chief supervisor at the time rightly said that was not how things should work,” Barletta wrote with his characteristic gift for understatement. “The President was not supposed to be giving us aid and comfort. That was what we should be doing for him.” A quick, national search for the right agent to accompany the president on his rides produced the perfect combination — an army veteran, secret service agent, and experienced equestrian. Barletta spent the next decade accompanying Reagan on hundreds of rides spanning several continents.
Recreational Therapy
For Reagan, ranching was no publicity stunt. He built the fences in front of the rustic main house himself and was forever clearing his favorite riding trails of overgrown brush. When he’d head out to chop wood, he’d throw the saws into his old, beat-up red Jeep, even though his wife, Nancy, preferred he take the newer, safer blue Jeep she and some friends had bought for his birthday. In fact, the First Lady continually plotted with the secret service to rein in her husband’s penchant for good, old-fashioned, mind-clearing, body-renewing hard work. Over time, through careful diplomacy, the security team convinced Reagan to refrain from jumping his horse and running the wood chipper. Then, of course, there was the question of firearms. One false alarm involved a simple attempt to control algae taking over the Rancho del Cielo pond. Reagan bought some goldfish to keep the water clear, which he inadvertently ended up feeding to a magnificent blue heron who surely thought he had stumbled upon a fish lover’s paradise buffet.
Frustrated, Reagan marched out of the house one morning, pistol in hand, and started shooting, hoping to scare the bird away. “When the gunshots echoed through the air, the whole place went crazy,” Barletta remembers. The author, who could see all the action from his post near the tack room, tried to calm everyone down with a brief, unintentionally inflammatory radio message: “It’s OK. Reagan shot.”
“Reagan shot?!” they screamed back. Barletta quickly explained what had happened, looking back at the president, who was already assessing the commotion he had caused.
“I suppose I should have told you I was going to do that, huh?” Reagan said. And that, Barletta revealed, was how the leader of the free world decided to turn over all his firearms to the Secret Service for safekeeping.
Despite these early mishaps, protecting the president on horseback was by far the biggest challenge Barletta’s team encountered. When Reagan saddled his gray stallion, the security team had several hours of serious work ahead of them. It didn’t help that the horse, El Alamein, was an Anglo-Arab, a half-Thoroughbred, half-Arabian combining the speed of the former breed with the intensity and endurance of the latter. He was so feisty, Barletta reports, that “the more you worked him, the more excited he got.”
The stallion, a gift from the president of Mexico, had been taught to emerge from his stall, rear, and take several steps on his back legs, a spectacle designed to awe and intimidate even the most experienced equestrian. In fact, El Alamein’s notoriously flamboyant nature was likely enhanced by trainers enamored of their Spanish conquistador heritage, a tradition producing proud, powerful, fiery horses, in part to scare the living daylights out of enemies, serfs, and common folk.
From antiquity through the conquest of the New World, a meticulously trained war stallion could rear, strike, and kick out his back legs on command to injure foot soldiers. He could leap to the side, slide to a stop, spin, and take off running without hesitation; he would also stand at attention in the midst of a raging battle if his rider dismounted to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Advanced competitors in the Olympic Games continue to demonstrate such feats, and these peacetime pursuits, too, require significant courage, fortitude, and risk to develop. The horse, after all, is an astonishing enigma, a prey animal willing to endure the horrors of war and the uncertainty of the unknown, carrying generations of riders, around the world, for reasons that still boggle the mind, sometimes receiving medals for exceptional bravery along the way.
Reagan, who started his military career in the U.S. Cavalry, no doubt felt history come to life on the back of El Alamein. He would ride for three or four hours at a time, rarely speaking to Barletta on the trail, totally immersed in the experience. Still, the president’s favorite mount was a constant source of anxiety for those charged with the task of protecting their fearless leader. El Alamein was so intense and flighty that at one point Barletta had veterinarian Doug Herthel assess whether the horse was suffering from back pain or some other hidden injury. In a treadmill test, the stallion proved stronger than the average racehorse, reaching optimal respiratory levels in two minutes when it took most Thoroughbreds five minutes to hit the same threshold. Herthel, a seasoned equestrian himself, had some trouble controlling El Alamein in a subsequent ride. “I don’t feel anything wrong with him,” the doctor concluded after a good twenty minutes in the saddle, “but I can’t believe you let the president of the United States ride this dingbat.”
“Still, President Reagan loved that horse,” Barletta observed. “It was almost as if this strong man and this strong horse really understood each other.” Not that there weren’t some close calls during the nearly ten years the president rode El Alamein. But Reagan’s poise and athleticism, combined with his love of a challenge, saved him on more than one occasion. Nonverbally, he could conjure up a calming presence under pressure that was simultaneously firm and reassuring, focused yet agile. It’s a skill that anyone who likes to ride a spirited horse develops through experience — or dies trying.
If Reagan had simply wanted to relax, he wouldn’t have chosen a horse like El Alamein. The president was accessing something in that relationship, something elusive yet essential. Trotting off into the desert on a horse ready to bolt at the drop of a hat or the rattle of a snake, gaining the animal’s trust and cooperation along the way, Reagan wasn’t just clearing his mind; he was literally exercising abilities that would prove useful in the international political arena.
Detractors insisted the former actor and radio announcer was a figurehead, a charlatan launched into office through his extensive film and public-speaking experience, a political amateur controlled by more intelligent, covert, perhaps malevolent forces. As a skeptical college student at the time he was elected, I too was willing to believe this rumor, ready to dissect his every false move — and confounded by his increasing popularity. After all, what Reagan said wasn’t so impressive. It wasn’t even how he said it. Whatever “it” was, there was no logical explanation for it whatsoever in my mind, at least not until I bought my first horse at age thirty-two. Only then did I realize that what Reagan learned in the saddle was crucial to his success.
Night of the Lepus
Contrary to popular belief, riding a horse does not come naturally — for one infuriating reason: the most basic skills are counterintuitive to the flight-or-fight response in both species. Even mildly challenging situations cause the blood pressure to rise. Guts clench and muscles tighten as breathing becomes fast and shallow. Horses and other large prey animals evolved to sense these nonverbal danger signals in herd members at a distance. When you’re sitting on the spine of such a powerful creature, his sudden, overwhelming urge to bolt, in concert with your body’s involuntary alarm system, becomes a serious threat to your immediate survival. Within seconds, a deadly interspecies feedback loop of escalating arousal spirals out of control, creating a tornado of disorganized responses guaranteed to leave dust and destruction in its wake.
Take the classic amateur rider’s initiation: managing a startled horse. If you could watch what happens to the nervous systems of both species in slow motion, ejection from the saddle stands out as the most logical conclusion. However, seasoned equestrians learn to modify their own instinctual responses, causing their mounts to experience the opposite of fear. It’s a nonverbal skill that comes in handy with humans too, as so many of my clients have discovered over the years.
“Stephanie Argento” runs a highly successful East Coast marketing firm. Tall, confident, effusive, the forty-nine-year-old mother of two teenage
