator came on the line: “Mrs. Reagan? Mr. Regan.”

The names were so close — except for her long “a” versus the chief of staff’s long “e”—that the four words always sounded silly, the way each morning’s phone call between Queen Elizabeth and her mother would begin, she’d been told, with the operator saying, “Your Majesty? Her Majesty.”

She detested Don Regan. Mike’s biggest mistake had been allowing Ronnie to let the treasury secretary and Jim Baker switch jobs at the beginning of last year. She’d had almost nothing to do with Don when he was in the cabinet, but as chief of staff he presented her with constant irritations. Each of them was unable to disguise dislike of the other, and the only way for her to handle a call from him was to plunge in as if she’d been the one to place it.

“Don,” she began. “You need to take care of this little ranch problem before it gets out of hand.”

“What ‘little ranch problem’ is that?”

She could picture him in his suite at the Biltmore over in Santa Barbara — big Mr. Merrill Lynch stuck in the same hotel as the traveling press corps. And she could tell from his voice that she’d knocked him off guard — good! — as if she were summoning him to come fix a broken latch in the hay barn.

She explained the problem: “I saw something in the Herald Examiner yesterday — I hope you did, too — about how by this time next year Ronald Reagan will have spent a year of his presidency in California.” Some reporter had done the math: at the current rate, Ronnie would accumulate three hundred days at the ranch, plus another seventy-five or so at the Annenbergs’ and the Century Plaza in L.A. “They ran the story with a sort of favorite-son pride. But that’s not how it’ll play in the rest of the country if anyone picks it up. It will make Ronnie sound lazy.” She paused for a few seconds. “What are your plans for dealing with it?”

Regan, his Irish already up, responded in the voice he’d inherited from his father, a Boston cop: “I don’t know. Suggest that you spend more time in Washington?”