Moving-Up Day For the Reagans

By George Church

A week of Inaugural fun-and serious work as well

As movers packed up their belongings, the departing couple exchanged alternately jocular and tearful reminiscences with friends and neighbors at a series of farewell get-togethers. After a final embrace in the empty house that they had regretfully put up for sale, they boarded a plane for a flight to a distant city, where the husband plunged into a round of urgent business conferences. Another upwardly mobile executive family pulling up roots because of the husband's career? Well, yes, but with a difference: the job in this case is the presidency of the U.S.

Ronald Reagan was to assume that awesome responsibility at noon Tuesday, in the midst of the most lavish festivities ever to surround a presidential Inauguration. They officially got under way Saturday night with a fireworks show at the Lincoln Memorial, followed by this week's succession of parties and balls. But that was only the televised surface. Reagan's own final preparations for his new post were both more personal and more businesslike: an emotional farewell to California, where he had risen from obscurity to show-biz celebrity and political power, and the final drafting in Washington of a series of directives designed to get him off to a fast start on mending a battered economy.

At the start of his last week as a private citizen, Reagan helped his wife Nancy pack up at their home in Pacific Palisades, which they are offering for sale through the Coldwell Banker real estate agency (asking price: $1.9 million). Their activities, said Press Aide Joseph Holmes, were "remarkably like anybody else getting ready to move." Reagan wandered through the house gathering up belongings and taking long looks at the stunning ocean views. He also accepted possession of a white Arabian stallion, a gift from Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo that Reagan had trouble quieting because of the press of onlookers.

The next day, he and Nancy rode in a motorcade to downtown Los Angeles for a red-carpet reception at city hall and a lunch with businessmen and other admirers at the Biltmore Hotel. Jesse Unruh, a Democrat who ran against Reagan for Governor in 1970, had an imaginative compliment. Said Unruh: "You rarely get into trouble in the political field because of your enemies. It is the most difficult part of leadership to be able to say no to your friends." That, he added, was one thing Reagan had proved himself capable of doing.

At city hall, Reagan, who was in high good humor much of the week, gave a dissertation on jelly beans, which seems likely to become as much a symbol for President Reagan as peanuts were for Jimmy Carter. Reagan observed that he "became addicted" to jelly beans when he gave up smoking decades ago. He kept a jar on the cabinet-room table in Sacramento when he was Governor, and even found them a useful tool in judging his associates. Said Reagan: "You can tell a lot about a fella's character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful." Thus was born The Ronald Reagan Jelly Bean Character Test, which obviously needs some clarification before Reagan uses it in Washington.

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.

These would largely be symbolic actions. But more substantive decisions are already pressing in on Reagan. Within a few weeks, he will have to draft a detailed speech, amounting to a State of the Union address, explaining the economic package his aides want to present to Congress by mid-February. At about the same time, Reagan will have to decide on his approach to dealing with the Soviets, and with U.S. allies, whose leaders will be clamoring to meet with him early in his Administration. Social issues--abortion is the prime example--that are important to many of Reagan's followers probably will be put aside by the new Administration so that it can set a few clear priorities and act on them immediately.

The new Administration will also have to decide quickly how to organize itself. Reagan initially intended to set up an Executive committee of the Cabinet, a kind of super-Cabinet of three or four senior department heads that would meet regularly with him and top White House staff officials to discuss the whole range of policy decisions. But aides last week were talking of setting up not one inner Cabinet but three or four. One would concentrate on foreign and national-security policy, another on economic affairs, a third and possibly a fourth on related domestic concerns, such as welfare, education, health and other social policies.

The nation this week is mesmerized by the fun and games of the Inauguration, but for Ronald Reagan it is obvious the serious work of being President has already begun.

--By George Church. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Douglas Brew with Reagan

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, Douglas Brew, Reagan

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