Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [276]
Reagan’s face crumpled, his expression that of a man who has just staked the farm on one card and lost. His eyes turned humid, almost welling up with tears—I have seldom felt so bad for anyone. Then his stoicism returned. He took the empty plate from Lindsey’s hand, placed it back on the table, and directed his gaze to the far horizon, leaving us to get on with the details.
IT WAS hardly surprising that the question of who had actually written the book came up in the press from time to time. Everybody knew that Reagan wasn’t writing it all by himself, but Bob Lindsey’s name was not to appear on the jacket or the title page—even if it had been supposed to appear there, his taking the last cookie would probably have made the president want to take his name off it. I came up with a quick answer to such questions that seemed to satisfy everybody: “Of course the president wrote the book—it’s his book—but with the editorial assistance of Robert Lindsey.”
This seemed to solve the problem, so far as reviewers were concerned, and it did not erupt again until Reagan himself came to S&S for a press conference in October 1990, shortly after the book had been published. After being introduced to the people at S&S who had worked on the book, Reagan and I posed for photographers, each holding a copy of the manuscript and pretending to edit it, then Reagan stood up, walked to the door, and waved to the photographers jauntily. Pausing at the threshold, he called out to them cheerfully, “I hear it’s a terrific book! One of these days I’m going to read it myself,” and was gone.
• • •
I HAVE always remembered him that way, cheerful, upbeat, good-natured, and even when the book didn’t sell—for by the time it came out it had, quite unfairly, become fashionable to put down Reagan, even among those who had been his supporters—I looked upon it as one of my happier publishing experiences.
Who else would tell the story of the dead goldfish at the summit? It appears that during the first summit meeting, when the president was staying in the home of my old schoolmate the Aga Khan, he was informed that one of the goldfish in his host’s aquarium had died. Feeling responsible, Reagan sent the Secret Service out to search through Geneva for a replacement, and placed the dead goldfish in a matchbox in his pocket, which he then forgot to discard, so that during his initial meetings with Gorbachev, on which hung the fate of the world, he was carrying a dead goldfish in his pocket. From whom else, after all, would you get that kind of candor? What other president would have had that sense of old-fashioned good manners toward his host? And in an age of faked emotions in politics, how nice to look back on somebody who, whatever his faults, genuinely believed in what he was saying. Even when it was wrong.
* Another drawer in Nixon’s desk was filled with dog biscuits, since King Timahoe, the red setter that Nixon’s aides had urged him to buy to make him seem more warm and human to the public, in fact hated Nixon and would growl and back away every time Nixon tried to pet him for the camera. John Ehrlichman, who had led the research group that decided that a red setter would have the most appeal for voters, came up with the idea of the dog biscuits, so that Nixon could surreptitiously palm one from the drawer and hold it out to King Timahoe whenever the president wanted to be photographed interacting with his dog.
CHAPTER 32
Few people in book publishing ever learn much from experience—or to put it another way, almost everything that experience teaches them eventually turns out to be wrong. This is not because of stupidity or even stubbornness but because every book is a different product. Even when books fit (or appear to fit) within a given genre or category