Munday Document Funday

(Don't fuck up the governor's steak!)

This is the doc I was looking for, an advance manual for Ronald Reagan’s political tour in the fall of 1978, in when I stumbled the yet-more-interesting one, the advance manual for George W. Bush’s political tours in 2002, featured last week. I’ll lead with the part that I, at least, thought was a hoot. At the time I tracked it down, a certain Donald John Trump was still a political novelty, and one of the things people were making fun of was his passion for well-done steaks: something only a boob would prefer.

Well, lookee here, fourth line from the bottom…

The interesting part of all that is that, as I reported in Reaganland, “Most politicians skipped the meal, arriving only in time for their speech. Richard Nixon certainly did; he believed it made for amore dramatic entrance. Not Reagan. The meal was when he read the mood of the room, the better to calibrate his performance—even though, for the most part, he said the same words every time. ‘He listens to the introductions,” the columnists wrote, “or the Rotary Club business, with that same air of interest bordering on wonder. You would never know he has heard it all a thousand times in a thousand dining rooms.’”

The rest, most of you might find snooze-y, but not I, for whom this doc was raw material for conveying how indefatigably the most image-conscious politician in the history of the planet staged his shows—with no detail being too small to attend to in advance: how, “upon his introduction, he would stride dramatically via ‘a safe, uncluttered passageway’ (per the advance manual) to a podium(‘sturdy and if too short blocked up with bricks or 2X4s,’ free from ‘ashtrays, gavels, etc.’) set to his six-foot-one height. He would plant himself at a mark taped down to ensure advantageous camera angles. He would pop out his right contact lens so he could simultaneously read the text infront of him with one eye and read the reaction at the first row of tables—never more than eight feet away, so he would have faces to look directly into, to enhanced the aura of sincerity—with the other. Lighting was carefully specified; once, but never again, Michael Deaver, who almost always traveled with him to such events, dimmed the houselights before he spoke. Reagan snapped at him: ‘Mike, don’t ever let them turn down the house lights again. It causes me to lose my eye contact.” On important occasions, his wife Nancy accompanied him—and “as she watches her husband give tthe speech she has heard countless times before,’ a reporter marveled, ‘her look of rapt, wide-eyed adoration never falters.’”

One more interesting detail: the guy in charge of pulling plans like these together ever since 1976 for the Governor, whose name was David C. Fischer, was rewarded with a plum White House job as presidential body man, then left to cash in with a lucrative consultancy, with one of his clients being the “National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty,” the White House front group in charge of raising off-the-books donations from the blue-haired heiresses of the right to fund the Nicaraguan Contras; his job, he explained under immunity to the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, was securing Oval Office grip-and-grins for the donors.