The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  * * *

  As Ronnie and Nancy mapped out what the future might hold for them, family life for the Reagans remained as complicated as ever. Young Ron, the only one still at home, was a natural charmer who could always find a way to make his mother laugh. Ronnie taught his youngest to swim and ride, as he had the other three. And Ronnie’s work was keeping him nearby, which meant the son they called Skipper saw more of his father than the others had. Ronnie, Nancy, and their youngest took a four-day horseback trip together in the High Sierras, something they had never done before. “I was the baby of the family. I know that my siblings, most all of them, resented me from Day One, as they perceived me to be her favorite, and therefore, the favorite in the family. That resentment deepened,” Ron told me.

  But his father, even while attentive and doting on the favored child, kept what Ron recognized was an emotional barrier between them. As Ron saw it: “You almost get the sense that he gets a little bit antsy if you try and get too close and too personal and too father-and-sonny.” Meanwhile, his mother was overprotective, controlling, and always on a hair trigger.

  So, Ron pushed back, in small ways at first. He grew his hair long. At the age of twelve, he announced he was an atheist. Near the end of the Reagans’ years in Sacramento, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Southern California, from which he was expelled for misbehavior. For several years when he was in high school, Ron was involved with an older woman from a prominent show business family who had a teenage daughter of her own. The ex-governor and his wife discovered the affair when they returned early from a weekend away and found Ron’s thirtysomething paramour had been staying at their house in Pacific Palisades. According to Ron’s brother, Michael, the couple had sex in Ronnie and Nancy’s bed. “I was heartsick when I learned about it, because I believed she was robbing him of his wonderful teenage years,” Nancy wrote of her son’s liaison. “But there was nothing I could do about it.”

  Michael, on the other hand, could hardly contain his delight when he heard what his younger half brother had done. He felt a particularly acute rivalry with Ron, who not only carried his father’s name but also Ronald Reagan’s blood. “Well, Dad, there’s good news and bad news,” Michael told Ronnie. “The bad news is that you came home early, and you caught him. The good news is that you found out he isn’t gay.” Michael thought he was being funny, but his father took the comment seriously. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re absolutely right. I guess it is a blessing,” Ronnie said, sounding relieved. “I must tell Nancy.”

  The eldest of Ronnie’s children, twice-divorced Maureen, had been drifting in and out of their family life for years. Ronnie and Nancy were less than thrilled when she took up with film and television director Gene Nelson, who was twenty years her senior and had been a contemporary of her father’s in Hollywood. Maureen tried to build a career as an actress but learned that her last name was an impediment when seeking work in the liberal entertainment industry. She also continued to be wounded by the efforts of Ronnie’s political advisers to erase her from his public life.

  It was hard to maintain even a personal connection. When Ronnie was governor, Maureen worked out an arrangement with his sympathetic secretary, Helene von Damm, who alerted her to openings in her father’s schedule in which her calls could be put through. Maureen managed to get a role in a 1972 production of Guys and Dolls that was playing in Sacramento and was devastated when her father and Nancy decided to go to Europe on a mission for President Nixon rather than attend her opening night. Ronnie told Maureen he felt bad about missing his chance to see her perform. “There was genuine disappointment in his voice when he told me to break a leg, but to break it without him and Nancy in the audience,” she recalled later.

  Michael also dabbled at acting, but his real passion was racing speedboats, a dangerous, financially questionable pursuit that his father frowned upon. When he was twenty-six, Michael got married, hoping to create the kind of family he’d never had. He gave eighteen-year-old Pamela Gail Putnam, whose father was line coach for the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, a ruby ring that had belonged to Jane Wyman. On the day they exchanged vows in Hawaii, Ronnie and Nancy chose to be nearly five thousand miles away in Washington for Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding instead.

  Ronnie did send Michael a letter, which was the first he had ever gotten from his father. It began by warning his son of the consequences of infidelity: “Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three a.m., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic disappears.”

  But the missive closed on a more idealistic note. “Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should,” Ronnie wrote. “There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

  “… P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.”

  Their conspicuous absence from Michael’s 1971 wedding may have been Ronnie and Nancy’s way of expressing their disapproval for an impetuous, ill-conceived match. The marriage fell apart within a year. Michael found himself dead broke, living in a friend’s guest room, with his car repossessed. His wife was pregnant when she walked out, a poignant endnote that convinced him his existence would never be anything more than an endless cycle of paternal absence and maternal betrayal passing from generation to generation. Here is how Michael put it in his memoir: “I hated myself and my biological mother, who had abandoned me to what I considered a cruel fate. I hated my adoptive mother for sending me away to school and not taking care of me. I hated my stepmother for revealing that I was illegitimate. And now, just when the woman who I married found out she was going to become a mother, she had left me. It seemed to me that all mothers hated me. All I could think of was that they were all whores.”

  Michael did, ultimately, find love and stability—with Colleen Sterns, whom he met on a blind date. They married on November 7, 1975, in a chapel across the street from Disneyland. Nancy and Ronnie arrived a half hour after the wedding was scheduled to begin, and Michael was annoyed to see they had Ron in tow. He had purposely not invited either of his half siblings. His sister, Maureen, had declined her invitation because she had a speaking engagement in Washington.

  The most awkward moment came after the ceremony, when the photographer suggested a family photo, which would bring Ronnie and Jane Wyman together in the shot. Nancy fixed her eyes on Ronnie, who stared straight ahead. After a long and awkward pause, Jane said: “Nancy, don’t worry about a thing. Ron and I have had our pictures taken together before. If you’d like to join us, fine. Now, Ron, come on. The photographer’s waiting.” The groom was exasperated to see his younger half brother also join the group.

  * * *

  Of Nancy’s relationships with the four Reagan children, none was so fraught as hers with Patti. After high school, her daughter went to Northwestern University. Patti made that choice not for any academic considerations, or because it was her grandfather’s alma mater, but because she was having an affair with her married English teacher from high school and believed he was taking a job there. He took a post in Pennsylvania instead, and after he failed to show up for a rendezvous they had planned, Patti was devastated. Nancy happened to be visiting New York and invited her daughter to join her. Patti poured out all the tawdry details of her romance with her teacher. She was at her lowest, and desperate for the balm of a rare moment of grace in her relationship with her mother. “I needed her right then—I needed her to be a mother. My mother. I needed her to listen to me, not judge me, to understand that I was in pain.
I don’t know why I was so certain she would do all those things, but I was,” Patti recalled in an essay she wrote for Time shortly after Nancy’s death.

  “It’s terrible that he took part of your youth from you,” Nancy told her. “You should have been going to school dances, going steady.” Not only was she the gentle, nurturing mother her wounded nineteen-year-old daughter needed at that moment, but it turned out that Nancy—her radar ever on—had known about the affair for two years. She figured out what was going on when Patti, in an act of brazenness, invited both the teacher and his wife to the Reagan home in Pacific Palisades over a Christmas break from her boarding school. During that visit, Patti had noticed her mother standing back from everyone, unusually quiet as they all, including her grandparents, gathered at the Christmas tree in the living room. “So, for all that time, she’d kept her suspicions to herself, even from my father. She didn’t want to upset him, but she also knew that she had to let me go through the pain and the drama. If she had interfered, it would have made things worse,” Patti wrote.

  That memory, Patti reflected many years later, “towers above all the others. Because I know that the mother she was on that day was who she really longed to be… but so many things had gotten in the way.”

  Among those many things was Patti’s defiant nature. At Northwestern, she befriended Eva Jefferson, the feminist and antiwar activist student body president who became famous when she debated Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970 on national television. Patti sought her out specifically because her father had told her not to have anything to do with “a very radical black girl named Eva Jefferson.” She found Jefferson not to be the fire-breathing revolutionary of Ronnie’s imagination, but someone who was “soft-spoken, intelligent, and seemed to be respected by everyone.” Patti also connected with women’s movement leaders on campus, and discovered in their new and controversial way of thinking another avenue by which she could reject Nancy and everything she represented: “We were all rebelling against mothers who advocated ‘letting the man wear the pants in the family.’ So we made a point of wearing pants, of not wearing bras, leaving our legs and underarms unshaven, and dressing in black. I immediately threw out my Lady Schick razor and my bras, and loaded up on black turtlenecks.”

  By the end of her freshman year, in the spring of 1971, Patti decided to leave Northwestern to study drama at the University of Southern California. For a while, she lived at home in Pacific Palisades and commuted to school, giving her ample opportunity to steal tranquilizers from her mother’s medicine cabinet to trade for diet pills: “I was using her habit to support mine.” Patti’s uncle Dick Davis remembers family holidays punctuated by political arguments. Loyal, who had brooked no backtalk from Nancy or Dick while they were growing up, was outraged when his granddaughter challenged her elders’ views. Dick recalled: “When Patti tried to sound important and knowledgeable about a nuclear plant in California one year at Christmas, my father just destroyed her on the spot and said, ‘You’re talking to your father, who’s extremely knowledgeable, and I’m your grandfather. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’ ”

  Patti moved out of her parents’ home and, by the end of her junior year, had dropped out of college. She was getting more heavily into drugs, including LSD and cocaine. The governor’s daughter also grew and sold marijuana. A talented songwriter, she had an on-and-off fling with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and moved in with guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Eagles, one of the biggest rock bands of the 1970s. Her parents were furious and embarrassed. Ronnie told Patti that living together outside of marriage was sinful. “During Patti’s years with Bernie, we had virtually no contact. It wasn’t because she was living with a rock musician, although the Eagles were not exactly a mother’s dream. And when I finally met Bernie, I found him very likable,” Nancy wrote. “It was that they were living together, which we just couldn’t accept.”

  Patti and Leadon cowrote a song titled “I Wish You Peace.” It was featured at the end of the Eagles’ fourth album, One of These Nights, which sold more than four million copies and was the band’s first to reach number one on the Billboard LP chart. While trying to figure out what to call herself for the writing credit that would appear on the album, Patti decided to declare a new identity. She dropped her father’s surname and rechristened herself Patti Davis. It does not appear to have occurred to Patti that in claiming Davis as her name, she was repeating what her mother had done decades before. But in Patti’s case, there was a pull in the opposite direction. Nancy had done it to signal to the world that she belonged to someone; for Patti, it was a means of distancing herself from her father.

  “There was an underlying reason for choosing my mother’s maiden name, but I wouldn’t admit it for years, even to myself. It was a child’s way of asking for a parent’s approval,” Patti wrote later. “It makes perfect sense to me now that I would take my mother’s name; for all our enmity, all our battles, she was the only parent who was there. My father’s emotional unavailability made it easy to relinquish his name; in a way, it had no identity to me. My mother’s did, just as she had a certain identity as a parent. It might not have been a nurturing identity, but at least it was something tangible.” So determined was Patti not to pass along the dysfunction by having children of her own that she had a tubal ligation at the age of twenty-four.

  * * *

  Patti was not present—and, according to her, was not invited—when Ronnie and Nancy summoned the other three Reagan children to a meeting on Halloween 1975. This was the first, and last, such session they would ever have as a family. The purpose: to inform them that their father was becoming serious about running for president, which meant he would be challenging a sitting Republican in the White House. The Watergate scandal and the prospect of impeachment had forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, and his vice president, Gerald Ford, had assumed the office. Ford himself had been named vice president in December 1973 amid an unrelated kickback scandal that had forced Spiro Agnew from office. The dominoes had fallen and put in the Oval Office a moderate former House minority leader who had never been elected to any office higher than congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  As the family sat in the Reagans’ Pacific Palisades living room, Maureen tried to talk Ronnie out of running, arguing that the party was in too much turmoil in the wake of Watergate. She thought he should wait four years and try in 1980. Michael tried to sound enthusiastic but worried privately that the dark secret of his childhood sexual abuse—and the pictures that had been taken of him—would come out. Ron just pouted.

  Nancy had her own reservations. According to Deaver: “Her questions were always the hardest for her husband and his top staff to answer. Who is going to organize this thing? Where is the money going to come from? Who specifically in state A or state B will break ranks with a sitting president to support Reagan? Who are we going to put on our board? Do we really have a chance or are we tilting at windmills?”

  But Ronnie wanted to do it, and that meant Nancy did too. “Looking back, I realize it was inevitable that Ronnie would run. And certainly it was inevitable that I would go along with whatever he decided,” she recalled. Only his wife was at his side when Ronnie made his formal announcement on November 20, 1975, at the National Press Club, the headquarters of a professional and social organization and a popular spot for holding news conferences in Washington. Early reviews from the Eastern establishment were less than encouraging. “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the media and particularly by the president. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn’t make much sense,” James Reston wrote in the New York Times.

  Then again, so many other expectations had been upended that who was to say what made sense anymore? The initial assumption—by the Reagan team, and pretty much everyone else—had been that after Nixon was reelected in a 1972 landslide, he would serve a full second term, putting Ronnie in the pole position to run for the nomination fo
ur years later. But Watergate destroyed that scenario. Instead of Nixon—whom Ronnie defended after most other Republicans had abandoned him—Ford was in the White House as 1976 approached. He represented a soft-focus brand of politics that Ronnie and others on the right disdained. Ford’s naming of liberal Nelson Rockefeller as vice president only compounded the low regard that movement conservatives felt for him. Ronnie twice turned down lesser Cabinet posts with which Ford had sought to neutralize him, once in late 1974 and a second time in the spring of 1975.

  The former California governor fired a salvo against his party’s president when he declared at the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that Republicans should raise “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors.” His words were also a shot at a deflated and fearful party establishment. At that moment, the GOP seemed to have fallen even lower than it had been after Goldwater’s landslide defeat. In the wake of Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s subsequent pardon of his disgraced predecessor, Republicans lost forty-nine House seats in the 1974 midterm election, giving Democrats there enough votes to override a presidential veto.

  But Ronnie argued this was no time to tack to the middle. “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers,” he said. “It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.”

  As unique as the circumstances were, challenging a sitting president in a Republican primary was an audacious move. “Many of Reagan’s past supporters, me included, were of a pragmatic view,” recalled Reagan’s former aide Tom Reed, who by then had joined Ford’s administration as a top Pentagon official. “At no time in American history had a political party deposed its sitting president and then won the ensuing national election. To many of us, it was Gerald Ford or a Democrat. On top of that, we liked Jerry. He was a friend doing the best he could in chaotic circumstances.”