'President Reagan'
At the appointed hour, Deaver knocked on the door. Reagan grunted and Deaver heard him roll over, so he knocked again, saying: “It’s eight o'clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as President in a few hours.”
“Do I have to?” Reagan called back. Then he laughed.
Trying to make his beaten and bitter predecessor feel more comfortable, he rolled out old Hollywood stories, a couple of them about his days at Warner Brothers studios under Jack Warner.
“He kept talking about Jack Warner,” Carter said later to his communications director, Gerald Rafshoon. “Who’s Jack Warner?”
Led by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the party’s elders came within minutes of persuading Reagan to take Ford as his running mate, not so much as Vice President but as a kind of co-president in charge of foreign affairs and budgetary matters. A joke, which took notice of Reagan’s supposed laziness, made the rounds on the floor of the Republican convention: “Ford will be president before nine, after five, and on weekends.”
In the weeks before his inaugural, with staff and press concentrating on who would man the new government, the President-elect spent his own time outlining the inaugural address. To him, the words were more important than the men who served him, aides he usually just called “the fellas,” often because he could not remember all their names. He was helped this time by a fellow named Ken Khachigian, a Los Angeles lawyer who had written for President Nixon and done a good deal of the heavy word-lifting on the 1980 campaign speeches. As he always did, Reagan began by chatting for twenty minutes or so about his ideas and gave Khachigian a six-inch pile of the four-by-six index cards he had used and edited for speeches over the years. In his transition meetings with Carter, Reagan had not taken a note nor made a serious comment during the President’s long and complicated issue briefings, but at the end of the first and most important session - use of nuclear weapons was one topic - he noticed that Carter used three-by-five cards listing the subjects of the hour-long talk. “Can I get copies of those?” Reagan asked as he stood up to leave.
With his writer taking notes, Reagan began dictating themes:
He also told Khachigian to find the script of a World War II movie. “It was about Bataan,” he said. An actor named Frank McHugh, Reagan remembered, said something like: “We’re Americans. What’s happening to us?” The writer found the line, which was somewhat different from what Reagan recalled, and used it as a finale in the first draft of the speech he brought to the President-elect on January 4: “We have great deeds to do…. But do them we will. We are after all Americans.”
They were watching television. Steve Bell of ABC News was talking about the crisis, about Carter and his men working on the details of transferring money to the Iranians. The image of an Iranian mob appeared; the President-elect pursed his lips and muttered: “Shitheels!”
