My dinner with Ronald Reagan yielded an unexpected lesson
The future POTUS refused the interview request. I was phoning up to his room from the dated lobby of the Lord Jeffrey Inn, a place named after an alleged British war criminal, now renamed the Inn on Boltwood. It was my chance for a huge scoop — he was visiting Amherst College with his son, on the grand tour that some American parents take their teenage children on in anticipation of higher ed.
The dejection immediately dissipated when he invited me to dinner instead. Dinner with Ronald Reagan: a two-fer — the Inn’s restaurant was the best place in town, and I had a feeling that the former California governor, now in the thick of his primary challenge against Gerald Ford, was headed for higher office. But ten minutes later, when I dumped my Caesar salad in my lap out of sheer nervousness, I was back in the bad place I’d started.
There was a five-second gap, and then the future President gave me a huge grin.
“I hope that’s a big napkin,” he said.
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. The version of Reagan that I’d carried into the lobby was that of the ex-actor-turned-Governor of my home state, who’d taken a hard line against protesting students at San Francisco State and was now President Ford’s challenger from the right. And this wasn’t just the consensus on the campus. It was my own considered view based on being a former constituent and coming of voting age in Southern California.
“Where are you from, son?”
Note the reversal — the college junior who had come to interview him was now the interviewee. There was no audience and no notebook out.
He asked what I thought of his time in Sacramento leading the state. I answered honestly: I told him that his administration had been extremely right-wing and against most of what I believed in. In retrospect, that was pretty nervy. But I was nineteen, and it didn’t register. In any case, I’d been straight with him to his face.
Reagan didn’t rebut me. There was no defensiveness at all. He just asked if I knew about his earlier role in the labor movement as head of the Screen Actors Guild. No argument — just an inconvenient truth, to use a term ahead of its time: cognitive dissonance with my simple view of the man. He let me do my own arithmetic. My grandfather had also been a union man earlier in his life, before he became the chair of FDR’s Federal Power Commission. The watch I was wearing was engraved as a gift to him from his union brethren. Reagan didn’t know any of that, but I did, and the parallel landed.
On the subject of higher education — the project I was supposedly there to report on — he volunteered his views on the flagship University of California system. Many would now view his optimism as anachronistic, but he was convinced the UCs were critical to California’s economic health. It was the same move he’d made with the SAG detail: pragmatic, unbranded, not the stump-speech version. He knew his audience was one nineteen-year-old kid from LA, and he played it straight.
The dichotomy inside my teenage brain: a right-wing governor who once ran a union and talked about a public university system as economic infrastructure rather than an enemy camp. Neither fact erases the easy label — he was a conservative, and he did fight with California college kids. But it was more complicated than I had thought.
I never got the interview. I got something harder to file.
The Pattern I Kept Watching Fail
Zoom out forty-plus years. NSF. The BRAIN Initiative. NEON. Krasnow. A career spent in rooms where consequential decisions about science get made, and where the instinct to label — to sort the players into allies and opponents before the meeting starts — is nearly universal, and nearly always costly.
I keep going back in my mind to that dinner. Reagan didn’t argue with my characterization of him. He didn’t rebut it, didn’t get defensive, didn’t produce a list of counterexamples. He just handed me one fact that didn’t fit and let me sit with it. That’s how complicated people actually behave. They don’t refute their labels. They occasionally, almost casually, hand you evidence that the label is incomplete, and if you’re not listening for that evidence, you miss who you’re actually dealing with.
The instinct that made nineteen-year-old me sure I had Reagan figured out is the same instinct I watched policy professionals apply, decades later, to program officers, university presidents, appropriators, and committee staff — with the same blind spot, and sometimes with serious consequences.
At NSF, I watched that same pattern with bemusement, as we fought off an NIH initiative for using PubMed as a data repository on the basis that we had already labeled the White House champion of the initiative as an adversary (clearly, we had no idea what a real adversary at that level would look like), at great political cost. At the time, he had argued in writing that, by sharing data platforms, we would strengthen our position with Congress as good stewards of the taxpayers’ money. We won the battle of the platform – we went with DOE’s platform – but lost the war. The champion of PubMed turned out to be a very real champion of basic science research over the long haul. And by turning away from NIH, we left ourselves (especially NSF Biological Sciences) open to the critique that we were undermining the country’s much larger biomedical research enterprise.
A position on a data-sharing platform isn’t a person’s whole orientation toward science, any more than “right-wing governor” was the whole of Reagan. This seems obvious, stated plainly. It is apparently not obvious in practice.
The Better Heuristic
Science policy runs on multi-year, cross-administration coalitions. You work with people across election cycles, across ideological shifts, across reorganizations that change who has power and who doesn’t. The temptation to fall into the mislabeling trap compounds over time. You stop updating your priors. You route around them at great cost, and you miss out on evidence that’s sitting square in front of you.
The heuristic I’ve landed on is simple, if hard to practice: listen for the fact that doesn’t fit, not the one that confirms. A lot of times, a potential ally doesn’t bother to argue back about how you’ve labeled them — they just let the contradiction sit there. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it entirely and walk away thinking your prior was confirmed because it wasn’t challenged.
Back to the Salad
I’m heading into a new chapter — the union wristwatch now worn by my nephew, more time in Paris, a little more distance from the rooms where these decisions get made. It’s a reasonable moment to look back at what I got right and what I got wrong, and the Reagan dinner sits near the top of the second list.
I had him wrong. Not completely — the easy-label version of Reagan captures real things about him. But I had him simpler than he was, and I knew it by the end of that dinner, even if I couldn’t have articulated it at nineteen. What I didn’t do, for a long time afterward, was draw the connection between that evening and the professional habits I was developing in parallel: the tendency to sort quickly, to file people under a heading, to stop listening once I thought I knew what I was dealing with.
The salad was embarrassing. The grin and the napkin line were generous. But the real story was sitting right across the table, and I was too busy being nineteen to fully hear it.
I’ve been trying to do better arithmetic ever since.
Discoverers and Discoveries 