Even with the tax hike battle raging around him, Ronald Reagan retains the serenity and confidence that have been key ingredients of his amiable style. En route to Billings, Mont., last week to appear at a Republican rally, Reagan spent nearly an hour chatting with Washington Contributing Editor Hugh Sidey aboard Air Force One about the rewards and penalties of the presidency. Sidey's report:
After 18 months, the Grecian Formula myth is at last retired. "I say goody," says Ronald Reagan. "I think a little more gray is in there, which has stopped all those items that I dye my hair, which I never did." He is right. There is more gray in there. Whether it is the weight of leadership or nature belatedly catching up with him after 71 years is debatable. This morning the rest of him appears several decades younger.
The presidency so far: "I have enjoyed it," he says simply and convincingly, but declines to reveal whether he would relish another term. "Sure," Reagan continues, "there are days that are very rough, and there are some times when you are haunted by a problem for a few days until you know that a decision has to be made and there is no one else to make it but you." Yet he has no regrets, not even a Walter Mittyish twinge to be back in the movies in a juicy wide-screen part. "I thought that I would miss that," he says, referring to his switch from films to politics. Harking back to his days as Governor of California, he recalls, "Nancy and I looked at each other one night in the living room in Sacramento and said, 'This makes everything we've ever done seem dull as dishwater.' It is the same way here [Washington]. You get to help write the script."
One reason he feels this way may be his concern about declining standards in film making. "They don't make them any more like we made them then," muses Reagan, looking down on Lake Michigan. "We used to fret a little bit under the strict production code—rules, morality and so forth. It made for great writing. Today they can just turn to obscenities or profanity. The oldest rule is that you can't do anything onstage that's as good as the audience's imagination. Today they don't leave anything to the imagination."
His current world, of course, has not been unlike a giant stage filled with diverse characters. "It is amazing how quickly you befriend each other," he says of his counterparts round the world. "You know that you are faced with the same problems and the same frustrations." Companionship at that level of power is special, and he never felt it so deeply as at the time of Anwar Sadat's assassination. "It was not just a sorrow, the sympathy that you have for someone well known," Reagan says. "There was a feeling of personal loss. That was when I first began to realize that there is a bond when you meet these people.