The first issue, as Margaret Thatcher waved a reporter into her suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel, was the seating. “Supposing I sit here. Where would you like to interview? I think opposite is easier. Elizabeth, you come here. Mr. Anderson can be there,” she said, waving her press aide, Elizabeth Buchanan down onto the sofa, fixing a steely gaze on her guest and eyeing him toward a chair.
She was, as they say, very much in command, with a busy schedule. She’d flown in the night before from Toronto and went directly to a North Michigan Avenue bookstore. Huge crowds. Heavy security. Spent two hours at a round table autographing copies of her 914-page tome, “The Downing Street Years” (HarperCollins, $30). Later, a 60-minute radio show.
When told that she had an ability like Elizabeth Taylor to create excitement-referring to her appearance at Stuart Brent Books, where the crowd had included everyone from Chicago social figures to a rowdy Irish youth who was removed by security staffers-and that few ex-prime ministers, other than Winston Churchill, could draw such a crowd, she said:
“Yes, well, the years one’s written about were exciting years. Years when the West did something. Unlike Bosnia,” Thatcher snapped, with a stare that could reduce a person to ash.
Dressed in a purple suit, with a string of big pearls, holding a cup of black coffee, Thatcher, 68, has not slowed a whit since the day when, as her book tells it, she walked out of 10 Downing Street for the last time and her personal aide “wiped a trace of mascara off my cheek, evidence of a tear which I had been unable to check.”
When asked if sexism played a role in her ouster, referring to the Cabinet revolt that led to her resignation as prime minister on Nov. 28, 1990, she responded: “I don’t think so. It was (my) personality-firm, determined, purposeful. I just think some of them just couldn’t take it.”
Nor had she suffered any sort of narcissistic injury, as many leaders do when the rough-and-tumble of politics catches up with them. “There’s no point in looking back and having regrets,” she said. “I’d been there 11 1/2 years, three years longer than an American president can stay in office. I obviously had to go sometime.”
What dismayed her was the timing.
The revolt, she said, “came while I was away, signing a disarmament treaty (in Paris). In the middle of a Gulf War.” She had managed “to get high interest rates down and I wanted to see that through.”
She had wanted several more years to work a suitable successor up the ranks. What really hurt, she noted, were the “weasel words” of friends and allies covering up “their betrayal as frank advice and concern for my fate” in winning a leadership struggle.
Eyebrows have been raised by some critics of her memoirs, but Thatcher said she had not spent time brooding.
“It happened. So be it. And it gave me the chance to write down the record of those years while they’re still vividly alive in my memory. The events. The difficulties of decision. The agony of the Falklands (war with Argentina). Being absolutely on the spot in Aspen when Saddam Hussein went into the Gulf,” she said. “If I hadn’t been there, the whole future might have been different.”
In August 1990, Thatcher and President Bush were in Colorado to address the annual Aspen Institute Conference. Just after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they met on a ranch.
“Fortunately,” she writes, “the president began by asking me what I thought. I told him my conclusions in the clearest and most straightforward terms.” Mostly, she says, he followed them.
She “always liked George Bush,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. She later hectored him about “going wobbly” on sanctions against Iraq. Jimmy Carter was likable but limited, with a slim grasp of economics. Ronald Reagan, of course, was a paragon of virtue though, as she put it delicately the night before to WGN Radio host Milt Rosenberg, “He was not a detail man.”
“It is not the faint hearts who make history or get things done. It is the great hearts,” she had added. Or, as she said in her book, “Above all, I knew that I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did.”
In February, 1981, Thatcher was the first foreign head of government invited to Washington by Reagan after he took office. Their first outing, as leaders of the Western World, came in July, in Canada, when chiefs of the seven biggest industrial nations gathered at Chateau Montebello, a luxurious log hotel near Ottawa. Reagan was still recovering from an assassination attempt four months earlier.
As former London Times staffer Geoffrey Smith noted in his book, “Reagan and Thatcher,” Reagan spent much of the meetings doodling circles on a pad, filling them in with faces and adding cowboy hats.
The two met privately, providing Thatcher with “my most useful discussion at Ottawa.” Over the next eight years, they talked often by phone. Among their accomplishments, she suggested, was the collapse of Soviet-backed communism. The factors? “One, the determination of the West, of Ronald Reagan and myself, to have superior military forces and the latest technology. They couldn’t keep up. Two, a determination to fight the battle of ideas every way we could-and we did. Three, the coming on of a new generation of politicians in the Soviet Union who looked at communism through different eyes. And four, the many people who worked from within.”
Thatcher declined to discuss President Clinton.
“Look, that’s not the purpose of this interview,” she said. Nor Hillary. “Mrs. Clinton is not elected,” she added. “What advice? I have no advice to give to a spouse of an elected president. You can, if you like, read my book, about Denis.”
That would be her husband, now Sir Denis, whom she married in 1951. They have a twin son and daughter, Mark and Carol, born in 1953.
“(Denis) would have stayed in the army after the second World War,” Thatcher writes, “but the unexpected death of his father left him no option but to return to the family business, a paint and chemicals company. I am glad he did. His industrial experience was invaluable to me. He was also a crack accountant. He could sense and see trouble long before anyone else.”
Nor, she added, could she have made it through “the lonely job” of prime minister without him.
During the long hours at 10 Downing Street, he was a rock and refuge.
“Denis and I decided that we would not have any living-in domestic help,” she writes. “No housekeeper could possibly have coped with the irregular hours. When I had no other engagement, I would go up to (our top-floor) flat for a quick lunch of salad and poached egg on toast. But usually it was 10 or 11 o’clock at night before I would go to the kitchen and prepare something. We knew every way in which eggs and cheese could be served. There was always something to cut at in the fridge, while Denis poured me a nightcap.”
No longer prime minister, does she have more time for herself?
“Good heavens, no!” she said.
From an office in Belgrave Square, with a staff of seven, Thatcher keeps track of world events, prepares for speeches and raises funds for the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, currently funding 40 young people from Eastern European countries for short courses in the workings of a free-market economy. “I’m not going to give you a figure,” she said, cutting off questions on the foundation’s size, “except to tell you that we need more.”
She is concerned about the future.
“Europe,” she said, “will remain a controversial problem. I’m very fearful that people may think, in the aftermath of the Cold War, that everything’s secure. That’s not the consequence. Peace has not broken out. The collapse of great empires means a dangerous situation. We must not let our guard down.”
She is at work on her second book-about her early days.
Will it be easier? “No,” she said, “it’s not just getting it all down. It’s editing it so it tells the story in a readable and accurate way.”
Meantime, she’s having a terrific time pushing “The Downing Street Years.”
“She loved doing `Larry King Live.’ Had a great time. She loves speaking to people,” said Buchanan, the press secretary.
“Tour’s been fabulous. Interviews wonderful. Fantastic speeches. As Thatcher says, `I don’t mind if they stand up when I enter,’ Buchanan says. `It’s if they stand up when I finish.’ “
One problem, on the road, is keeping on top of things, to the extent that Thatcher likes.
“When something happens,” Buchanan explained, “the world’s press camps outside her door. So, she has to have something to say.”
As the interview ended, Thatcher checked her watch. She gave instructions to the photographer. “Don’t shoot me that way. There’s not enough light in front.”
She shook hands with her guest, with a motion that pulled him past her toward an outside hallway door. Then, she disappeared into an adjoining room. “Any news? Any news,” she demanded of an aide, who was inside, watching CNN.
