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TIME: Almanac 1993
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TIME Almanac 1993.iso
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022690
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0226105.000
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1992-08-28
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NATION, Page 37THE PRESIDENCYStill Not a Scratch on Him
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."