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more the movie star—and announced that he had a golf date at noon. This came as something of a surprise for us, since we had been anticipating an all-day session. Lindsey looked particularly shocked, since he wanted to go through the whole manuscript, line by line. Reagan, however, was at his placid best. He would deal with the big problems, then go and play golf. We could settle the rest. He had thought things over during the night, he told us, and come to the conclusion that it would be all right to mention his marriage to Jane Wyman. We quickly inserted four lines in the manuscript, and that was that. I guessed that Janklow had succeeded in persuading Mrs. Reagan to drop her objection to the mention of her predecessor.

The idea of starting the book with the president’s return home had seemed to him too negative. He had a different beginning in mind and sketched it for us from his big, reclining chair. Why not begin with the most important moment of his presidency? He had no doubt what it was. It was on November 19, 1985, during his first meeting with Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev, near Geneva. Reagan had realized, he told us, that the summit meeting was going nowhere. The two leaders were surrounded by advisers and specialists as they discussed disarmament and were unable to make any human contact, so Reagan had tapped Gorbachev on the shoulder and invited him to go outside for a walk. The two went outside, and Reagan took Gorbachev down toward the shore of Lake Geneva. “You and I,” he told Gorbachev, “are old men—grandfathers.” The peace of the world was on their shoulders. Why could they not simply sit down and talk things out, man to man, without advisers and “experts”? So they went into the boathouse, overlooking the lake, just the two of them alone, lit a fire, and at the end of a long, heartfelt discussion, Gorbachev agreed to take major steps toward nuclear disarmament and to come to two more summit meetings as well, one in the United States, one in the Soviet Union. It just went to show, the president said, his eyes moist, how important a person-to-person approach was.

Reagan told this story as if it were a scene from a movie, with vivid detail and real feeling—indeed, his sincerity was so plain that all of us were touched. He was obviously right—it was the perfect way to start the book. There was only one problem, I whispered to one of his aides. Since Reagan spoke no Russian and Gorbachev spoke no English, they could not have been alone for the discussion.

The aide nodded. “They weren’t alone,” he whispered back. “There were interpreters, security men, a whole bunch of people. That’s just the way the president likes to remember it.”

I nodded. This was a problem that had arisen before. Reagan’s memory was selective. Rather like Woody Allen’s Zelig, he had a tendency to place himself in events. He also was known to confuse fiction and reality. There had been the anecdote he had told Medal of Honor winners about the Eighth Air Force bomber pilot, who, when his B-17 was mortally hit by flak, ordered the crew to parachute out. Just as the pilot was about to jump from the flaming aircraft himself, he discovered that the ball gunner was trapped in his turret, wounded and unable to get out of the hatch above him, terrified of dying alone. The pilot took off his parachute, went back to the ball-turret position behind the wings and lay down on the floor so that he could put his arm into the turret and hold the dying boy’s hand. “Don’t sweat it, son,” he told the gunner, “we’ll go down together,” as the plane plunged to the ground.

This brought tears to Reagan’s eyes and to the eyes of the Medal of Honor winners. The only problem, as the press soon discovered, was that it had never happened. It was a scene from a movie, which the president had unwittingly transposed to real life.

He had the ability, rare even among actors, to convince a listener that something had happened the way he told it when it hadn’t, and he believed it with complete sincerity himself. Thus, we had to argue Reagan, with considerable embarrassment,