Polishing the President’s Image One Last Time

Michael Deaver still feels the wrench of emotion when he rereads the concluding pages of his book, the words describing the last time he would ever see his old boss, Ronald Reagan. It was in the winter of 1998, after Alzheimer’s disease had done its terrible work. Nancy Reagan had made the decision that the former president would no longer be seen in public, that only the immediate family would have access to the Great Communicator in his waning days.

She wanted the world to remember the president who’d cleared brush on his ranch, who’d stood erect as he challenged the Evil Empire, not the one who no longer recognized the people who once made up the tapestry of his life.

Deaver describes the scene in “A Different Drummer,” his recently published memoir of 30 years with Reagan--from low-level Sacramento staffer to the president’s gatekeeper and one of his most trusted advisors.

“Only his head moved as he finally looked up,” Deaver wrote of his last meeting, which took place in Reagan’s office. “His gaze, so questioning and unrecognizing, was new to me . . . I stood there confused and saddened. He had no idea who I was.”

Those few sentences are perhaps this brief book’s most poignant moment, the one in which Deaver’s relationship with the president came to an end. The book, which makes no pretense of scholarship, is a fond look back at a man who filled half of Deaver’s life. It is, in a way, Deaver’s farewell to Ronald Reagan.

“The nicest thing about this tour is that it’s not about me,” Deaver said on a recent afternoon. “It’s about Ronald Reagan.”

Deaver himself has been out of the limelight for more than a dozen years, working as a senior executive for a Washington public relations firm. Gone is the heady time when it was Deaver who was entrusted with being the “keeper of the body,” always at Reagan’s side. And gone too are those bad times when he found himself broke and humiliated after his perjury convictions, when the scotches were being downed in secret and the alcohol was taking its toll. Now he walks with a quick, sure step as he makes the rounds.

He was sitting in the lobby of the Luxe Summit Hotel in Brentwood, having just had lunch with Nancy Reagan. They speak, he said, a couple of times a week, just as they have done for years. It’s clear that Deaver has great sympathy for the role that Mrs. Reagan has inherited as her husband has become more and more debilitated.

“She’s a pretty remarkable lady doing what she’s doing today,” said Deaver, dressed in an understated blue suit. “I’m sure she thought it would be a lot different in her golden years. But she doesn’t complain.”

Michael K. Deaver’s face is a familiar one for anyone who followed the political ascendancy of Reagan, first to the governorship of California in 1966, then on to two terms as president. It was Deaver who created the “photo op,” who masterminded the manipulation of the media, who was known as “Magic Mike” for his ability to showcase Reagan in the best possible light. What Deaver invented, others have emulated in succeeding administrations.

“He is the godfather of our business,” said Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush’s image guru during his presidential campaign. “He plowed a lot of ground that we now tread. Deaver was one of the first guys to understand the power of media, of pictures and images.”

The New Guy Hits It Off With Mrs. Reagan

Deaver, who’d grown up in the desert towns of Mojave and Bakersfield before attending San Jose State, was still in his 20s and a small-time political operative when he was brought to Sacramento to be a bit player on the Reagan team. One of his major tasks--and one that no one else wanted--was to deal with Nancy Reagan.

“From the inside, the reviews on Nancy were not pleasant,” Deaver wrote. “Many who dealt with her said she was at best demanding, a tough-minded political wife who needed constant attention.”

But there was a chemistry between Deaver and Mrs. Reagan that worked well. And, as a result, it brought the political novice into Reagan’s inner circle and soon established him as a key player who gradually evolved into the image man. Deaver himself says he’s never been able to understand the “keeper of the image” moniker, contending that all he did was set the stage.

“I’ve always said the only thing I did is light him well,” he said. “My job was filling up the space around the head. I didn’t make Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan made me.”

But Kathleen Jamieson, the dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said so much of what will be remembered about Reagan are the backdrops conceived and executed so flawlessly by Deaver, like the images of him in China with the Great Wall stretching out behind him. “We remember the Reagan presidency through those stunning visuals,” she said. “Image by image, Deaver took memorable visuals and paired them with memorable language.”

As the years marched on, all seemed to be going well for Deaver. He married, and a son and daughter soon followed. He moved on to Washington when Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.

He was a big part of the daily action, the one who set the calendar and the agenda. But there in the background, little noticed at first, was the problem with the booze.

Veteran political consultant Stuart Spencer, one of Deaver’s close friends, remembers noticing a sign of the problem (but thinking little of it at the time) when they were drinking in a New York bar in the early ‘80s. He said Deaver was lining up his swizzle sticks on the table, an old alcoholic’s trick of counting drinks to know when to stop.

Still, Deaver was doing the work, year after year, polishing the Reagan image and taking care of business. But in the later White House years, Spencer started noticing that Deaver was disappearing. He thought at first that it was a sign of burnout, that Deaver was ducking work.

“But afterward I found out he was sitting in his room getting drunk,” said Spencer. “That was the biggest monkey on his back for a lot of years. He didn’t know how to get rid of it. Once he faced up to the problem, he’s been a different person. He’s a walking ad for Alcoholics Anonymous.”

In Deaver’s mind, there is a correlation between the booze and what happened when he left the White House in 1985. By then he had been with Reagan in one capacity or another for more than 20 years. It meant that he had been on a civil service salary for most of that time, even as others had gone on to lucrative careers in the private sector.

So Deaver started his own Washington consulting firm. At first the money rolled in. The goal for that first year was to take in $1 million in billings. But that goal was achievedin just a few months as Canada, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, TWA, Philip Morris Inc. and other big accounts flooded in.

Deaver was riding high. In seven months, the company billings amounted to an estimated $3 million. He bought the house next door to the one he’d been renting and added a kitchen with a wall of windows. He drove a marine-green Jaguar and furnished his office lavishly.

But then came the limo. On March 3, 1986, Deaver appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In the photo, he was shown sitting in the back seat of a limousine for a story highlighting Washington influence peddling. The image could not have been more damaging.

What happened next was a case study of the snowball effect. Deaver, who’d made his share of enemies along the way as Reagan’s gatekeeper, became the subject of a congressional investigation into his lobbying practices. Though no wrongdoing was found in his business dealings, he was convicted on three counts of perjury.

Deaver attributes a portion of his perjury problems to alcohol, saying it fogged his memory. He also says that life after sobriety has been like living a second life. His work is successful. His family is together. His relationship with the Reagans, who distanced themselves from him after his convictions, has been back on track for many years. And now, with the book, he’s put it on the record that in his mind at least, Reagan deserves to be ranked among the great modern presidents.

The book goes over some of the same ground several times--Reagan the decisive president, Reagan the thinker and writer--as if to rebut recurring criticisms of his old boss. “Other books about Reagan were beginning to come out,” said Deaver. “It started up a lot of this talk again about Reagan being so difficult to figure out, that he was an enigma.”

Deaver contends that’s true. His Ronald Reagan was the president who could listen and evaluate and then sleep well at night because there was no need to second-guess himself.

And what of Michael Deaver? Has he done any second-guessing? “I can now see I didn’t take much care in protecting my own image,” he said. “And I regret the fact that I never took the time to listen, to take that extra minute to be interested in people.”