Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast am on
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio cootape.
Speaker 2: Of an incident that took place less than fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: ago at the Washington Hillton Hotel when shots were fired
Speaker 2: at President Recond. Here you see the President coming out.
Speaker 1: Now we just have to watch. I don't know whether
Speaker 1: we can hear this or not. There it does shops flop.
Speaker 2: He was on the agents and leaders and bide in
Speaker 2: after the asservants are two or three people down on
Speaker 2: the on the ground. We understand, but one Secret Service
Speaker 2: agent one had made me another Washington policeman and who
Speaker 2: was injured. I can't hear the sound on this. You
Speaker 2: can't hear the sound. We understand also that James Brady,
Speaker 2: the White House Press secretary, was among those injured. President
Speaker 2: just a Nott of the fanfranc Yes, there is.
Speaker 3: To Brady.
Speaker 2: All this happened the two third of this afternoon. As
Speaker 2: the President was coming out after talking to the er
Speaker 2: called Cio. This is the first time that any of
Speaker 2: us has seen any of this of this tape, the president.
Speaker 2: Let me repeat once again, the President was immediately pushed
Speaker 2: into his cars. The agents are trained to do the
Speaker 2: situation of this kind, and the car immediately took off
Speaker 2: at fast to the whiteout.
Speaker 3: That's the way it sounded. March thirtieth, nineteen eighty one
Speaker 3: ABC News anchor The Lady Frank Reynolds reporting on the
Speaker 3: attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. We'll get into that
Speaker 3: and much more with Ken Kashigian, who served as trusted
Speaker 3: speechwriter confidence strategists to political legends and presidential giants Ronald
Speaker 3: Reagan and Richard Nixon, whether in the Oval Office, on
Speaker 3: Air Force One, at Camp David, or the Western White House,
Speaker 3: Ken was an eyewitness and insider to the twentieth century's
Speaker 3: greatest historical moments. Widely regarded as president as the President's
Speaker 3: favorite speech writer, the remarks Kashigian crafted for Reagan's delivery
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty five at Bergen Belson's former concentration camp
Speaker 3: has been described as the best speech of Reagan's career.
Speaker 3: Kashigian quickly mastered Reagan Reagan's speaking style and gained his
Speaker 3: confidence after joining the candidates struggling nineteen eighty presidential campaign,
Speaker 3: earning the distinction from political writer Anthony Yorke as an
Speaker 3: architect of Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty White House victory. Appointed
Speaker 3: Special Consultant to the President and senior White House staff member,
Speaker 3: they formed a unique personal relationship. Beginning with Reagan's acclaimed
Speaker 3: first inaugural address, Ken kashigi In collaborated to craft language
Speaker 3: shaping the historic Economic Recovery plan that marked the Fiscal
Speaker 3: Revolution for America's turnaround and renewed the new national spirit.
Speaker 3: Ken teamed up with Reagan to prepare dozens of other
Speaker 3: prominent public addresses. Among them were Reagan's re election announcement
Speaker 3: and convention acceptance speeches in nineteen eighty four, critical foreign
Speaker 3: policy remarks at the UN General Assembly, State of the
Speaker 3: Union Remarks, and speeches before Joint Sessions of Congress. Preparing
Speaker 3: to leave office, Reagan asked Ken to draft his dramatic
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty eight farewell address to the Republican National Convention.
Speaker 3: Ken Kashigein's new book is behind closed doors in the
Speaker 3: room with Reagan and Nixon. Ken, Welcome to Coast to coast, Am.
Speaker 3: How are you good?
Speaker 4: Richard? Great to be here. Thank you boy. That listening
Speaker 4: to that recording just sent NU took me back nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty one. Sent tingles down my spine all over again.
Speaker 4: That just made me shake just hearing that. Those sounds
Speaker 4: of taking me back to that day of assassination attempt.
Speaker 4: It was such a well bed.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, well let's start there. I mean, you weren't,
Speaker 3: as I mentioned, you weren't with President Reagan when he
Speaker 3: was shot. But what what's the detail about that day
Speaker 3: that most people don't know?
Speaker 4: Well, it was the day started for me. We had
Speaker 4: a senior staff meeting and then I I uh delegated
Speaker 4: that speech to it. The brand new speechwriter, Mariray Moss
Speaker 4: sing I had carried such a heavy load that she
Speaker 4: was the rookie speechwriter. So I said, you know, why
Speaker 4: don't you take a shot at this. And I oversaw
Speaker 4: the speech and it was before the Union group and
Speaker 4: and uh, but the President himself took a heavy hand
Speaker 4: to the speech up at Camp David and sent her
Speaker 4: back down. And then he had inserted a sam a
Speaker 4: quote into Samuel Gumper's quote, and when uh, he sent
Speaker 4: him back down to the White House. So he called
Speaker 4: me that morning and to verify the change in the
Speaker 4: quote right, and we had to have it correct that
Speaker 4: he didn't get it quite right, and so he called me,
Speaker 4: and so we had to change that, and we had
Speaker 4: to change another statistic, and then he called me again,
Speaker 4: and so after that we were going to deliver the
Speaker 4: reading copy to him. So I grabbed Murray, she's not
Speaker 4: married George will I grabbed her and I said, let's go.
Speaker 4: You haven't met the president yet. Let's go to the
Speaker 4: west wing and delivered the speech to him. So we
Speaker 4: ran over the west wing and it was now about
Speaker 4: just after twelve fifteen or so we went over the
Speaker 4: west We've delivered the reading copy to him. And normally, Richard,
Speaker 4: I always attend these events with the President, but I
Speaker 4: was exhausted from I mean, done so much of the
Speaker 4: work on the initial the speech with the president, and
Speaker 4: I was just exhausted. And I said, Bori, I said,
Speaker 4: you know you had worked this is your first initial speech,
Speaker 4: rookie speech. I said, no, where do you go with
Speaker 4: the president on this one? And take a look at
Speaker 4: how he delivers these speeches. So and for once I
Speaker 4: could have a nice relaxed lunch and take it easy today.
Speaker 4: And so I sent her on and and so Richard,
Speaker 4: I would have been as a senior staff member, not
Speaker 4: as junior, as Marie was. I would have been up
Speaker 4: in the motorcade setting up with Deverer and Brady, and
Speaker 4: then I would have been coming out of Washington Hilton
Speaker 4: alongside of them, and so but I'm fast forwarding now.
Speaker 4: But instead I went to have leisurely launched and went
Speaker 4: up to have a meeting with Marty Anderson, the Domestic
Speaker 4: Policy Advisor, right after lunch. And then it was a
Speaker 4: rainy day that day, and as we're meeting, the sirens
Speaker 4: were going off loudly and loudly, and I said to Marty,
Speaker 4: I said, you know, there must be an accident over
Speaker 4: on seventeenth Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. And then Barbara Honeger,
Speaker 4: his secretary, burst into the office and said the President's
Speaker 4: been shot. And I said, you know, those words just
Speaker 4: ring into your head, and of course I was what
Speaker 4: took me back to nineteen sixty three, when I was
Speaker 4: a sophomore in college heading out to my English class,
Speaker 4: when President Kennedy was shot. And that's when, of course,
Speaker 4: the first thing you think, you turn on the TV
Speaker 4: and see what you can find out. And there was
Speaker 4: that picture of Jim Brady laying on the pavement there,
Speaker 4: and all I could think about was I piled around
Speaker 4: with Jim Brady all through the night ad campaign. We
Speaker 4: were the closest of buddies. We sat across the work
Speaker 4: table from each other all throughout the campaign. If you
Speaker 4: read my book, those first chapter six chapters on the
Speaker 4: eighty campaign talks about how Jim Brady and I piled
Speaker 4: around all the time. I would have been standing right
Speaker 4: next to him coming out of the Washington Hilton.
Speaker 3: That day unbelievable, and that you and I might not
Speaker 3: be talking right now had been had it not been
Speaker 3: for a little fatigue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, dodging the bullet had all new meaning to me
Speaker 4: that day.
Speaker 3: So did President Reagan ever talk about how the assassination
Speaker 3: attempt changed him personally? I mean, did it make him
Speaker 3: more fearless or more fatalistic?
Speaker 4: It made him, he said later on, we've been especially
Speaker 4: when we were filming some commercials in eighty four. But
Speaker 4: he did tell it again to Missus Reagan.
Speaker 2: And to.
Speaker 4: The Catholic cardinal. He said, you know, he felt that
Speaker 4: there was an angel on his shoulder, and he said,
Speaker 4: whatever time I have left belongs to God. But he
Speaker 4: felt that life had no meaning for him. And right
Speaker 4: afterwards too he penned a long letter to the Soviet,
Speaker 4: to the Soviet premier that you know, some changes had
Speaker 4: to be made in terms of how they viewed each other.
Speaker 4: But he you know, when when you escape death as
Speaker 4: he had, there had to be some changes. And when
Speaker 4: you watch the film commercials we did in eighty or four,
Speaker 4: he talks about it explicitly. Yes, it did make a
Speaker 4: big change.
Speaker 3: In his attitude and his humor after the shooting became legendary.
Speaker 3: Was that was that one Reagan? Or was there a
Speaker 3: conscious effort maybe from his team, maybe from you, to
Speaker 3: craft that image, to craft that image of resilience.
Speaker 4: No, No, that was the humor in the hospital undown.
Speaker 4: He didn't have any joke writers in the hospital room.
Speaker 4: You know where he's at. Honey, I forgot the duck
Speaker 4: and then he said to the doctor, he said, I
Speaker 4: hope you're all Republicans. No, that was all the classic
Speaker 4: Ronald Reagan. You know, the guy had a gift for gap.
Speaker 4: There's no question about that. Later on, when we delivered
Speaker 4: a prepare to speech before the Joint Session of Congress,
Speaker 4: when he came back on April twenty eighth, and we milked,
Speaker 4: and we milked the public sentiment for all we could.
Speaker 4: And I tell that story in great detail in my
Speaker 4: book about how we did that, but that we specifically
Speaker 4: wrote some great stories into that speech to get a
Speaker 4: lot of humor in it. So that was I plead guilty.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about his rise and the nineteen eighty campaign.
Speaker 3: I mean, he was a political outsider. He took on
Speaker 3: the GOPI establishment. What's the biggest myth about his nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty campaign that people still get wrong?
Speaker 4: Oh, the biggest myth, Richard, is that we were in
Speaker 4: the dumps back in late September, in early October. You know,
Speaker 4: everybody thinks Reagan's campaign in nineteen eighty they he won
Speaker 4: a landslide and this was just we were gliding all
Speaker 4: the way through. Everything was easy, peasy, but this was
Speaker 4: a struggle. In early October, we were going through a nightmare.
Speaker 4: We were having demonstrators at every stop over the Equal
Speaker 4: Rights Amendment. So we had women demonstrators that every stop
Speaker 4: were demonstrating against them. And then he had he had
Speaker 4: made a big mistake at one stop where he said
Speaker 4: that he said that the trees give off more as
Speaker 4: much as much, if not more pollution than cars. And
Speaker 4: I don't know where that came from, just came out
Speaker 4: out of left field, and I don't he read that
Speaker 4: somewhere in some goofy magazine publication, and uh, it just
Speaker 4: slipped out. And so now here he's saying the environmental
Speaker 4: environmental problems are caused by trees, and the women are
Speaker 4: chasing him all over the place because of the Equal
Speaker 4: Rights Amendment issues, and we're being dogged. In the first
Speaker 4: week of October, Jimmy Carr is ahead of us and
Speaker 4: and we're we've got a nightmare situation. And so, uh,
Speaker 4: the campaign was really behind, uh the first week of
Speaker 4: October and going into the second week of October. But
Speaker 4: I did come up with a line, and I don't
Speaker 4: want to still still the thunder two truly in our
Speaker 4: discussion here, but I did come up with the line
Speaker 4: that may have helped us a little bit later in
Speaker 4: the campaign. But that the that we might talk about later.
Speaker 4: But those first two weeks in October, we were in big,
Speaker 4: big trouble and it was largely because of all those demonstrators.
Speaker 4: And it wasn't until we exceeded to agree to a debate,
Speaker 4: and as ste Spencer, our campaign strategist, came up with
Speaker 4: the idea of putting a woman on the Supreme Court,
Speaker 4: and that changed the dialogue a little bit. And but
Speaker 4: still they felt that Reagan was sort of a cowboy,
Speaker 4: that he was going to be dangerous in foreign policy issues.
Speaker 4: And it was about that time that I was having
Speaker 4: secret discus lessions with the former President Nixon, who was
Speaker 4: giving me private, secret advice to pass along the governor.
Speaker 4: The governor who was then Governor Reagan, that we called him,
Speaker 4: and we start changing the course of the campaign a
Speaker 4: little bit and coming up with some new lines and
Speaker 4: better messaging that helped later turn around the campaign, but
Speaker 4: early on, So that's one of the myths, Richard, that
Speaker 4: things were going along really easy for regular along.
Speaker 3: Obviously, Nixon and Reagan had very different styles, yet Reagan,
Speaker 3: as you say, leaned on Nixon's expertise a little bit.
Speaker 3: What's the most surprising advice Nixon gave Reagan about winning
Speaker 3: the presidency?
Speaker 4: Well, I think this will surprise a lot of people.
Speaker 4: And this I go into great detail in the book,
Speaker 4: which I hope people will spend some time in because
Speaker 4: I reveal in these secret memos that Nixon wrote to
Speaker 4: Reagan that nobody had ever seen before until I published
Speaker 4: them in my book. And that is people would normally
Speaker 4: think that Nixon would advise Reagan about foreign policy issues
Speaker 4: and recommended to talk to him about foreign policy and
Speaker 4: the advisement of foreign policy. But it's just the opposite.
Speaker 4: Nixon said that Reagan must focus on economic issues and
Speaker 4: talk about inflation and the economy. So Nixon wrote very specific,
Speaker 4: very brilliant strategic memos to Reagan on economic issues in
Speaker 4: the eighty campaign, and in these secret memos as well
Speaker 4: as in secret conversations that he had with me. Now
Speaker 4: I say that their secret for a good reason, Richard,
Speaker 4: and that was we were still close enough to Watergate
Speaker 4: that hadn't been known in nineteen eighty that anyone that
Speaker 4: Reagan was in communication with Nixon, the Carter people would
Speaker 4: have jumped on it, as we used to say, like
Speaker 4: a hen on a ginbug.
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