‘Meet the Press’ transcript for May 20, 2007

MR. MEESE: It was. And also Camp David was very important to him, to get away from the day-to-day activities of the White House and to be outdoors at Camp David. If he couldn’t be at the ranch, at least he would be out with trees and where he could ride horseback and walk and hike with Nancy as he did.

MR. RUSSERT: But organized religion was not as important to him as his direct relationship with God.

MR. DEAVER: Well, I—that’s true. But I think he missed the service of going to church, the whole formality of it, too. It was comforting to him.

But when Ed was talking about being out, I remember one Saturday going up to the White House, and Reagan was standing in the dining room looking out the window down towards 16^th Street, all by himself. And I went up behind him and said, “A penny for your thoughts.” And he said, “Oh,” he said, “I was just sitting here thinking I will never be able to walk out there and just go through a bookstore again by myself.”

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to politics. He—President Reagan decided to run for re-election. The first debate was in Louisville, October 7^th. It was not a good performance. Here’s part of Reagan’s presentation.

(Videotape, October 7, 1984)

PRES. RONALD REAGAN: The system is still where it was with regard to the—with regard to the, the progressivity, as I’ve said.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: And this is what the president wrote about his own performance. “Well the debate took place in Louisville and I have to say I lost. I guess I’d crammed so hard on facts and figures in view of the absolutely dishonest things Mondale’s been saying in the campaign, I guess I flattened out. Anyway I didn’t feel good about myself.”

MR. BRINKLEY: There is zero sense of flattery of himself in the diaries. Occasionally, he will lurch into his poll numbers and say, “Look, I’ve gone up from, you know, 49 percent to 59 percent on an issue.” But he’s very self-deprecating, and I think that’s one of the reasons Ronald Reagan had such an enduring appeal. And you see—he was able to watch himself like he would in Hollywood in the dailies, and he’d sit at night, watch himself on television on shows like MEET THE PRESS, and suddenly say, “Oh, I didn’t do very well. I got to do better.” And he constantly was working on the performance aspect of being president, and that, obviously, was a deep failure.

MR. RUSSERT: He would ask the White House switchboard operator, “What are the calls today? How are people lining up?”

MR. MEESE: Yeah.

MR. BRINKLEY: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: Endlessly curious. The second debate he bounced back by saying to Walter Mondale, “He will not make his age or inexperience an issue in this campaign” and went on to an easy re-election.

MR. MEESE: But I think you put your finger on something there. If he did overprepare, if he tried to cram a lot of facts and figures, he had an almost photographic memory. And a lot of times the fact that he would—had been fed so much at the presss conference briefing, or at a briefing before a speech or something like this, and that was really counterproductive. If he was just natural, as he was in that second debate, and used his sense of humor—you know, his sense of humor also shows itself in the diary. One of the best lines I thought was when he says, “the Girl Scouts were in to see me today. They made me an honorary Girl Scout, and I didn’t have to go to Sweden for the operation.”

MR. RUSSERT: One of the more controversial aspects of the presidency, as we all know, was his visit to Bitburg...

Mr. DEAVER: Oh yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...the German cemetery. Here’s his entry. “The press had a field day assailing me because I’ve accepted German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s invitation to visit a German military cemetery during our visit to Bonn.” Then, “The press continues to chew away on the German trip. They are really sucking blood. The evening TV news was again filled with my sinning against humanity by going” through “with the visit to the German” military “cemetery.” And then again, “The uproar about my trip to Germany and Bitburg cemetery was cover stuff in Newsweek and Time. They just won’t stop. Well I’m not going to cancel anything no matter how much the bastards scream.”

And on May 5^th, there’s the president with Helmut Kohl laying a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery. He determined to go forward with that trip. But Mike Deaver, we have an indication of the president’s attitude towards the media.

Mr. DEAVER: Right, right. You know, the Bitburg thing, of course, was my fault. I’m the one that picked that cemetery on the advance trip, and I always felt badly about it. And I was going to Germany one night about midnight when he called me back to the White House and took me into the den and said—never asked me to sit down, he was in his pajamas—and said, “I know where you’re going. You’re going over there to see Kohl and have Kohl call me and turn this thing off. Well, I don’t care what you do,” he said, “but I’m not turning this off, I’m going. So you just go on your trip and do what you want to do, but I’m coming.”

MR. RUSSERT: On the press—let me share another one with you. “Dropped in on the min—on the TV anchor and men and women who were being briefed on tonight’s State of the Union address. I cannot conjure up one iota of respect for just about all of them.” He didn’t like the press.

Mr. DEAVER: Well, actually he liked people. And he enjoyed, I think, the give and take. I think it would get—he would be angry when the facts were wrong, as far as he was concerned, but he—there wasn’t anybody that I know of that he hated, whether they were in the press or anyplace else. And...

MR. MEESE: No one.

Mr. DEAVER: ...you know, the give and take with them every morning coming across through the Rose Garden was friendly and the combat I think he enjoyed.

MR. RUSSERT: And he watched and read a lot.

Mr. DEAVER: Yes, he did.

MR. MEESE: He watched television every night.

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