Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

“Is it about your mother?” he asked, as if Jane Wyman didn’t exist.

Maureen and Ron assured him that Nancy was fine. “It’s Iran and the Contras,” his eldest child explained.

“Mermie,” said the president, with a sort of scolding forbearance, “we’re on vacation.”

Ron pointed to the presidential seal on a paperweight. “Come on, Dad. You don’t really get a vacation.”

“You need to stop the drift,” said Maureen. “You need someone new to take charge.”

“You’re talking about Don Regan.”

“Yes,” Ron replied.

“This is really your mother speaking,” said the president through pursed lips.

It was strange to hear Nancy invoked as a source of exasperation rather than wisdom and goodness. Maureen and Ron looked at each other, stymied.

“I’m not going to fire Don,” said their father.

“Why not?” asked Ron.

“What’s he done wrong?” the president countered.

“He’s the chief of staff!” exclaimed Maureen. “And he can’t report to you on what people have been doing because it seems that no one bothers reporting to him !”

Trying to lower the temperature, Reagan gave his daughter a half-smile. “I can’t fire a man with whom I’ll be ringing in the New Year on Wednesday night.”

“Don Regan?” asked Maureen.

“I don’t think so, Dad,” said Ron.

“I know that the Annenbergs invited him,” the president protested. “Don was tickled about it.”

“He sent ‘regrets,’ ” Maureen explained.

Her father looked a bit stricken.

“ Regrets, he’s had a few ,” sang Ron, hoping to keep things light.

Reagan shook his head and said, once more, “Your mother.”

“You’re kind of scaring us, Dad,” said his son. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

Maureen decided that a radical change of subject might give her father the necessary shock: “Dad, why did you ask me to pray for you the day you went to Iceland?”

“Did I?” asked the president. “Well, I had lots to accomplish over there.”

“But you’d never asked me to do that before, even when a lot was on the line.”

The president swiveled ninety degrees in his chair. His children looked at each other and then followed his line of sight. He was regarding the nuclear football, the briefcase with the launch codes, on the other side of the room.

“Dad,” said Maureen, frustration now filling her voice, “we’re wondering if you know how bad everything is, how much trouble you’re in. Things are worse than they were at Thanksgiving. And they were terrible then.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the president. “We’ve got John Tower’s commission working hard. We’ll find out what happened.”

“We need a strategy ,” Maureen said.

“Well, I suggested giving immunity—”

“You need to try something else. The Senate shifts to the Democrats a week from now.”

Ron made another suggestion: “You need to ‘change the conversation,’ as they say. Maybe with some big new initiative?”

“Your mother wants a Democrat to run the White House!” The president’s tone contained some of his previous exasperation, but also a measure of his customary marveling over all that Nancy said or did. He then tried some subject-changing of his own. “Take a look at this. They brought it to me this morning.” He showed his children a Christmas card from Nicholas Ruwe, the ambassador to Iceland, which featured a photo of Ronald Reagan strolling with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. “She’s a nice gal,” said the president, pointing to his Icelandic counterpart.

“That giant fur collar!” exclaimed Ron, laughing and shaking his head. “You look like you just won the Preakness.”

A young man whom Maureen recognized as one of Don Regan’s mice entered the office. She glared at him as if he’d stowed away on the plane from Washington. “ Excuse me?”

“Now, Mermie,” said the president.

“I’m sorry, sir. And I’m sorry, Mrs. Revell. The speechwriting office wants the president to sign off on the Voyager citation.” Before leaving for Sunnylands tomorrow the president would confer medals on the designer and crew of the experimental plane that had just flown nonstop around the world. Reagan now looked at the text as if to indicate it might require quite a bit of tinkering — maybe enough that Mermie and Ron would have to leave him alone? But his two children merely moved to the side of the room; they would wait.

“Know why he likes this Voyager stuff so much?” Ron whispered. “It reminds him of his boyhood. It’s aviation, not space.”

Maureen agreed. “I know it’s supposed to give people a lift after Challenger , but it feels so antique and creepy — all about landing a plane before you run out of fuel.”

“ Dad is the one out of gas, isn’t he? He really seems paralyzed.”

Don Regan’s mouse scurried away, and the president’s children returned to his desk.

“Dad, you can’t do nothing ,” Maureen asserted. “You can’t let things remain static.”

“This whole Iran thing is just a bunch of ‘static,’ ” the president protested.

Ron sided with his sister. “No, Dad, it’s not static. It’s a thousand volts coming right at you.”

Reagan displayed the same frozen expression they’d seen him wear on Christmas Eve. Then, suddenly, he asked: “Did you hear that?”

Maureen and Ron both said they heard nothing. It seemed to them there wasn’t a sound on the whole glass-enclosed, bulletproof thirty-second floor.

“It sounds like a grandfather clock, ticking,” the president explained.

But there was no such timepiece in the room.

—

The December issue of Vanity Fair had been banished from Pamela’s house in Barbados, but atop a table in the entrance hallway she had set Fortune ’s September 15 number up on a little easel. The magazine’s lead story on Ronald Reagan’s “management philosophy” was now the occasion for barks of irony from every Democrat entering the premises. Surround yourself with the best people you can find , read the cover line. Delegate authority and don’t interfere .

Pamela reclined under some mango trees on a terrace by the pool. She had come here straight from Dulles after returning on the Concorde from nine days at Claridge’s. David Mortimer, Ave’s grandson via his first wife, snoozed on some nearby piece of patio furniture next to a wife of his own. Pamela had been doing her best to keep the family peace, but the heirs were beginning to convey the feeling that they should have gotten rather more from Averell Harriman’s will. Still, the trusts that she administered were producing more income than anyone had expected, thanks mostly to the booming stock market. (Like most Democrats, Pamela had long since stopped using the word “Reaganomics.”)

David was handsome and always cordial. And why shouldn’t he be? Pamela had been very generous in assigning the range of dates on which he and his wife might use the Sun Valley house between now and the coming of spring. Moreover, she had invited David to come along with her to China in a few months for what would be her most serious foreign-policy trip yet. Even so, there seemed to be trouble ahead.

She returned her attention to some of the paperwork on a breakfast tray that spanned the width of her chaise longue. She had begun trying to take more of an interest in the House of Representatives, instinct telling her that she would be able to boss around the mousey incoming majority leader, Tom Foley. She was writing him a note, and wondering if she shouldn’t perhaps ask him to come down. Not right now, but maybe at Eastertime. Over the next couple of weeks things would be quite crowded here. It wasn’t just the Mortimers. Dick Helms and his wife were coming for New Year’s; she’d put them in the little cottage where Ave had been more comfortable toward the end, in close proximity to his nurse. It now occurred to her that the Helms she really ought to be inviting was Jesse! Suppose the Senate should shift back , and he was chairing Foreign Relations when a Democratic president finally rewarded her with a post requiring confirmation? It was not so unlikely a thought, and she looked out over the pool to ponder it.