Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [121]
The speech was printed in all capital letters: Copy of speech on heavy bond paper, RRPL; interviews with Ken Khachigian and Mari Maseng.
had spent part of his Saturday editing: Reagan Diaries, p. 29.
It was now a little after eleven: Interviews with Khachigian and Maseng; according to the DDPRR, Reagan was in the Oval Office between 10:54 a.m. and 11:24 a.m. Maseng and Khachigian remember meeting with Reagan alone in the Oval Office at about this time. The president’s schedule for the day listed two and a half hours of speech preparation time starting at 11:00 a.m.
But White House officials: Interview with Raymond Donovan; copy of a memorandum, dated February 17, by a White House official recommending acceptance of the union’s invitation to speak. “This is biggest possible breakthrough group in the AFL-CIO,” the memo reads. “Very Strongly recommend this event” (emphasis in original), RRPL.
On election day: Owen Ullmann, “Labor Leaders See GOP Senate as Nightmare,” AP, November 6, 1981.
already being dubbed: The first reference to “Reagan Democrats” that I could find appears in a UPI story on March 12, 1981. In a story on March 24, 1981, the Christian Science Monitor refers to a group of conservative Democratic lawmakers as “Reagan Democrats.”
But the speech mattered: Reagan wrote at length in Where’s the Rest of Me? about his time as president of the Screen Actors Guild; he was known to regale advisors and friends with stories about his time negotiating contracts with the major Hollywood studios.
The text of Reagan’s talk: Interview with Maseng, first draft of speech, RRPL.
Reagan read the text: Copy of Reagan’s rewrite of speech, as well as his editing marks on the rest of the draft, RRPL.
Now, as he reviewed the final draft of the speech: Reagan summoned Maseng and Khachigian to his office to point out errors in the quote from Gompers as it appeared on his speech cards, according to Maseng. Maseng does not recall the nature of the error, but believes the president indeed found a mistake that had been introduced by someone else. In truth, Reagan most likely made the mistake. The Gompers quote is included on his stack of index cards of quotations, but Reagan’s version has the two errors that were later corrected by a researcher in the speech-writing office, according to various drafts of the address (RRPL). Joanne Drake, chief of staff of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, provided me with the quote as it appears on Reagan’s cards. The full and correct Gompers quote (I will note Reagan’s errors in parentheses): “Doing for People what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon (Reagan used ‘on’ instead of ‘upon’) their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality, which in any way lessens initiative, is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers. Let social busybodies and professional public (Reagan left out ‘public’) morals experts in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under the pretense of social welfare.” Darryl Borgquist, the researcher who discovered Reagan’s errors in the draft, eventually obtained a photocopy of the president’s quotation cards, greatly aiding his fact-checking efforts. Still, Borgquist said, he often struggled to verify quotations inserted into addresses by the president, especially those attributed to authors. Then the researcher realized that the president was culling the language from movie scripts, not books or magazine articles. Invariably, a call to Warner Bros. would reveal that an author had also submitted a screenplay to the studio, and Reagan had likely read it. The future president had committed it to memory.
One of the city’s prime venues: The history of the Hilton was culled from various stories in the archives of