Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Thank you very much, Mr. President, Mrs. Ford, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President to-be…

She knew what the politicians on the platform were thinking: how calm he was; not a quaver in his voice; as if he were just getting ready to give the Panama Canal speech inside one more VFW hall in North Carolina rather than saying goodbye to twenty thousand people under these lights, these badly aligned pseudo-stars, here in this vast, weirdly unbuttressed arena. But this was nothing. How many times had she heard him tell the story of that night in 1940, in South Bend, when he’d stood up and talked, in person, to two hundred thousand people at the Knute Rockne premiere, the whole thing going out over Kate Smith’s radio show to more listeners than had tuned into Jerry Ford tonight.

I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pale pastel shades.

She’d joke about this line with Ted Graber, her decorator, when she next saw him. But come to think of it — yes, here was her inexhaustible ability to worry about anything — the line seemed to have something wrong with it. Was it too close to that one about Goldwater’s ’64 platform? A choice, not an echo. She broke The Gaze, imperceptibly, to steal a glance at Barry, whom she would also never forgive. Sticking with Jerry Ford, after all Ronnie had done for him in ’64! Merv tells her she’s the real Irishman in the family. “You know what Irish senility is?” he’d asked her at lunch a few weeks back. “You only remember the grudges.”

She feared, without note cards from Mike Deaver, that Ronnie would “go up,” forget whatever words he’d decided to speak. She can see the cameras, not just broadcasting this moment but recording what will be the last important film clip of Ronnie’s career, and she doesn’t want him to fade or fumble his way through it.

He is fading — lately, in some hard-to-define way; he’s harder for anyone to connect with. Not her, of course, but he’s been baffling many of the others who’ve been clustered around them in all the hotels they’ve been moving between. She has no idea what’s next for the two of them: he’s already turned down the chance to become Sevareid’s split-screened opposite on the CBS Evening News. “People will get tired of me on TV.” Even now he prefers radio.

She would get through the next moments by concentrating on the plus side: no more harrowing landings in the Flying Banana, that prop plane they’d made do with while Mr. and Mrs. Grand Rapids swanned around on Air Force One. And no more worrying that Patti would suddenly pose nude or marry one of the Eagles just in time to make the Tuesday-morning papers on the day of a primary.

If he could just bring this speech in for a landing, they could go home, and she’d be willing to spend a whole month at the horrible flea-ridden ranch he loved, without a single trip back to Pacific Palisades.

If I could take just a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

She has no recollection of this. And that adds to her nervousness. She can imagine what the liberal cartoonists will do — show Ronnie burying himself as some smiling has-been artifact of the twentieth century. But there is no turning back from this last moment.

His words spread through the arena and out over the television airwaves:

It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day. I set out to do so, riding down the Coast in an automobile…

Who, several thousand listeners were thinking, still says “automobile,” as if it were something new?

Then as I tried to write — well, let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they will be living in.

What, Nancy wondered, will they know about him ? What will it all have amounted to? Wouldn’t this video clip, the one now being created, just crumble to dust along with the reels of Crash Landing ?

And suddenly I thought to myself, if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems of which the president spoke here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country…

Anne Macmurray Cox ground her teeth at this McCarthyite reference to a suffix-less “Democrat” party, but she listened politely to the litany of conservative complaint:

…the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are the challenges that we must meet…

Then, through her binoculars, she took what would be a last look, for a long time, at her ex-husband. Peter Cox was watching the proceedings with an intentness that he had never displayed in their pew at Christ Episcopal back in Owosso. The magnified sight disturbed her. Had her analysis been wrong? Was Peter actually a true believer in this glossy false god whose hair was dyed darker than her own? She made a mental note to rejoin the Presbyterian Church, yet another affiliation she’d exchanged for Peter’s.

And suddenly it dawned on me: those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

“Well, of course they’ll know!” exclaimed Pamela Harriman. “Dear God, if there is anything between his ears, it’s straw.”

Her son shooshed her and pointed to Ave, who was sleeping.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us, now one hundred years later, free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction”?

Richard Nixon, having returned to his office following supper, relieved to know that Pat was again, already, sleeping, wondered if these people Reagan was talking about would ever appreciate Nixon , the first man to have done something about limiting those missiles, whose locations and throw weights Reagan didn’t have the slightest goddamned idea of.

And if we failed, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

“Can you follow this?” Anne Cox asked Jane Hazard. “Are these future people supposed to be vaporized or just in prison?”

“He lost me driving down the Pacific Highway,” Jane answered.

This is our challenge…

Nancy Reagan, whose nervousness about this improvised speech had trumped The Gaze and made her actually listen, could recognize the sound of a peroration coming on. They would soon be out of here. The benediction, she imagined, would be short and unfervent — the country’s Holy Rollers had already gone over to Carter.

…we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.

Applause that had been pent up by reverence, and by the riddle-like nature of Reagan’s remarks, finally let itself go. The orchestra returned to life and played “California, Here I Come,” a tune the Ford delegates could now sing as an order for Reagan to scram, once and for all.