Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [275]
Some minutes elapsed while we sipped our coffee and discussed various points—my notes include questions such as “Why did RR pick Haig (or the rest of his cabinet)?”; “What did RR think of Begin personally?”; and a mysterious one that reads simply, “Cut the nutmeg story?”—but it was becoming increasingly apparent to me that we no longer had Reagan’s full attention.
At first I thought he was probably thinking about his golf date—as an outdoor man, he cannot have relished spending the morning indoors with a writer and two editors. Then it dawned on me that his gaze was fixed not on some far horizon visible only to him but directly on the plate with one cookie. His expression was determined but mildly guilty, as if he had been caught in the act of some misdeed. The truth struck me like a thunderbolt. What he wanted was the remaining cookie, but of course he couldn’t take it. The lesson had been drummed into him during his childhood and was now ineradicable: You do not take the last cookie on the plate, you offer it around.
Every child is taught some version of that, of course, but I had no doubt in the poor-but-honest household in Galesburg (and later, Dixon), Illinois, where the Reagan family often made do with “oatmeal meat” (a mixture of oatmeal and hamburger, served with gravy), the lesson was drummed into him harder than most, for the family lived precariously on the knife edge of respectable poverty. Reagan’s father was a shoe salesman who went on binges whenever things were going well for him, and while Reagan’s descriptions of his childhood tend to be sentimental and affectionate, one has an underlying sense of just how important it was to his mother to keep up appearances and how seriously both parents took the teaching of good manners, which was the main thing that kept them in the middle class. There were a good many things that Reagan had done since his days in Illinois that must have surprised and discomforted his mother—getting divorced, for one thing—but he had remained, as she surely had wished, an essentially decent and truthful man who saw people as individuals and treated everyone with courtesy. Given who he was, taking the last cookie on the plate was out of the question, and he knew it; yet the more he looked at the cookie, the more he wanted it.
I was tempted to ask Chuck Adams to put his cookie back on the plate, but I didn’t think that he would get away with it, and, being good-mannered himself, he would hardly want to admit that he had only pretended to eat his cookie, despite the fact that it had been made for a president. Mine had a bite taken out of it, so that was no use.
Eventually, it became evident that Reagan’s mind was elsewhere and that nothing could be accomplished until it was returned to the matters at hand. I coughed and, once I had his attention, said how much I had enjoyed my cookie.
Reagan nodded vigorously. They were good, weren’t they? They had been baked for him only this morning by the Reagan maid, who put them in a paper bag and handed it to him as he was getting into his car. Reagan’s face was as full of emotion the third time he told this story as it had been the first, while Lindsey, Adams, and I smiled as if we had never heard any of it before. Only Reagan’s aides looked glumly at their hands, presumably wondering how many more times they would hear about the maid before the end of the day.
Now that I had given Reagan a cue, he picked up on it instantly. Lifting the plate, he pointed to the remaining cookie. Would anybody like the last cookie? he asked. One of his aides took the plate from his hand and passed it on. The aides, I noticed, knew better than to reach for the last cookie. Chuck Adams passed the plate on to me, and I passed it on to Lindsey, the last man in the circle. I caught a glimpse of the president’s face. His eyes were hopeful and bright, his whole expression