Peanuts, a pretzel and history's twists
Star Tribune, January 23, 2002
Mitchell B. Pearlstein

It's hard to fathom how a lousy pretzel came within minutes, maybe seconds, of turning things inside out a short while ago, but it did. President Bush's fainting and fall after choking on a pretzel brought to mind what a friend wrote right after Sept. 11 about the narrow ledge we trek in this life. "Only a thin membrane," he said, "separates civility from barbarism."

"Membrane" is exactly the right word when recalling how close Ronald Reagan came to dying when he was shot in 1981, only two months after moving into the White House. John Hinckley's bullet stopped a bare inch from his heart. Then it took emergency room physicians relative eons to figure out that Reagan had, in fact, been shot, as the entry wound was hard to detect. "A neat and bloodless little slice under his arm," as described in a recent book. Who knows how much longer the new president could have hung on if the cause of his collapse hadn't been discovered when it finally and fortunately was? Who knows how different the planet would be if he had succumbed that afternoon?

Another story -- again about Reagan -- is eerily apt here.

Martin Anderson, a senior domestic policy adviser to Reagan, in his very good 1988 book "Revolution," writes of a near disastrous plane ride during Reagan's unsuccessful 1976 campaign for the Republican nomination. Reagan was working in the first row, with a "stuffed" briefcase open on his knees, when suddenly he stood up, "his hand at his throat."

"He was trying to talk but he couldn't," Anderson says. "He lurched into the aisle with a pleading look on his face. As I stood up, Nancy reached for him and the Secret Service men rushed into the aisle and asked what was wrong. He couldn't answer and just kept clutching his throat with his left hand as his face got redder and his eyes widened."

Anderson's first thought was that Reagan was having a heart attack. A young staffer thought the same and grabbed an oxygen tank. "We all stood there, frozen, helpless."

But then Michael Deaver, another senior aide, realized what was happening. "Quickly pushing us out of the way, he came up behind Reagan and wrapped his small slender arms around Reagan's powerful torso. He slipped his hands just below Reagan's rib cage, clenched his right fist and then grabbed his right wrist with his other hand and yanked with all his might -- the famed Heimlich maneuver." But nothing disgorged.

Deaver slammed his fists into Reagan again. This time "a shower of partially chewed peanuts sprayed out of Reagans mouth into the aisle. Reagan gasped, noisily sucking in air as he slowly straightened up, the color of his face rapidly changing back to normal. He smiled weakly at us and said 'thanks' to Mike."

Thanks to Deaver's quick thinking, Reagan had escaped physical death. But now quick thinking was needed to avoid political death.

"By then," Anderson continues, "the press corps had noticed that something was wrong. . . . We put the oxygen tank away quickly. If he took a few whiffs now and the press saw it they would be suspicious and we would never catch up with the rumors about his health." Reagan himself understood the implications of such suspicions about a presidential candidate in his mid-60s. So within "thirty seconds of getting his wind back, he straightened his clothes and headed toward the back of the plane."

A few reporters, peering around a pulled-aside curtain, surmised that Reagan had been choking on something. One of them asked on what, precisely, and Reagan replied, "a damn peanut." Anderson quickly added that it was probably one of Jimmy Carter's peanuts, given that the leading Democratic candidate and soon-to-be president was a peanut farmer, and everyone laughed. A PR disaster had been avoided, as no blaring headlines followed, only a brief story on page 6 of the Los Angeles Times, "Reagan Chokes on a Snack, Calls it 'Carter Peanut.' "

Four years later, in 1980, a majority of the American people, confident that Ronald Reagan was up to the job in all ways, including constitutionally, made him the 40th president of the United States. "Sometimes," Anderson concludes and reconfirms, "history turns on such small incidents as these."

It's as if he's talking about current twists.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.