The biggest problem with “Killing Reagan,” the fifth in a series of best-selling “Killing” books by top-rated Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, is that people who experienced the events described in the book are still around to talk about them.
With “Killing Lincoln,” “Killing Kennedy,” “Killing Jesus” and “Killing Patton,” most of the principal characters are dead and can’t refute any information that may be inaccurate.
But “Killing Reagan” has brought out a number of top officials, assistants and other aides to debunk O’Reilly’s contention that an assassin’s bullet that nearly ended President Ronald Reagan’s life on March 30, 1981, also began his slow descent into the Alzheimer’s disease that affected him throughout the rest of his two terms. However, his Alzheimer’s diagnosis was not announced to the public until 1994, more than five years after he left office.
Tom Griscom, a former executive editor and publisher of the Times Free Press, became assistant to President Reagan for communications and planning in early 1987 and remained until late 1988.
While he served in the White House, Griscom said there was never any question Reagan was engaged and capable of making decisions presidents must make. Reagan, he said Friday, was “fully capable of doing the job.”
O’Reilly’s “centerpiece” for his contention about the Alzheimer’s disease is a memo he admittedly never saw or tried to see until almost four weeks after the book was published. That memo was written by James Cannon, who had been chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, R-Tenn. In it, Cannon was attempting to describe for Baker, who was replacing Don Regan as Reagan’s chief of staff on Feb. 27, 1987, the lay of the land in the White House.
At that time, according to Griscom, Reagan was still recovering from prostate surgery he’d had on Jan. 6, had not been frequently visible in public and was in the middle of the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal, which was a secret deal to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages.
The memo, Cannon told authors Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus for the 1989 book “Landslide,” recommended the new team, among many other points, “consider the possibility that section four of the 25th Amendment might be applied” (which allows the president to be removed if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet declare him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”).
By the time the memo was completed, Baker had spent time with Reagan at a lunch in the Cabinet Room, said Griscom, who also was there, and had no worries about the president’s competency.
“[The suggestion in the memo] was quickly brought up and down and dismissed,” Griscom said. “It was not, ‘Let’s find out more. Let’s go look at things.’ It never got any serious consideration.”
In the ensuing months he was in the White House, Griscom saw Reagan nearly every day and worked closely with him on his major speech at the Berlin Wall (“Tear down this wall!”) on June 12, 1987, and on summits with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987 and Moscow in May 1988.
On the Berlin Wall speech, he said, Reagan knew instinctively what he wanted to say and fought for its wording against the State and Defense departments. On another occasion where the senior staff was preparing for a major speech, he said, he and Baker and other staffers gathered in the family quarters, and Reagan pulled out a legal pad with the three-page, handwritten basis of the speech he wanted to give.
“If he could sit down and pull something like that together,” Griscom said, there should have been no doubt about his engagement.
Until O’Reilly’s book, recent scholarship had done much to counter the “amiable dunce” description that aide to presidents Clark Clifford once gave him and the “pretty shallow” tag that White House tapes record President Richard Nixon saying.
Indeed, in their audio book “Reagan In His Own Voice,” Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson and Kiron K. Skinner describe the depth and breadth of knowledge Reagan displayed on a wide range of subjects on daily radio addresses he wrote and gave between 1975 and 1979.
They also related American conservative movement historian Lee Edwards’ recollection of visiting Reagan before his 1966 run for governor of California and finding the “dog-eared,” “annotated” books of history, biography, economics and politics he had read, digested and studied.
“This was a man who loved ideas,” he said.
Similar, according to the authors, was the late reporter and columnist Bob Novak, who was dazzled on a visit by Reagan’s knowledge of relatively obscure economic philosophers.
“Reagan was better read and better educated than we were,” he said.
Griscom said the president was driven by “central core convictions.” Details like missile throw-weight that fascinated President Jimmy Carter “were not what drove him or what approach he took.”
“He was comfortable about who he was,” the former White House staffer said. “Part of the Washington establishment stalwarts were befuddled by Ronald Reagan.”
Apparently, O’Reilly, in his haste to churn out one more book, was too. But people are around to call him on it.