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People from All Backgrounds Pay Respects to Reagan; Afghanistan Struggles to Reconstruct; Book Compiles Reagan's Letters; Governor's Plane Led to Funeral Scare
Aired June 10, 2003 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, ANCHOR: Well, as we mentioned ordinary Americans paying their last respects to Ronald Reagan. Thousands of people have joined long lines around the Capitol to file past the former president's flag-draped casket.
Sean Callebs joins us from there now -- Sean.
SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, behind me you can see a line that seemingly stretches forever. From where we are, these people are going to have to wait about three and a half hours under the warm Washington, D.C., sun to make their way into the rotunda to pay their last solemn respects to former President Reagan.
Let's give you an idea of what authorities are trying to do, though, to make this wait as comfortable as possible.
If you look over here, you can see some of the water bottles that have been dumped over here in the past few hours or so. There is water everywhere. There are volunteers going through the crowd. They have sunscreen. They have water. There are a handful of large fans toward the front of the line doing what they can to make things comfortable for people.
There have been a couple of heat related -- people affected by the heat. Both diabetics. They were both taken away by the D.C. Fire Department, and neither needed hospitalization.
But there are at least 30,000 people that made their way into the rotunda so far today. That was by 9 a.m. this morning. Park police say -- the capital police say they want to get 5,000 people through an hour.
Now these people going through are waiting like this. Like we see this Boy Scout group paying their final respects to President Reagan. There's a group from New York and also a Native American making his way through, really people from all walks of life are coming through here in full ceremonial dress paying solemn respects.
We want to bring in a couple of people who made -- now, state representative from Michigan. You have a shirt that you purchased and you were able to sell to the Michigan members of the legislature.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
CALLEBS: Tell me about the drive down here, what it was like and why you chose to come on a moment's notice.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, we had a very late legislative session last night. And actually, we got finished about -- a little after midnight.
So we had our stuff packed up and ready to go. Left about 1 a.m. this morning, got here at about 10. Met up a friend who lives outside the Beltway and then took the Metro in.
And we would -- we would not miss this opportunity.
CALLEBS: What was Ronald Reagan mean to you, to make a trip like this, to wait in heat like this for only a few moments?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I first heard Ronald Reagan speak live in 1976, and I've been a fan of his ever since.
And the thing about Ronald Reagan that really impressed me that is important to me is the courage that he had to say what needed to be said and his Christian faith. Those were the two things about him that I really admired.
CALLEBS: What about the way this has been set up? Could it have been set up any better? It seems like there are very few complaints. Even though it's very uncomfortable here, people are waiting.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think you could have done any better than this. This is -- for us this is a pilgrimage. And we're happy to do this. We're happy to wait as long as necessary to pay our respects to, I think, the greatest president of the 20th Century.
CALLEBS: OK. Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat with us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You bet. Thank you.
CALLEBS: I hope the wait moves quickly for you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
CALLEBS: As I said the police hope to get about 5,000 people through an hour. There are, of course, going to be dignitaries coming through later on this afternoon. Unsure how that will affect the wait for these folks.
But everyone here appears content to do what they have to do to make their way to the Capitol.
Kyra, back to you.
PHILLIPS: Sean Callebs, thanks so much.
Reagan's body will lie in state all day today. Tomorrow's funeral service is scheduled at 11:30 a.m. Eastern at the National Cathedral in Washington.
After the funeral, the remains will be flown back to Southern California. The casket is scheduled to arrive at the Reagan Presidential Library at 5:15 p.m. Pacific Time, 8:15 p.m. Eastern.
A private funeral service will start an hour later.
Stay with CNN for continuing live coverage.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: News around the world now.
Tributes pour in for Ronald Reagan. An especially emotional one from South Korea's former leader, Kim Dae-Jung. Kim, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who says it was Reagan who persuaded South Korea's former military regime to spare his life.
In Pakistan, 11 killed when gunmen opened fire on a military convoy in Karachi. Several others injured. Police say the shooting was an assassination attempt on the city's top military officer. He survived. The dead include seven army personnel, three police officers and a civilian.
And a Danish translator says he witnessed the abuse and killing of U.S. prisoners -- excuse me, prisoners by U.S. troops in Afghanistan two years ago. Denmark says it has opened an investigation into the allegations. The Danish defense minister says the man worked in Kandahar, the main U.S. base in southern Afghanistan.
PHILLIPS: There are about 20,000 American troops deployed in Afghanistan and thousands more international troops. Despite that strong presence, security still hangs in the balance and violence goes on.
Here is CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just last night gunmen killed 11 Chinese construction workers and wounded several others in the northern town of Kunduz (ph).
And last week the aid agency Medicins Sans Frontieres suspended its operations in Afghanistan after five of its workers were ambushed and killed.
The Taliban claims responsibility and vows to keep killing Americans and other foreigners as the militants continue their campaign to disrupt reconstruction, force the international community to abandon Afghanistan, and discredit President Hamid Karzai and his government.
The U.S. has warned the Taliban will increase attacks before Afghanistan's landmark elections scheduled for September, elections in which women will participate and also stand for office.
Since the U.S. routed the Taliban in 2001, Afghan officials have complained publicly that there has not been enough international security forces to clamp down on warlords as well as the Taliban and other militants.
A U.S. government report recently said that while the Bush administration's rhetoric on Afghanistan is positive, promised reconstruction efforts are not getting the attention or the funding they need.
With far less than half Afghan's 10 million eligible voters registered, there are fears now that the election could be severely jeopardized unless more international forces pour in to provide security. Absent that, many Afghans say the elections would just cement the power of the warlords and the drug mafia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Well, just a few hours ago Christiane Amanpour interviewed Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai.
He spoke about the tough security challenges, the upcoming elections and international support.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Mr. Karzai, do you believe that there are enough forces to maintain security in Afghanistan right now? And most especially, to ensure that registration goes ahead and that the polls are successfully protected if the elections are held in September?
HAMID KARZAI, PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN: Right. Well so far we have registered 3.5 million voters for election, and the U.N. is expanding its operations for registration of voters in Afghanistan. As it expands you will see more of the registration take place.
Of the registered voters, over 32 to 33 percent are women, and the rest are -- are men.
With regard to more security forces for the nation of Afghanistan, definitely, we need more security assistance forces for Afghanistan. We hope that the NATO deployment which is being considered will take place before elections. And in parts of the country where we do not have enough security forces.
And I also hope that we'll have enough of the Afghan national police and national army to be deployed before the elections.
If we do not provide the Afghan people with an environment of free voting and free choice of their candidates to vote for, definitely the Afghan people will have difficulties in casting their vote in the manner that they like.
AMANPOUR: Mr. President, can you tell me what date those elections are scheduled for? There's been a lot of different interpretations on when they may be held. What date do you have them scheduled for?
KARZAI: The joint Afghan-U.N. relations commission have set the month of September for elections. With regard to the exact date of the elections, they will have to decide in the month of September as to which date they will like to have the elections done.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: The American favorite of the open road may get the heave-ho from the City of Lights. Still to come, the tenuous future of SUVs in Paris.
But first a foreign policy legacy of President Reagan. Tell you about what the man's personal letters reveal about his accomplishments.
ANNOUNCER: You're watching LIVE FROM on CNN, the most trusted name in news.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: Powerful pictures of a U.S. Marine giving the salute to former President Reagan at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. He survived Operation Iraqi Freedom but lost both of his hands.
So you can imagine the presidency of Ronald Reagan was marked by profound changes in international relations. Much of his ideas and thoughts on foreign affairs are contained in the thousands of pages of correspondence that he left behind.
Joining us is Kiron Skinner, a CNN analyst who has closely studied Reagan's letters and co-authored several books on that subject.
Kiron, it's good to have you.
KIRON SKINNER, CNN ANALYST: Thank you.
PHILLIPS: Let's talk about this relationship, a unique relationship you developed with Nancy Reagan and how she gave you special access to these letters.
SKINNER: In 1996, Mrs. Reagan gave me access to President Reagan's private papers following the research I had done for George Shultz's memoir, so that I could write and do research on the end of the Cold War.
And as I began to open the boxes I found thousands of pieces of paper in Reagan's handwriting. It was amazing and overwhelming. The more boxes I opened the more I found. And I found letters, speeches, radio essays from the late 1970s.
I shared these with colleagues at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Martin and Annelise Anderson, economists who'd worked with Reagan, who became my co-authors on four books and one that will come out in the fall, "Reagan's Path to Victory."
I shared it with Secretary Shultz, who's written the forward for all of these books. And even close advisers of Reagan were surprised at how much he had written before, during and even after his presidency. PHILLIPS: And Karen, he was such a man of mystery in so many different ways. But he really revealed himself in these letters, in his radio commentaries and his newspaper columns.
SKINNER: Yes.
PHILLIPS: What did you discover about this man that it actually has now led to quite a reassessment of who he was and what he believed in?
SKINNER: Yes, Kyra, that's right. It's really -- I think the word revealed himself. That's what these writings do.
Reagan does seem a mystery to many, and he seemed aloof while in office. Many reporters and those who worked with him said that.
But when you look at the writes you can tell he was extremely comfortable in a one-to-one writing relationship in communicating with people through letters and radio commentaries that he wrote himself.
That's where he mapped out his ideas, his strategies for helping to end the Cold War. It's all there in Reagan's own handwriting. And it's quite surprising.
He writes in some letters that he had a game plan, a strategy of quiet diplomacy for dealing with the Soviets. He revealed in letters that missile defense, the very controversial issue that became known as Star Wars. He writes in fact that it was his idea to begin with.
So there are just striking revelations in his letters.
PHILLIPS: You mention the one letter back from July of 1981, the one with regard to the Soviet Union. Let's talk about that one for a minute, because this was just -- just a young man that wrote him a letter, a constituent. And Reagan took it seriously, and he wrote him back in this handwritten letter. It's pretty amazing.
SKINNER: Yes, and seven months into his presidency. He received a letter from a man saying, "Why don't you tell us what your grand strategy is, what your game plan is for dealing with the Cold War and the Soviet challenge?"
And Reagan wrote back and said, "I have a foreign policy. I have a plan but I don't believe that it should be put in quotation marks. I believe in quiet diplomacy. Once you go public with what you're doing you can't do it anymore."
And I think that was an important letter. It wasn't just Reagan making a statement. Two years later, his first negotiations with the Soviets, well before Gorbachev came into office, had to do with the Soviet Pentecostals, getting them released from the Soviet Union.
Quiet diplomacy that we didn't learn about until many years later, really until 1990, that Reagan's first negotiation with the Soviets, in fact, was what he had talked about in this 1981 letter, a back channel that worked very effectively. PHILLIPS: Wow. Something else that was very interesting I found in your book was this correspondence between Reagan and Nixon. Not a lot of people knew about this.
SKINNER: No, and that actually was not found, most of those letters in the Reagan Library but in the Nixon Library, Yorba Linda and some of the national archives facilities.
Reagan and Nixon had a long correspondence over many decades. We start in 1959, letters from Nixon in our book, "Reagan, A Life in Letters." With correspondence that went on until Nixon's death in 1994.
Nixon was vice president when he began writing Reagan extensively. Reagan was five years from running for governor of California. But I think Nixon realized that Reagan was a potential political force that he should get to know, and you should see it in the letters.
PHILLIPS: It's a wonderful book. It's an interesting book. We're going to take a quick look at it there: "Reagan, A Life of Letters." Real inside look to what made Reagan tick.
Kiron Skinner, thanks so much for your time.
SKINNER: Thank you.
PHILLIPS: We're going to take a quick break. More LIVE FROM after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(STOCK REPORT)
O'BRIEN: Well, the airplane which shut down the U.S. Capitol yesterday in the midst of Ronald Reagan's state funeral, it was a plane carrying the governor of Kentucky to attend those ceremonies.
Let me tell you a lit bit, first of all, about the aircraft and what we've been able to learn about how this response occurred and how this evacuation was ordered.
First of all it's a Beechcraft King Air. Not this particularly version of the aircraft but very similar. About a 30-year-old version of that aircraft. And it's a twin engine, turboprop airplane. And it was flying into Washington D.C. national airport, ironically Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Now, since 9/11 that airport has been off limits to general aviation aircraft. That is to say, anything that's not an airliner or not a charter. However, airplanes that are occupied by VIPs, in this case government officials would qualify, certainly the governor of Kentucky, do get exemptions to fly into the national airport.
Now we have been able to put together the radar track of this particular flight to give you a sense of how it arrived. I'm going to try to slow it down just a little bit.
But as it came in, you'll see what happened was it was slightly diverted. Moved in toward the airport. And then finally landed.
What that indicates to us, as we looked at that loop. That kind of happened quickly. I'm going to try to replay it for you, as well. What that indicates, at least, as far as the radar track we saw so far, the transponder apparently was working the whole time. This kind of flies in the face of some of the information we've been getting.
In any case something about this flight got some people concerned. Whether it was the FAA, the Transportation Security Agency, homeland security or the military, it's unclear right now.
Joining us with some insights on all of this is CNN's Mike Brooks, who has been checking his sources there.
Just give us a sense of what people on the ground were hearing, Mike, and why the decision was made to evacuate the capitol in the midst of the ceremony.
MIKE BROOKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Miles, we're hearing a couple different stories.
But the bottom line is U.S. capital police, a source at the U.S. capital police tells me they decided to go ahead and evacuate the buildings because there was an inbound bogey, or an inbound plane that was unidentified to them.
They got the information from -- either it was a coordinated effort, from the national capital coordination center in Herndon, Virginia, to go ahead and intercept and to go ahead and evacuate it.
We've also heard that it was the U.S. capital police that decided after hearing chatter over the direct line with the FAA, decided to go ahead and do it. We're still trying to get exactly what the true story is.
But overall they say that the evacuation went smoothly. We had Anderson Cooper on our air live. And we saw officers from U.S. capital police coming up and kicking them out of the position.
We see here the media just getting out of the way, the police there trying to get their lines out, just tell them to get away. They were told -- reporters there were just told to take off their shoes and run.
So again, Miles, it seemed very, very hectic, but the officials there said it went very smoothly. There were no injuries. And they said it worked. The evacuation worked better than they thought it would, and it was a good dry run.
Hopefully, as we move towards tomorrow with all the heads of state in town and the funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington on the north side of D.C., hopefully nothing like this would happen. But they say it was a good dry run that went fairly smoothly. O'BRIEN: All right. Let's look at the radar track one more time. I just want to highlight it for you, because it went by kind of quickly the first time.
There's the aircraft. As we say it was that Beechcraft King Air. And on board that King Air, along with every other plane that would fly into a place like D.C., is a transponder.
Let me show you quickly what a transponder looks like. We have a quick little animation. It's not different from a car radio or whatever you might have in your car, XM . There it is. And that particular transponder that you see there is rigged up with a squawk code, 1200. That means you're a VFR aircraft in this case.
Let me show you quickly. The cockpit of the King Air. Give you a sense just roughly of where that transponder might be on the King Air.
The question that comes up is did that transponder work throughout that process? As we bring that radar telemetry up one more time, we're going to show you exactly what happened. And in order for this particular software to work it has to have an operative transponder on board.
As we take it in, we see it has all the information there. It comes in toward the south to meet the approach, which brings you into Washington National Airport.
And throughout the course of this radar track, what you see is it never loses that radar information, indicating that that transponder might have been working the whole time.
So, just further compounds the mystery that we've been telling you all day today. We still don't know why this particular aircraft carrying the governor of Kentucky raised suspicion, but nevertheless, as Mike Brooks said, it was a fire drill which worked out pretty well and shows, at the very least, the hair trigger nature of security right now in the post-9/11 world.
Back with more in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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Aired June 10, 2003 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, ANCHOR: Well, as we mentioned ordinary Americans paying their last respects to Ronald Reagan. Thousands of people have joined long lines around the Capitol to file past the former president's flag-draped casket.
Sean Callebs joins us from there now -- Sean.
SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, behind me you can see a line that seemingly stretches forever. From where we are, these people are going to have to wait about three and a half hours under the warm Washington, D.C., sun to make their way into the rotunda to pay their last solemn respects to former President Reagan.
Let's give you an idea of what authorities are trying to do, though, to make this wait as comfortable as possible.
If you look over here, you can see some of the water bottles that have been dumped over here in the past few hours or so. There is water everywhere. There are volunteers going through the crowd. They have sunscreen. They have water. There are a handful of large fans toward the front of the line doing what they can to make things comfortable for people.
There have been a couple of heat related -- people affected by the heat. Both diabetics. They were both taken away by the D.C. Fire Department, and neither needed hospitalization.
But there are at least 30,000 people that made their way into the rotunda so far today. That was by 9 a.m. this morning. Park police say -- the capital police say they want to get 5,000 people through an hour.
Now these people going through are waiting like this. Like we see this Boy Scout group paying their final respects to President Reagan. There's a group from New York and also a Native American making his way through, really people from all walks of life are coming through here in full ceremonial dress paying solemn respects.
We want to bring in a couple of people who made -- now, state representative from Michigan. You have a shirt that you purchased and you were able to sell to the Michigan members of the legislature.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
CALLEBS: Tell me about the drive down here, what it was like and why you chose to come on a moment's notice.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, we had a very late legislative session last night. And actually, we got finished about -- a little after midnight.
So we had our stuff packed up and ready to go. Left about 1 a.m. this morning, got here at about 10. Met up a friend who lives outside the Beltway and then took the Metro in.
And we would -- we would not miss this opportunity.
CALLEBS: What was Ronald Reagan mean to you, to make a trip like this, to wait in heat like this for only a few moments?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I first heard Ronald Reagan speak live in 1976, and I've been a fan of his ever since.
And the thing about Ronald Reagan that really impressed me that is important to me is the courage that he had to say what needed to be said and his Christian faith. Those were the two things about him that I really admired.
CALLEBS: What about the way this has been set up? Could it have been set up any better? It seems like there are very few complaints. Even though it's very uncomfortable here, people are waiting.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think you could have done any better than this. This is -- for us this is a pilgrimage. And we're happy to do this. We're happy to wait as long as necessary to pay our respects to, I think, the greatest president of the 20th Century.
CALLEBS: OK. Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat with us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You bet. Thank you.
CALLEBS: I hope the wait moves quickly for you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
CALLEBS: As I said the police hope to get about 5,000 people through an hour. There are, of course, going to be dignitaries coming through later on this afternoon. Unsure how that will affect the wait for these folks.
But everyone here appears content to do what they have to do to make their way to the Capitol.
Kyra, back to you.
PHILLIPS: Sean Callebs, thanks so much.
Reagan's body will lie in state all day today. Tomorrow's funeral service is scheduled at 11:30 a.m. Eastern at the National Cathedral in Washington.
After the funeral, the remains will be flown back to Southern California. The casket is scheduled to arrive at the Reagan Presidential Library at 5:15 p.m. Pacific Time, 8:15 p.m. Eastern.
A private funeral service will start an hour later.
Stay with CNN for continuing live coverage.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: News around the world now.
Tributes pour in for Ronald Reagan. An especially emotional one from South Korea's former leader, Kim Dae-Jung. Kim, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who says it was Reagan who persuaded South Korea's former military regime to spare his life.
In Pakistan, 11 killed when gunmen opened fire on a military convoy in Karachi. Several others injured. Police say the shooting was an assassination attempt on the city's top military officer. He survived. The dead include seven army personnel, three police officers and a civilian.
And a Danish translator says he witnessed the abuse and killing of U.S. prisoners -- excuse me, prisoners by U.S. troops in Afghanistan two years ago. Denmark says it has opened an investigation into the allegations. The Danish defense minister says the man worked in Kandahar, the main U.S. base in southern Afghanistan.
PHILLIPS: There are about 20,000 American troops deployed in Afghanistan and thousands more international troops. Despite that strong presence, security still hangs in the balance and violence goes on.
Here is CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Just last night gunmen killed 11 Chinese construction workers and wounded several others in the northern town of Kunduz (ph).
And last week the aid agency Medicins Sans Frontieres suspended its operations in Afghanistan after five of its workers were ambushed and killed.
The Taliban claims responsibility and vows to keep killing Americans and other foreigners as the militants continue their campaign to disrupt reconstruction, force the international community to abandon Afghanistan, and discredit President Hamid Karzai and his government.
The U.S. has warned the Taliban will increase attacks before Afghanistan's landmark elections scheduled for September, elections in which women will participate and also stand for office.
Since the U.S. routed the Taliban in 2001, Afghan officials have complained publicly that there has not been enough international security forces to clamp down on warlords as well as the Taliban and other militants.
A U.S. government report recently said that while the Bush administration's rhetoric on Afghanistan is positive, promised reconstruction efforts are not getting the attention or the funding they need.
With far less than half Afghan's 10 million eligible voters registered, there are fears now that the election could be severely jeopardized unless more international forces pour in to provide security. Absent that, many Afghans say the elections would just cement the power of the warlords and the drug mafia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Well, just a few hours ago Christiane Amanpour interviewed Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai.
He spoke about the tough security challenges, the upcoming elections and international support.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Mr. Karzai, do you believe that there are enough forces to maintain security in Afghanistan right now? And most especially, to ensure that registration goes ahead and that the polls are successfully protected if the elections are held in September?
HAMID KARZAI, PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN: Right. Well so far we have registered 3.5 million voters for election, and the U.N. is expanding its operations for registration of voters in Afghanistan. As it expands you will see more of the registration take place.
Of the registered voters, over 32 to 33 percent are women, and the rest are -- are men.
With regard to more security forces for the nation of Afghanistan, definitely, we need more security assistance forces for Afghanistan. We hope that the NATO deployment which is being considered will take place before elections. And in parts of the country where we do not have enough security forces.
And I also hope that we'll have enough of the Afghan national police and national army to be deployed before the elections.
If we do not provide the Afghan people with an environment of free voting and free choice of their candidates to vote for, definitely the Afghan people will have difficulties in casting their vote in the manner that they like.
AMANPOUR: Mr. President, can you tell me what date those elections are scheduled for? There's been a lot of different interpretations on when they may be held. What date do you have them scheduled for?
KARZAI: The joint Afghan-U.N. relations commission have set the month of September for elections. With regard to the exact date of the elections, they will have to decide in the month of September as to which date they will like to have the elections done.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: The American favorite of the open road may get the heave-ho from the City of Lights. Still to come, the tenuous future of SUVs in Paris.
But first a foreign policy legacy of President Reagan. Tell you about what the man's personal letters reveal about his accomplishments.
ANNOUNCER: You're watching LIVE FROM on CNN, the most trusted name in news.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PHILLIPS: Powerful pictures of a U.S. Marine giving the salute to former President Reagan at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. He survived Operation Iraqi Freedom but lost both of his hands.
So you can imagine the presidency of Ronald Reagan was marked by profound changes in international relations. Much of his ideas and thoughts on foreign affairs are contained in the thousands of pages of correspondence that he left behind.
Joining us is Kiron Skinner, a CNN analyst who has closely studied Reagan's letters and co-authored several books on that subject.
Kiron, it's good to have you.
KIRON SKINNER, CNN ANALYST: Thank you.
PHILLIPS: Let's talk about this relationship, a unique relationship you developed with Nancy Reagan and how she gave you special access to these letters.
SKINNER: In 1996, Mrs. Reagan gave me access to President Reagan's private papers following the research I had done for George Shultz's memoir, so that I could write and do research on the end of the Cold War.
And as I began to open the boxes I found thousands of pieces of paper in Reagan's handwriting. It was amazing and overwhelming. The more boxes I opened the more I found. And I found letters, speeches, radio essays from the late 1970s.
I shared these with colleagues at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Martin and Annelise Anderson, economists who'd worked with Reagan, who became my co-authors on four books and one that will come out in the fall, "Reagan's Path to Victory."
I shared it with Secretary Shultz, who's written the forward for all of these books. And even close advisers of Reagan were surprised at how much he had written before, during and even after his presidency. PHILLIPS: And Karen, he was such a man of mystery in so many different ways. But he really revealed himself in these letters, in his radio commentaries and his newspaper columns.
SKINNER: Yes.
PHILLIPS: What did you discover about this man that it actually has now led to quite a reassessment of who he was and what he believed in?
SKINNER: Yes, Kyra, that's right. It's really -- I think the word revealed himself. That's what these writings do.
Reagan does seem a mystery to many, and he seemed aloof while in office. Many reporters and those who worked with him said that.
But when you look at the writes you can tell he was extremely comfortable in a one-to-one writing relationship in communicating with people through letters and radio commentaries that he wrote himself.
That's where he mapped out his ideas, his strategies for helping to end the Cold War. It's all there in Reagan's own handwriting. And it's quite surprising.
He writes in some letters that he had a game plan, a strategy of quiet diplomacy for dealing with the Soviets. He revealed in letters that missile defense, the very controversial issue that became known as Star Wars. He writes in fact that it was his idea to begin with.
So there are just striking revelations in his letters.
PHILLIPS: You mention the one letter back from July of 1981, the one with regard to the Soviet Union. Let's talk about that one for a minute, because this was just -- just a young man that wrote him a letter, a constituent. And Reagan took it seriously, and he wrote him back in this handwritten letter. It's pretty amazing.
SKINNER: Yes, and seven months into his presidency. He received a letter from a man saying, "Why don't you tell us what your grand strategy is, what your game plan is for dealing with the Cold War and the Soviet challenge?"
And Reagan wrote back and said, "I have a foreign policy. I have a plan but I don't believe that it should be put in quotation marks. I believe in quiet diplomacy. Once you go public with what you're doing you can't do it anymore."
And I think that was an important letter. It wasn't just Reagan making a statement. Two years later, his first negotiations with the Soviets, well before Gorbachev came into office, had to do with the Soviet Pentecostals, getting them released from the Soviet Union.
Quiet diplomacy that we didn't learn about until many years later, really until 1990, that Reagan's first negotiation with the Soviets, in fact, was what he had talked about in this 1981 letter, a back channel that worked very effectively. PHILLIPS: Wow. Something else that was very interesting I found in your book was this correspondence between Reagan and Nixon. Not a lot of people knew about this.
SKINNER: No, and that actually was not found, most of those letters in the Reagan Library but in the Nixon Library, Yorba Linda and some of the national archives facilities.
Reagan and Nixon had a long correspondence over many decades. We start in 1959, letters from Nixon in our book, "Reagan, A Life in Letters." With correspondence that went on until Nixon's death in 1994.
Nixon was vice president when he began writing Reagan extensively. Reagan was five years from running for governor of California. But I think Nixon realized that Reagan was a potential political force that he should get to know, and you should see it in the letters.
PHILLIPS: It's a wonderful book. It's an interesting book. We're going to take a quick look at it there: "Reagan, A Life of Letters." Real inside look to what made Reagan tick.
Kiron Skinner, thanks so much for your time.
SKINNER: Thank you.
PHILLIPS: We're going to take a quick break. More LIVE FROM after this.
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O'BRIEN: Well, the airplane which shut down the U.S. Capitol yesterday in the midst of Ronald Reagan's state funeral, it was a plane carrying the governor of Kentucky to attend those ceremonies.
Let me tell you a lit bit, first of all, about the aircraft and what we've been able to learn about how this response occurred and how this evacuation was ordered.
First of all it's a Beechcraft King Air. Not this particularly version of the aircraft but very similar. About a 30-year-old version of that aircraft. And it's a twin engine, turboprop airplane. And it was flying into Washington D.C. national airport, ironically Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Now, since 9/11 that airport has been off limits to general aviation aircraft. That is to say, anything that's not an airliner or not a charter. However, airplanes that are occupied by VIPs, in this case government officials would qualify, certainly the governor of Kentucky, do get exemptions to fly into the national airport.
Now we have been able to put together the radar track of this particular flight to give you a sense of how it arrived. I'm going to try to slow it down just a little bit.
But as it came in, you'll see what happened was it was slightly diverted. Moved in toward the airport. And then finally landed.
What that indicates to us, as we looked at that loop. That kind of happened quickly. I'm going to try to replay it for you, as well. What that indicates, at least, as far as the radar track we saw so far, the transponder apparently was working the whole time. This kind of flies in the face of some of the information we've been getting.
In any case something about this flight got some people concerned. Whether it was the FAA, the Transportation Security Agency, homeland security or the military, it's unclear right now.
Joining us with some insights on all of this is CNN's Mike Brooks, who has been checking his sources there.
Just give us a sense of what people on the ground were hearing, Mike, and why the decision was made to evacuate the capitol in the midst of the ceremony.
MIKE BROOKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Miles, we're hearing a couple different stories.
But the bottom line is U.S. capital police, a source at the U.S. capital police tells me they decided to go ahead and evacuate the buildings because there was an inbound bogey, or an inbound plane that was unidentified to them.
They got the information from -- either it was a coordinated effort, from the national capital coordination center in Herndon, Virginia, to go ahead and intercept and to go ahead and evacuate it.
We've also heard that it was the U.S. capital police that decided after hearing chatter over the direct line with the FAA, decided to go ahead and do it. We're still trying to get exactly what the true story is.
But overall they say that the evacuation went smoothly. We had Anderson Cooper on our air live. And we saw officers from U.S. capital police coming up and kicking them out of the position.
We see here the media just getting out of the way, the police there trying to get their lines out, just tell them to get away. They were told -- reporters there were just told to take off their shoes and run.
So again, Miles, it seemed very, very hectic, but the officials there said it went very smoothly. There were no injuries. And they said it worked. The evacuation worked better than they thought it would, and it was a good dry run.
Hopefully, as we move towards tomorrow with all the heads of state in town and the funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington on the north side of D.C., hopefully nothing like this would happen. But they say it was a good dry run that went fairly smoothly. O'BRIEN: All right. Let's look at the radar track one more time. I just want to highlight it for you, because it went by kind of quickly the first time.
There's the aircraft. As we say it was that Beechcraft King Air. And on board that King Air, along with every other plane that would fly into a place like D.C., is a transponder.
Let me show you quickly what a transponder looks like. We have a quick little animation. It's not different from a car radio or whatever you might have in your car, XM . There it is. And that particular transponder that you see there is rigged up with a squawk code, 1200. That means you're a VFR aircraft in this case.
Let me show you quickly. The cockpit of the King Air. Give you a sense just roughly of where that transponder might be on the King Air.
The question that comes up is did that transponder work throughout that process? As we bring that radar telemetry up one more time, we're going to show you exactly what happened. And in order for this particular software to work it has to have an operative transponder on board.
As we take it in, we see it has all the information there. It comes in toward the south to meet the approach, which brings you into Washington National Airport.
And throughout the course of this radar track, what you see is it never loses that radar information, indicating that that transponder might have been working the whole time.
So, just further compounds the mystery that we've been telling you all day today. We still don't know why this particular aircraft carrying the governor of Kentucky raised suspicion, but nevertheless, as Mike Brooks said, it was a fire drill which worked out pretty well and shows, at the very least, the hair trigger nature of security right now in the post-9/11 world.
Back with more in a moment.
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