"If You Don't Dance"

As Ronald Reagan prepared to launch his campaign for the presidency, TIME National Political Correspondent John Stacks and West Coast Correspondent Joseph Kane interviewed him at his home in Los Angeles. Their report:

With a fortune of well over $1 million, Ronald and Nancy Reagan live comfortably in an elegantly furnished, five-bedroom ranch-style house in Pacific Palisades. In the living room, the grand piano is covered with mementos of show business days, photographs of Old Friends Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Edgar Bergen. On the end tables are small glass dishes filled with the jelly beans that became his trademark as Governor. They are intended for guests. To keep down his weight, he rarely eats them now. Reagan is dressed casually, in slacks, a blue V-neck sweater and velvet slippers embossed with back-to-back gold Rs.

No matter how much his campaign advisers have tried to moderate his image, at heart he is still the romantic conservative he has always been, glorying in the strength and goodness of the American people. Says he: "I used to fantasize what it would be like if everyone in Government would quietly slip away and close the doors and disappear. See how long it would take the people of this country to miss them. I think that life would go on, and the people would keep right on doing the things they are doing, and we would get along a lot better than we think."

Reagan calls the national campaign trail the "mashed potato circuit," and he has been wandering along it for 15 years. Says he: "I have a feeling now that I don't get on planes. I get up in the morning and put them on, like a pair of pants. I wear them. In show business we used to say that if you don't sing or dance, you wind up an after-dinner speaker."

He was Governor of California for eight years, and he believes that somehow Government by the people has been snatched away from them. Says he: "I think one of the things that has been done over the past few decades. . . was a tendency to have increasing Government by an elite, and those at the Government levels believing that they had to make the decisions more and more regarding how business and industry are run, interfering virtually in every one of our lives. And they are doing this to a people who for 200 years have probably been the most independent and most individually free people in all the history of mankind.

"Oh, Government is a legitimate function," Reagan adds. "When I talk about regulations, I always use the words 'unnecessary regulations.' I don't want medicines that could destroy our health instead of helping us. But then Government goes beyond that protection thing, and they start trying to protect us from ourselves."

More generally, Reagan blames Washington for turning Americans against one another. He says: "We have seen politicians in recent decades set people apart. They have helped to create special interest groups, whether on racial or religious lines or on ethnic lines, whether it's labor or management, whatever; and they have done it for selfish political reasons. Then they can appeal by giving or offering a promise to one group that they'll get special treatment. They are appealing to envy and greed and pitting one group against another."

Reagan's view of foreign relations is similarly one of a nation beleaguered. "I know this is going to be a perilous time ahead," he says. "I think the arrogance of the Soviet statements and actions reveals how far they are probably going to go to test us. I guess the biggest reaction of anything I say is to my line that maybe we should stop worrying about whether the rest of the world likes us, and decide we are going to be respected in the world as we once were. I think this loss of respect is reversible, mainly because the people want it reversed. We have backed away from some of our principles. We have appeased. We've certainly turned off a number of our friends."

If Reagan's views have not changed much since he emerged as a national political figure, he thinks that he himself has changed a bit. Says he: "I probably have a greater tolerance of opponents. I suppose I learned they weren't an enemy out to do me in. They sincerely believed in their ways as I believe in mine, and so I suppose there is a sort of tolerance I gained in that regard. I don't think I lose my temper quite as quickly as I once did."

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