William well, i will need that. I am sure. [indiscernible] and then our editorinchief thought it might be more effective oneonone. Pres. Reagan i remember an interview once i had have you ever seen their headquarters . It is kind of a beautiful country home, spacious lawns. William it is indeed. The president a bsolutely captivated our founder for four and a half hours and then had to leave to make a speech. It was a memorable lunch. What we would like to do here, sir, is ask you some questions so that our readers here and abroad can have a better idea of president reagan, the man. I would like to start off by asking what has surprised you the most, pleasantly and unpleasantly, about being inside the government you have for so long observed from the outside . Pres. Reagan well, first of all, one surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, was how little i was surprised. Because the eight years as governor of california, i realize when i came in here, suddenly it wasnt the great shock as becoming governor had been. But discovery of kind of the routine, the scheduling and all of that. While there was the international situation, the rest was, as i say, not too shocking. There was, however, there was a surprise having to do with being the commanderinchief and things of that kind. One part of it that shocked me a little bit was a week after we here, we were invited down to a sunday lunch. The helicopter picked us up on the lawn. And shortly we landed at his farm and he told me that they had been there several days installing phones. And i said, what do you mean, installing the phones . Thats when i found out that i cannot even go across town to a lunch or private dinner without phones being installed. And it was explained to me jack explained it, they had explained it to him that wherever i was i had to have the ability to communicate, anyplace in the world. And in telling him this, they told him they could reach to inform me. And they challenged him on that. And they said, name someone jack is telling me all this anand he named a son of Embassy Guard in africa and they got him on the phone and he and his wife got to talk to his son. I asked him if he wanted someone else and had another son a quartermaster on a destroyer out in the six fleet the mediterranean. When he said, do you get him, they said no. He said, you can get anyone. They said no, the fleet is on maneuvers. The only one that can get the fleet on maneuvers is the president. So jack was telling me all this and we got there and got in the house. I met the young mans wife, a very sweet young lady, had not seen her husband for months. I excused myself, went back out, and i said is it right that i could get someone from the six fleet . This said, yes sir, and i said, well get quartermaster kilpatrick and i went in and got her. She got to talk to her husband whom she had not seen for all of those months. And i did not realize what i had done. It was a surprise to find out what just a few words from me i had to think better because i got a letter from quartermaster kilpatrick and he told me i would be surprised what air traffic was like. I hadnt even thought it through that the last portion of the call would be by radio. He said that the air was admirals talking to admirals and ships talking to ships constantly in all of this, and then a voice on the air said white house calling. Another voice said what code is that . Another voice said maybe it is no code, maybe it is the white house. He said even hollywood could not have silenced the air as quickly as it was silenced and they got a lonely quartermaster on a. Estroyer to come to the phone he wrote this line, which i will never forget he said it was as if god had called the vatican and asked for an altar boy by name. William that is great. Making that call was obviously not the toughest decision you have had to make. What has been the toughest decision in 4. 5 years . Pres. Reagan there are a lot of tough decisions, a lot that there is so much right on both sides. Cabinet go over and over these things. There are differences of opinion, split between right and wrong. When i have heard enough, i make the decision. I have always used the cabinet, as i did as governor, as a kind of board of directors, except for one thing. They dont vote. I have to make the decision. But i think the hardest ones will always be those instances where you have to, you order our young men in uniform to go someplace where their lives will be endangered. That is without doubt the most difficult. William when you became president , you did not have any Foreign Policy experience. Has your view of the world changed in the 4. 5 years . Pres. Reagan i have to tell you, the premise is a little wrong. Not that i had been a diplomat in any way, except again, having been governor of california, while it did not have a Foreign Policy, if california were a nation, it would be the seventh ranking economic power in the world. So i had some interest in and i guess it is the biggest percentage of trade in and out of our country, by way of california. But i had always had an interest in international affairs, particularly because of the soviet union and when i was president of the Screen Actors Guild, the effort of the communists to move in on the Motion Picture industry. All i can tell you is when i was running for governor, some of the press editorialized that if i did not stop talking about international affairs, i could never become governor. But i did have that interest. And then as governor, four times the president asked me to do some missions, errands for him abroad that took me 218 Different Countries in the world. Some of them several times. More than once. So that has always been an interest of mine. There wasnt much that had to be changed in my opinion about the good guys and the bad guys and what our responsibility was. William did it bother you that when you came into office, some or maybe even many european intellectuals or elitists viewed you as an actor, cowboy with simplistic views about the world . And if it did bother you, do you think that view has been altered during your term . Pres. Reagan it did not really bother me so much because i had gone through that same thing being governor. Some people thought to go straight from the acting profession to governor without having held any other political offices was, as you described it. It did not bother me so much. I do think there has been a change now that we have become personally acquainted. When i say we, i mean heads of state of a number of our allies. We were all on a very cordial first name basis at, say, the economic summit. I dont think that prevails now. William what oaks and what thinkers most influenced you before coming to the white house . Pres. Reagan that is a tough question. I have been a voracious reader, whether it has been nonfiction or fiction. That and articles, publications and so forth. I had to try to pick out someone in particular, i dont the guy can. I just dont think i can. I have opened myself up to just about all of the viewpoints there are in that sense. My greatest dread, my nightmare, is that sometime i might be caught in a hotel room someplace with nothing to read. I dont think i could go to sleep or shut my eyes if i did not read myself to sleep at night. William you mentioned before in passing your role as president of the Screen Actors Guild. I read that that period in your life perhaps more than any other shaped your attitudes and policies. What did your experiences as a labor leader teach you . Pres. Reagan i was very proud of the Screen Actors Guild at that time. When i went into the job, i found that it existed on some very firm principles. For one thing, the Screen Actors Guild said the guild would not be engaged in politics and nor would there be politics in the guild. We believed our members were of every kind of philosophy and there was no way even by majority vote we had a right to take a position politically that might be counter to the views of our members. We also, and for two decades i was in charge most of the time of our negotiations of the reinstitution of the basic contract producers. I discovered i did not instituted, it was already there. The Screen Actors Guild had its own rule, which was the qualities it could be. We stuck to those things. I had the pleasure after some of those years of negotiating to have the head of one of the studios, who was always very prominent in their negotiating committee, tell me one day that when the guild was first proposed, the idea of an actors guild, he was one who fought the hardest against it. But he said i have come to believe that the Screen Actors Guild is the most constructive force for good in the Motion Picture industry. But william could you describe briefly the fight with the communists over control of the Screen Actors Guild . Pres. Reagan yes. Incidentally, i was a new Democrat Fresh out of the war, in uniform. We got out and there had been the aflcio, they had pledged no strikes. And yet of the 43 guilds and unions in the Motion Picture business, most of us were aflcio unions. This was a jurisdiction strike. It was called over whether some 350 people in the entire industry should be members of the Stagehands Union or members of the trade union. We had that mix. Back from the days of the great strike on broadway in the theater days, there had been a tradition in the picture business to reconcile the differences between stagehands what had happened in the theaters in the old days was a stagehand did every thing in the theater, not just ask stage but the stage. If a seat needed fixing in the front, he came out like a carpenter and fixed the seat. This had led to the jurisdictional strike on broadway. The settlement finally was that everything behind the proscenium arch was the stagehands, and everything in front of it belonged to the craft unions plumbers, carpenters, so forth. In hollywood, they made the proscenium arch the soundstage door. Anything in there stagehands, but every studio had mills where they made in sections the sets. At the end of the day, you would see the sets for the next days shooting being wheeled down on rollers down the studio streets, huge sections like a whole wall of this room here, and all of it, into the soundstage. In the soundstage, the Stagehands Union set erectors put the pieces together, it was then behind the presidium arch. The issue they picked for this strike was that the set erectors should be carpenters. Carpenters worked in the mail and made those sections and these fellows only put them together. This led to the jurisdictional strike. The then czar of the Carpenters Union had always had a rivalry with the stagehands. So that was the cause of it. During the war, there had come subversion and infiltration of some of the union, even some of the aflcio unions. They had formed a rump group called the hollywood conference of studio unions. This was in contrast to the aflcio labor council. So they were on one side and we were on the other. I was not prepared i was not a red baiter, i was a new deal democrat and i had never gone for all of the stories. I had been told when i got back by some there had been and infiltration of the picture business. I was not prepared to believe it. I am the one who made the motion on the board of the guild, i was a board member at the time, not president i made the motion that as long as there was this difficulty, that both sides giving a different reason as to why there was a strike, why didnt we, the actors, who were not involved in any way, why didnt we involve management and both factions to sit down at a table with us present, as a labor union, to kind of be the mediator . And to protect against men who had nothing to do with the strike, to sit down and find out because we had to tell our members whether to go through the picket lines are not. How do you take sides when a lot of the unions are in the studios and a lot of them are on the street picketing . And the board bought this idea. We invited them. There was great reluctance on the part of the striking unions to join us, but they did not see any way to say no. We met twice a day, it ended up almost seven months. Trying to settle these things. Before long, there was no question about it and i was completely converted when i found out that yes, this was not a legitimate strike. I learned it even better when we had made that decision and called a mass meeting of the screen actors for the hollywood legion fight stadium. It was voted that i was going to report the result of these meetings to the membership and give them the boards recommendation that we continue to go through the picket lines and honor our contract with the studios. That was to be on a wednesday night. On a monday afternoon, i was on location on a picture we were making on the beach and i was called to the phone at an oil station some distance away. They came and got me and drove me down there. I was told on the phone that if i made that report to the guild membership, there was a squad that would see i would never work in pictures again. And so i made the report to the guild. There were pickets outside the Guild Meeting and so forth. I had about three quarters of a block walk to the parking lot where my car was parked afterward. I felt very comfortable when i found about eight of the Teamsters Union about the size of pro Football Players decided to walk to the car with me. Before that, by the time i got back to the studio that day after that call, and i had never heard about this and lawenforcement before, but the burbank police, where the studio was located, and the representatives of the studio, and special police, the guards of the studio, were assigned to my house 24 hours a day around the clock. They also gave me a permit for a revolver under my arm on a shoulder holster. That was the beginning. It did go on for a number of months until finally there was no giving in at all. We kept the studios open with the help of the unions and management. As long as we were in front of the cameras, there wasnt any way to stop making pictures. Finally it was a case of which we said to the people in the strike, you can get back to the studios the best way you know how. In some of those meetings with them, the strike committee, they were not all communists, i sat and heard Union Executives of some of the unions speaking to their chairman and saying look, we know the communists have got control of the strike and weve got to get it back in our hands. They were legitimately fooled and do not realize. That was the history of it, and it was in that that i learned something that set the stage for me as governor and later on here. During all of months, there could not help be times when i said to myself, oh my, to be making these decisions for thousands of actors and actresses whose careers are at stake. I found out that what i recommended they would do i decided the only way to sleep at night was to make up my mind that if i did what i honestly believed in my heart was right, and i may make a mistake, but if i believed it was the right thing to do, that is what we would do. When i became governor, i told the cabinet that on any issue that would confront us, i did not want to hear any of the political ramifications of the issue. I only wanted to hear what was right or wrong for the people, and we would make the decision on that basis, not on a political basis. I found i do sleep very well. William if i can ask you one more hollywood question. As an actor, you played many roles. Is there anyone role you would have liked to have played but did not given opportunity to . Pres. Reagan oh. I have to tell you, there were many such. Once you are in that business and doing it, you see a picture and oh boy, and you find out the things you would do different. But yes, there was one. Being under contract with warner bros. , a picture called santa fe trail, i was the second lead, not the star, to errol flynn. It was a historical picture. He played jed stewart and i played george custer. And all of the others were there and they had graduated west point into the calvary and it was the story of the capture of john brown. I played that and people say cowboy actor, good lord, my biggest fight with warner bros. Is they would not let me do pictures like that. I was doing drawing room comedies and so forth. Then they made they died with their boots on, the story of george custer. I had played him once. I begged, i said i played him once in that part is mine now. But errol flynn played george custer. William commentators and some former president s have talked of the loneliness of the presidency. You seem to approach the job with great relish. Do you find it lonely or burdensome . How would you describe it . Pres. Reagan no, i dont. I surrounded myself with people i have confidence in and believe in. I dont think i sit here all alone and decide everything by myself. As i say, i want to hear everybodys viewpoint. I dont give any indication of where i lean while i hear those viewpoints. I have had cabinet members who were under other president s who tell me they had not been in meetings that were as fruitful before. Apparently some president s use the cabinet as they meet periodically and different members report what their departments were doing. The word i have gotten from these others is they never found in cabinet members where everybody, regardless of whether it affected their particular agency, were involved in the discussion. But no, and maybe again, it was the eight years experience. We have taken president s from the ranks of the legislators i think the closest drop to being president of the United States is being governor. A legislator is used to being in a group and on a committee and making decisions on a rolling basis, majority rule. Only a governor has sat there and knows that the final decision has to be his or hers. I attribute part of this to that. I dont say it is easy, there have been a lot of decisions whereafter i have heard all of that, the ones where there is so much right on both sides, it is very difficult. But no, i dont have that feeling. William every day you receive detailed Intelligence Briefings on the entire world. What information have you received that most shocked or worried you . Pres. Reagan well, of course, the greatest shock was the telephone call on a weekend, about 3 00 in the morning, a few of us were at augusta country club, i had n