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There were wistful moments too. Looking around the Biltmore ballroom, Reagan recalled dining there in 1937 and being introduced to the woman who arranged his first screen test. "It all began here," he said. The next morning, preparing to board Air Force One for the flight to Washington, Reagan and Nancy joined their daughter Patti in the sitting room of the Pacific Palisades house, closed the door and emerged a few moments later in tears. As Reagan and his wife passed a dozen or more neighbors clustered in their driveway to wave goodbye, a reporter inquired about their feelings. Answered Reagan: "It's more than a little sad. It's really hard to leave."
All the while, Reagan was also conducting affairs of state, the most important being the preparation of his Inaugural Address. The work began in standard fashion: aides delivered to Reagan copies of every Inaugural speech from George Washington's to Jimmy Carter's, a dozen advisers submitted memoranda, Speechwriter Ken Khachigian prepared a draft. Flying back to California from Washington two weeks ago, Reagan read the pile of paper. Then the old actor, who has a superb inner ear for the crowd-pleasing phrase, put the whole mass aside and started out from scratch on a blank sheet of paper. Said he to aides, half apologetically: "I've got to do it in my own words." He kept scribbling away at Pacific Palisades, while movers bustled about crating up possessions.
Though Reagan was expected to keep fiddling with wording, the text by week's end was fairly well set. The speech was scheduled to be short—15 minutes—general and upbeat. In Reagan's view, he had to start immediately building confidence that the nation's menacing problems, especially its raging inflation, can be solved, before the expectation of more trouble becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So his draft text pledged an "Era of Renewal" and stressed the theme that a can-do Administration is taking charge of a can-do people.
The economy preoccupied Reagan in his last days as a private citizen. In his first two days in Washington, he presided over four meetings with his economic advisers, each lasting 90 minutes. The meetings filled in details of four directives that aides expected Reagan to issue within days, or even hours, of taking the oath of office:
> An order to all federal departments and agencies to report, probably within 60 days, how much they can save by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse."
> A freeze on federal hiring that will be more strictly enforced than the one Carter put into effect last March.
> Deferment of all pending federal regulations affecting business until the new Administration can decide whether their benefits outweigh their possible costs in impeding productivity and worsening inflation.
> Abolition of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, which tried to administer voluntary wage-price guidelines. This violates Reagan's free-market philosophy.