Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [6]
“Sit down,” Reagan began. “You’re at work.”
The group laughed.
“Well,” Reagan said, “I just wanted to tell you that every day won’t start this way while you are here. I’ve long taken seriously the lesson, you know what they say, ‘If you get up earlier in the morning, get to work earlier than everyone else, you work harder than everyone else, you stay longer in the day, you’ll leave a lot more money to your kids.’”
Everyone chuckled.
“And you leave it a lot sooner,” the president said. “So judge yourself accordingly and pace yourself accordingly.”
Reagan, as he so often did, was making fun of himself. He was an incorrigible comedian who started many meetings with a joke and could instantly eliminate tension in a room with a clever quip. In his desk in the White House residence, he kept a stack of index cards filled with one-liners and funny stories. His prodigious memory, fortified by memorizing scores of screenplays, allowed him to recall complicated jokes and yarns he had not heard or repeated in years. A master at exploiting his comedic skills for political advantage, he was adept at turning the humor on himself. Even his most fervent admirers admitted he was not the hardest worker in the world: whereas Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter were known to work sixteen-hour days, Reagan made it clear that the Oval Office clock must be set to his internal nine-to-five schedule. And if he wanted to take an afternoon off to go horseback riding—he liked to tell aides, “There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the backside of a horse”—he didn’t hesitate to do it. The previous Wednesday, in fact, he and several staff members had hopped on the presidential helicopter to go riding on the wooded trails around the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico.
By making fun of his own work ethic, even in settings such as this one, Reagan effectively defused a political weapon wielded by his opponents, who had often tried to remind voters of his relatively advanced age. The jokes also endeared him to his audiences, who admired his humility and knew that only a secure man could laugh at himself in this way.
“It may sound like a tired cliché, talking about a team,” Reagan continued. “We are a team, and our goal is a strong prosperous nation at peace, and team play is the only way I know how to do it.” This was no exaggeration: Reagan had been a passionate believer in teamwork ever since his days as a guard on his high school football team and later on the Eureka College squad.
“Right now,” the president told his audience, “the country is in trouble, and you can be a major part in changing this situation.” He exhorted the officials to work hard so that in their lifetimes no one could write a book called The Rise and Fall of the United States of America.
Continuing, the president said: “Maybe some of you were subjected to me a couple of times here and there during the campaign—I took pleasure in quoting some words of Thomas Paine, words that he said to his fellow Americans back when this nation was trying to be born. And he said, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ So let our prayer be that we can live up to this opportunity that God has given us and we can build the world over again.”
It was a minor speech to a relatively small circle of advisors, and it lasted just three minutes and fifteen seconds. Yet it revealed something important about Reagan and his beliefs. On the one hand, the president was acknowledging that the country confronted serious problems. In March 1981, after all, the nation’s economy was anemic and the Soviet Union seemed ascendant. But Reagan, a perpetual optimist, did not believe he was witnessing the end of the American century, and his deep faith was fundamental to that conviction. As a boy, he had often heard his mother, a devout member of the Disciples of Christ, explain that God had a purpose