The night before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, he made sure that he got a good night's sleep, carefully instructing his aides not to wake him until 8 a.m. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, about to step down from office, had been awake for 48 hours, supervising the negotiations over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect's aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o'clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it would soon be time to be sworn in, Reagan groaned: 'Do I have to?' On the way to the ceremony, he tried to chat with the exhausted Carter, regaling him with tales of his Hollywood days long ago at Warner Bros. 'He kept talking about Jack Warner,' Carter later complained. 'Who's Jack Warner?'

LRB 19 October 2006 | PDF Download