The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Call it latter-day Teflon if you will, but nothing seems to faze the Gipper on his unrepentant gallop into the Beverly Hills sunset. He answered about 150 questions in a Los Angeles court last Friday and Saturday, part of the leftover Iran-contra scandal that keeps snarling at his polished heels like a nasty attack dog. He had every right to repair to his bright Bel Air home, high above the smog, and have a little bit of the post-White House blues like Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter.

Instead, Ronald Reagan made plans to take some more golf lessons at the Los Angeles Country Club. He is dreaming of making a hole in one before his 80th birthday next year.

Reagan has shed a few pounds and maybe a few years, has grown all his undyed hair back after his skull surgery last September. He has signed up for enough lectures to keep him running around the world at something like $1,000 a talking minute and has been certified as a top-drawer sidewalk superintendent for his presidential library, now a huge hole in the ground. He roams the 34th floor of Fox Plaza, high above Century City, trains binoculars on a tip of his Bel Air home, visible 3 miles away, and mutters dark incantations against a new high-rise going up in his field of view. He leans down with pride to show visitors the model of the Spanish-type library building to be completed in 1991 with deep vaults for his 44 million pieces of paper.

He refuses to complain about the analysts who deny him any credit for the huge changes under way in the communist world, and he does not beef because George Bush uses him so little in state affairs. Reagan is utterly pleased with almost anything that comes his way -- from being mobbed by admirers in the lobby of Las Vegas' new Mirage Hotel, as he was the other day, to his morning horseback ride at his Rancho del Cielo in the Santa Ynez Mountains.

That ride may be the magic elixir. Even in his contemporary office, surrounded by two chunks of the Berlin Wall and power photographs, Reagan gets almost poetic when he talks about rising in the bright mountain sunlight with Nancy.

"We get up and breakfast about 8 o'clock," he says. "We switched a long time ago to breakfast food -- cereals. I'll have a piece of rye toast, and I have one of those little honey bears with which I can squirt honey on it." Fortified, he heads for the stable.

"I'm an ex-cavalryman, and I ride a flat saddle in boots and britches," he explains. "I come up to the stall, put a rope around my horse's neck, say, 'Come on, boy,' and lead him down to curry him and pick his hoofs."

His favorite mount is El Alamein, a stallion out of Mexico with a good ear, as Reagan explains. "Not too long ago, he did something that made me kind of call him to order, and I said, 'Hey, Mexicano.' He stopped and turned and looked right at me, and I thought, 'My gosh, he was raised and ridden and directed with the Mexican language.' So I've got to learn a little more Spanish.

"We ride up at 1,400 ft., and we can see the Channel Islands out there and the other way the Santa Ynez valley. In the hot summer you can ride in those oak trees and stay cool; comes the winter you can pick the paths that stay in the sunlight. It is so beautiful, the place casts a spell. I love that life."