As First Lady, Nancy Reagan decided to devote her energies to making the White House a “special place.” Americans, she said, “wanted it that way.” She intended to bring “the best of everything” to the mansion. It helps to put this passion into political perspective. Ronald Reagan had become President at a low point in America’s international prestige. Both Reagans felt an intense need to restore American pride.
As Nancy saw it, the Carters’ down-home White House style, with its emphasis on informality and cost cutting, seemed part of this negative American image. While the President was telling the American people it was morning in America again, the First Lady decided to remind them that their afternoons and evenings could be wonderful too. All that was needed was some good old Hollywood glamour.
Nancy was trying to help define the Reagan administration’s tone by doing what came naturally. Even before the inauguration, contemplating her job, she had told a reporter, “You can only be yourself. If you try to do anything else, it’s phony.” She was the daughter of an actress who had palled around with the likes of Spencer Tracy and George Cukor. She had been a moderately successful screen star in her own right and had married an even more successful one. Hollywood’s lavish style was as natural to her as California sunshine.
Nancy should have seen omens of trouble to come in the criticism of the Reagans’ sixteen-million-dollar inaugural. The extravagance had been funded by friendly Republican millionaires, but the Antifeds of 1980, now equipped with press credentials, made Nancy target number one for their aversion to displays of wealth and power. They contrasted the six-year-old blue chiffon gown Rosalynn Carter had worn to her inaugural ball to the one-shoulder white satin sheath by James Galanos that made Nancy the center of attention. “Limousines, white ties, and $10,000 ball gowns are in, shoe leather, abstemiousness, and thrift out,” wrote one almost incoherent scribe.
The critics found even more fault with Nancy’s White House redecorating. She raised over $800,000 from another batch of rich Republicans to redo the private rooms on the second floor. This too was denounced as outrageous extravagance. Then she decided the White House needed new china, and contracted for a $220,000 order. The Queen Nancy image was born.
By December of 1981, Newsweek was telling people that the First Lady appeared to be an “idle rich, Queen bee figure” who was “obsessed with fashion and society.” Pollsters reported that sixty-two percent of the American people thought she put “too much emphasis on style and elegance.” Megagallons of ink were spilled on how much she spent on her wardrobe. She was roasted for accepting gowns from top designers free of charge. Her plea that she was trying to help the American fashion industry was dismissed with hoots and hisses. Even Republican supporters like Bob Hope joked that when Nancy’s childhood nursemaid tickled her, she had said: “Gucci, Gucci, goo.” Johnny Carson said she snacked on caviar.
I happened to have lunch with Elliott Roosevelt and Nancy Reagan in the middle of this fusillade. Nancy was extremely upset and bewildered by the media’s unrelenting hostility. “Ronnie says I should just forget them, but I can’t,” she said plaintively.
“Tell them to go to hell!” declared Elliott.
I shook my head and urged Nancy to meet regularly with the press and be as honest as possible with them. “But the questions they ask!” Nancy cried.
“You’ll get used to them,” I assured her. “Meanwhile, try to stay calm and devote yourself to a cause that people can identify with. Eventually, the public will change their minds about you.”
Although we did not agree politically, I liked Nancy personally. In private she is relaxed and full of fun, with a warm quick laugh. She is also far more intelligent and down-to-earth than she has been portrayed by certain journalists. I agreed with her husband (for once) when he said she was getting a bum rap from the press and public. No matter what the pundits thought, the White House needed new china. When the Reagans moved in, the wealthiest nation in the world could not field a complete set of dishes for a state dinner. Every First Lady back to Dolley Madison has exercised her right to redecorate the private quarters to suit her own taste and her family’s living arrangements.
When I interviewed Nancy for this book, she still felt bewildered by the flap over the china and the redecorating. “I tried again and again to get someone to explain that the Knapp Foundation was donating the china. Not a cent of taxpayers’ money was used. It never got into print,” she told me. “As for the redecorating, a lot of money went for basics like plumbing and air conditioning and restoring the marble floor downstairs. It wasn’t all spent on the second floor.”
Nancy has told people my luncheon advice was the best suggestion she got from anyone while she was in the White House. She talked things over with the President and some of his advisers and decided there was a cause out there she could adopt as her own: drug abuse. She did not pick this out of a hat. In 1981 two decades of the drug culture were cresting with disastrous impact on millions of young Americans. We had been inundated with celebrities and gurus telling us drugs were harmless fun, good for the soul. There was a real need for someone to speak out against this insidious menace.
The Reagan administration launched an all-out assault on drug use. Nancy’s program, Just Say No to Drugs, was the centerpiece of the effort. Athletes, movie stars, civic leaders, and numerous private groups pitched in. Nancy attended an endless parade of antidrug conferences and narrated a documentary, The Chemical People, for PBS. She convened a conference of First Ladies from other countries in Washington to discuss the drug problem from an international perspective. The bottom line showed significant results. During the years when Just Say No was going full blast, drug use among high school and college students dropped almost fifty percent.
Meanwhile, Nancy was taking a few lessons from that master of spin control, Ronald Reagan, on how to deal with other aspects of her image. At the 1981 Al Smith Dinner in New York, an annual gathering of politicians from all points of the ideological compass, she made an impromptu speech when she was introduced. She said she had heard there was a cardboard cutout of her going around, in which she was wearing a crown. “Now that’s silly,” she said. “I’d never wear a crown. It musses up your hair.”
Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs campaign was one of the most successful causes ever embraced by a First Lady. It dramatically reduced drug use among Americans of all ages, particularly the young.(AP/Wide World Photos)
As a chuckle raced through the startled crowd, Nancy said she was taking this opportunity to announce her new charity project: “The Nancy Reagan Home for Wayward China.” This time the laugh was long and loud. Nancy was on her way back from the bottom of the polls.
A few months later, Nancy and her husband went to the Gridiron Club dinner, another annual affair in which the high-profile types in the current administration get roasted by the press. As everyone expected, Nancy got a going-over. A reporter dressed in fake high style impersonated her warbling “Second Hand Clothes” to the tune of the Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand showstopper, “Second Hand Rose.” It was a direct hit on the borrowed outfits from Adolfo et al.
When eyes traveled to the dais to see how Nancy was taking it, they found only an empty chair. Even the President looked puzzled. Many thought she had stalked out in a rage. Suddenly onto the stage pranced Nancy as a bag lady, singing her own version of “Second Hand Clothes”:
“Second hand clothes
I’m wearing second hand clothes
They’re all the thing in spring fashion shows.
Even my new trench coat with the fur collar
Ronnie bought for ten cents on the dollar.
The china’s the only thing that’s new
Even though they tell me I’m no longer queen
Why did Ronnie have to buy me that sewing machine?
Second hand clothes, second hand clothes
I sure hope Ed Meese* sews.”
The applause made the building totter. People got so
carried away, one Washington pundit compared Nancy’s performance with William Jennings Bryan’s epochal speech “You Shall Not Crucify Mankind upon a Cross of Gold.” That is going a bit far, but you get the idea. Nancy had found her way back across that perilous gap between upper-class elegance and democratic humility.
Not everything went smoothly for Nancy Reagan or the Reagan administration thereafter. But among First Ladies, Nancy unquestionably rates the Comeback Queen award. By January 1985, just after Ronald Reagan had swamped the Democrats forty-nine states to one for reelection, Nancy was ahead of him in the popularity polls, seventy-one percent to sixty-two percent. The New Republic, bastion of oppositionists to almost every President, expressed bewilderment that the woman who had started out as the least popular President’s wife in decades could achieve poll numbers that topped Jackie Kennedy’s.
All it took was some showbiz smarts and a little Democratic advice. (I was not the only one to offer her my two cents, I hastily add.) But if Martha Washington is watching her successors (and I sometimes think she is), I am sure she was proud of Nancy’s performance. It was a class act—in more ways than one.
Nancy also functioned as a political partner in her own way. The old spinmeister Ronald Reagan made this very clear in one of his 1985 weekly radio addresses. “Nancy is my everything,” he said. “When I look back on these days, I’ll remember your radiance and your strength, your support and for taking part in the business of the nation. Thank you, partner, thanks for everything.”
In Rosalynn Carter, the political partner and the wife were so intertwined the result was often a blur. Not so with Nancy Reagan. Out front, she was a wife. This goes back to the roots of her life, when she experienced the pain of her parents’ divorce and years of being parked with relatives until her actress mother married a wealthy Chicago doctor and was able to give Nancy a sense of belonging to a family again. Even when she went to Hollywood and launched her own screen career, Nancy made no secret of her desire to marry and have a family.
That probably explains the romantic intensity she brought to her marriage to Ronald Reagan. Ronnie’s considerable charm has something to do with it, of course. I was aware of the power of his personality long before he became President. My husband, Clifton Daniel, told me about the day he met Reagan in the early fifties, when Clifton was the New York Times correspondent in London. He went down to Southampton to meet his boss, Turner Catledge, the crusty managing editor of The New York Times. A chuckling Catledge came down the gangplank with Reagan and introduced him to Clifton. After Reagan said good-bye, Catledge told Clifton he had met Ronnie on shipboard and they had barely parted company during the voyage. “That fellow knows more good stories than I do,” Catledge said—a tremendous admission. Catledge prided himself on his prowess as a southern yarn spinner.
Maybe it was those funny stories, or Ronnie’s amazingly good-natured ways—but Nancy Reagan adored the man, and he reciprocated with almost gushing emotion. “I pray I’ll never face the day when she isn’t there,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “Of all the ways God has blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest.” Unlike George Bush and other Presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson, who loved to organize dinners for twenty on two hours’ notice, panicking the White House staff, Ronald Reagan seemed happiest when he was alone with Nancy, watching the news or a favorite show on television, often eating dinner on TV trays. Larry Speakes, Reagan’s press secretary, says: “The Reagans have one of the greatest love affairs I have ever seen, in or out of politics. They are truly best friends, as well as husband and wife.”
When she became First Lady, Nancy made no attempt to conceal her love, saying things like “My life began when I met my husband.” That made her a target for some feminists. Gloria Steinem wrote a particularly nasty article in Ms. magazine, condemning Nancy’s supposed subservience to her husband. The First Lady compounded this problem with what the press corps dubbed “The Gaze.” When Reagan gave a speech, she sat in the first row, watching him with total rapture on her face. She was baffled and not a little hurt when she discovered the press was making fun of her. “It’s the way I really feel about Ronnie,” she said.
There was another reason for Nancy giving her husband The Gaze. Everyone agreed that her presence had an almost magical effect on his performance. To a degree that approaches mysticism, she and Ronald Reagan are attuned, even invisibly attached, to each other. “She charges his batteries,” declared one Reagan aide.
In the 1984 reelection campaign, Reagan did poorly in his first debate with his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale. Nancy and his campaign advisers decided the problem was the President’s attempt to jam too many facts and figures into his head from the massive briefing books that his staff had prepared. But when he started rehearsing for the second debate, they could not get him to relax and be himself. Reagan’s confidence seemed badly shaken. He messed up his best lines, forgot favorite jokes, and generally performed like an already beaten man.
When Nancy heard about this, she strode into the room wearing a raincoat, rushed up to her husband, and pulled open the coat as if she had turned flasher. On her sweater were the words “4 MORE IN 84.” Reagan broke up, and so did everyone else. “Okay,” the President said in his best show-business style, “let’s take it from the top.” Everyone who was there swears an incredible transformation took place. The relaxed, confident Reagan returned. He beat Mondale in the second debate—and went on to one of the greatest reelection landslides in American history.
That was partnership, Nancy style. There were other small but touching ways in which the Reagans testified to the strength of their alliance. One was the loud plaid suit that the President often wore to press conferences. Aides called it his Mutt and Jeff outfit and began plotting ways to prevent its appearance until they found out that Nancy had selected the material. It was Ronnie’s way of taking her into the ring with him.
When the Reagans called on Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 1982, the President and the Queen left the ceremonial hall together. Ronnie turned and motioned Nancy to join them. “That’s a breach of protocol!” spluttered one stuffy British reporter. Larry Speakes lived up to his name and talked fast enough to convince him it was an ancient Reagan family custom for husbands and wives to walk side by side.
When it came to the big issues with which Reagan dealt as President, Nancy’s views got a respectful hearing, but they often failed to win her partner’s assent. As a politician, Nancy was much too nervous, too eager to adjust to passing public moods to protect Ronald Reagan’s popularity. When Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an evil empire, Nancy wanted him to tone down the rhetoric. The President refused because he thought it was time to let the Russians know he had no illusions about their totalitarian system.
During the 1984 campaign, Nancy organized a veritable cabal of friends who were invited to dinner to help her talk Reagan out of his stand on abortion. Five minutes into the meal, Reagan said: “Nancy, I know what you’re up to. I’m not going to change my mind and that’s all there is to it.” That was also the end of the argument. Unlike some other First Ladies, Nancy could lose gracefully.
One of their sharpest disagreements was over Reagan’s determination to lay a wreath at the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany to commemorate their World War II dead. Many Jewish and non-Jewish spokespeople protested this decision because some SS troops—Nazis—were buried there too. Few were more vehemently opposed than Nancy. “I had a close friend who had spent some time in the concentration camps,” Nancy explained to me. She urged the President to persuade Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to find another cemetery. When Kohl refused, Reagan decided to go ahead with the ceremony. He was convinced it was time to stop punishing every living German for World War II and testify to the forty years in which West Germany had been a strong and dependable ally.
“Ronnie was right,” Nancy says. “The ceremony did become a giant step toward reconciliation between Germany a
nd America. But I still wish Chancellor Kohl had chosen another cemetery.”
Looking back on the incident, the President provided a glimpse of how the Reagan partnership operated: “[Nancy] is not one to shout or be [violently] critical when she disagrees with me. Most of the time, she’ll just say in her quiet voice something like: ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to do that?’”
Reagan went on to wonder if a man could be a good President without a wife who is willing to tell him the truth. “If you can’t trust your wife to be honest with you, whom can you trust?” he asked. “She’ll tell you things no one else will, sometimes things you don’t want to hear, but isn’t that how it should be?”
To an astonishing extent, Nancy knew Ronald Reagan’s strengths, and like every wife, his weaknesses. One of the latter was a dislike, almost an inability, to say no. Most politicians share this trait to some extent. Saying no can make enemies, the last thing a politician wants to do. That is why almost every presidential administration has an abominable no man—someone who takes the heat for making tough decisions about firings, promotions, and the like. In the Reagan White House, Nancy appointed herself to this job.
She frequently exercised near veto power over proposed appointments, when she thought the would-be appointee was trying to push Reagan around. One story concerns William Simon, the money wizard who was being considered for the treasury. Talking over the job, he laid down a whole set of demands that had to be met before he accepted. Nancy made sure he was a dead duck before he got to the White House gate.
By now I think you can see the leading edge of Nancy’s role as partner. She was almost always playing protector. Ronald Reagan’s age undoubtedly had something do with it. When he left the White House in 1989, he was the oldest president in history, just shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. The protector tendency magnified as the White House years passed for another much more serious reason. Nancy Reagan is a First Lady whose husband survived an assassination attempt.
First Ladies Page 17
