The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  The president elect’s hard-Right supporters were not enamored with any of this. When an image of Ronnie kissing Graham at her doorstep appeared in newspapers across the country, the Wall Street Journal called it “a photograph that may upset arch-conservatives almost as much as the famous one of Jimmy Carter bussing Leonid Brezhnev at the Vienna summit.” Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus lobbying organization, warned in a speech to evangelical activists: “If by June the Washington establishment is happy with Ronald Reagan, then you should be unhappy with Ronald Reagan.” But others understood the shrewdness of co-opting the enemy this way. Richard Nixon had spent his presidency chafing at the mercilessness of what he called the “Georgetown set.” They helped destroy him, he believed, with a thousand snubs and slights. In a letter to Deaver, Nixon wrote that he was “enormously impressed by the way our man has taken over the Washington establishment by storm. There will, of course, be some rough times ahead, but I am confident that he is building up enough equity that he will be able to sail on no matter how rough the sea gets.”

  * * *

  The weeks between the November election and the January inauguration did not go entirely smoothly, however. Even as the Reagans were wowing DC kingmakers, there was no letup in the constant drama and tension within their dysfunctional family. On November 25 Ron and Doria, who lived together in a one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment, were quietly married. Only after the fact did Nancy and Ronnie learn of the ceremony, which was performed in the chambers of a New York judge. The couple’s sole witnesses were a Secret Service agent and a friend of Ron’s. The bride wore red cowboy boots with a black sweater and slacks; the groom, blue jeans and tennis shoes. At the time, Nancy had yet to warm up to Doria personally or approve of her twenty-two-year-old son choosing a woman seven years older than he was. An unnamed friend told People magazine: “She loves young Ron and cried for days after he got married.”

  Ronnie’s election victory also brought no letup in the battle between Nancy and her antagonists in the media. Her tone deafness and poor timing didn’t help. Particularly damaging was an interview she did with United Press International’s Helen Thomas on December 10, just two days after Beatles legend John Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park West. Nancy repeated her long-standing opposition to gun control and added that she herself owned a “tiny little gun” that Ronnie had given her for protection at home while he was traveling. Nancy also claimed—was she in denial or simply lying?—that her children had not used marijuana or other illegal substances “that I know of.” She insisted that Ron and Patti had never been part of the “drug culture.” Practically simultaneously, in another interview with the same news organization, Patti confessed that not only had she tried marijuana but also “I don’t know anyone who hasn’t smoked dope. I don’t anymore. I can’t afford to be that spacey anymore.

  “I don’t think pot is such a terrible drug,” Patti added. “It just makes you forget things—like your name.”

  Amid all this came reports that Nancy had been rude and presumptuous toward Rosalynn Carter during the traditional tour of the White House that outgoing first ladies offer their successors. The press had already christened Rosalynn the “Steel Magnolia” and Nancy the “Iron Butterfly.” According to sources on her side, Rosalynn bristled at Nancy’s desire to poke into closets and bedrooms that she had wanted to remain shut because they were messy. Nancy, meanwhile, found Rosalynn’s manner to be as chilly as the room temperature in a White House where all the thermostats had been set to sixty-five degrees as a conservation measure during the energy crisis.

  Nor was Nancy impressed by the executive mansion itself. It struck her as overdue for renovation. “My overall feeling was of surprise that the residence looked so dreary and uninviting. It just didn’t look the way the president’s house should look,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a place we’d be proud to bring people—our personal friends or our country’s friends. When my son, Ron, arrived for the inauguration, he said, ‘Mom, this place is a mess. It looks low rent.’ ”

  Nancy would deny a subsequent scoop by UPI’s Thomas claiming that she had actually proposed that the Carters move out early so that her decorator could get a head start fixing up the place. However, Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, Paul Costello, told me that he overheard the conversation in which Nancy made the insensitive suggestion to Rex Scouten, the White House’s famously discreet chief usher. “Mrs. Reagan, we can’t do it,” Scouten told her over the phone, according to Costello’s version of events.

  Blame runs downhill in Washington. In this case, it landed on Nancy’s newly hired press secretary, Robin Orr, the former society editor of the Oakland Tribune. The day after Thomas broke the story that Nancy had tried to nudge the First Family into a premature departure from the White House, the Reagan transition office announced that Orr would be returning to California to be closer to her children and to take an unspecified “high-level” position with the International Communications Agency in San Francisco. Her tenure lasted all of twenty-eight days, not even long enough to make it to the inauguration. She was replaced a month later by Sheila Patton, a vice president with the high-powered public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Patton soon married and changed her name to Sheila Tate. (For clarity, I will refer to her from here on by her married name.) Tate was a better fit for the job, savvier and more attuned to Washington ways. Letitia Baldrige, who had been Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, also came in to help Nancy assemble a staff.

  But Nancy continued to create a new and embarrassing story line at every turn. The Washington Post reported she had decreed that whoever got hired to be the president’s spokesman should be “reasonably” good-looking. So, when Ronnie announced his selection of James Brady as his press secretary on January 6, a reporter teasingly asked the balding, bearlike Brady whether his looks had passed muster with the first lady-to-be. Ronnie retorted: “That question leads to a story that has been written concerning Nancy which was a total invention out of whole cloth, and there have been several more of those, and I am getting to be an irate husband at some of the things that I am reading, none of which are true.” The president elect then added with a smile that Nancy thought Brady was “absolutely handsome.”

  More significant was her perceived influence on some of Ronnie’s other picks for key posts. According to notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn, she nixed William Simon, whom conservatives wanted for Treasury secretary. When Simon met with Ronnie at the ranch during the transition to discuss the job, he laid down a list of demands, including that he be allowed to pick his own staff and make decisions without clearing them with the White House.

  “Mrs. Reagan was sitting there reading a magazine while Bill Simon was listing his requirements,” Cohn recounted. “Sure she was—you can imagine how she was reading that magazine. She was drinking it all in, was what she was doing. And let me tell you, Bill Simon walked out of the president’s life that day. I mean, he couldn’t get a phone call through after that. Nancy put her foot down. She pointed out to the president that you don’t hire people who make demands before they have the job.”

  Six days before the inauguration, Nancy and Ronnie left their home in Pacific Palisades for the last time. Neighbors gathered at the bottom of their driveway, and well-wishers lined the streets all the way to Sunset Boulevard. When their motorcade arrived at the airport, Nancy got her first glimpse of Air Force One. The reality of what was happening hit her once again when she saw the words “United States of America” emblazoned on its blue-and-white fuselage. A pilot welcomed them aboard, and stewards gave them a tour. Nancy was delighted to learn that it had a private two-room suite for the first couple, and that its airborne kitchen could cook up just about any food she liked. She was less impressed with the official guest quarters that awaited them on their arrival in Washington. “Blair House really needs fixing up,” she wrote in her diary.

  The next morning, the Secret Service fit
ted her and Ronnie with bulletproof coats to be worn whenever security was a concern. To Nancy, it was a reminder of a dark possibility that was always lurking at the back of her mind—one that would, all too soon, become a reality.

  * * *

  Washington had never seen a spectacle quite like the four-day celebration around the inauguration of Ronald Wilson Reagan. It was far more than just another quadrennial transfer of power. As biographer Edmund Morris wrote, the dawning of the Reagan era “realigned the American political landscape with a suddenness unmatched since Franklin Roosevelt’s accession to power in 1933.”

  There were laser light shows, fireworks displays, and $500-a-plate dinners, along with a big Hollywood presence. Nearly twenty thousand people gathered in a suburban sports arena for the inauguration-eve gala, at which late-night television king Johnny Carson joked: “Well, this is the first administration to have a premiere.” Ronnie and Nancy, seated in velour-covered, thronelike wing chairs, looked on like a king with his queen. Frank Sinatra was the producer and director of the event, evoking memories of how he had put together a starry celebration the night before John F. Kennedy began his presidency in 1961. As he had at Ronnie’s second inauguration in Sacramento, Sinatra capped off his own performance with one of his standards, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” But this time, he had rewritten the lyrics:

  I’ve known some Nancys,

  No need to tell you

  Therefore, I’m qualified to sell you

  Someone with warmth, charm, and grace

  Nancy with the Reagan face

  You must have noticed

  She’s always beaming

  Semantically, that should be gleaming

  That’s why they invented lace

  For Nancy with that radiant face…

  Nancy brushed aside a tear and blew Sinatra a kiss. Ronnie told the crowd, “You know, almost every day in the past few weeks, someone has asked Nancy and me, ‘Has it sunk in yet?’ Well, tonight there was a point in the program where I reached over and said to Nancy, ‘It sunk in.’ ”

  Not everyone was so taken with the spectacle. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales pronounced the gala, which was broadcast on ABC, to be “a tacky combination of a Hollywood awards show, a Kiwanis club talent contest, and a telethon stocked with fewer greats than near-greats and even more pure mediocrities.” In the New York Daily News, Rex Reed called it “a grotesque burlesque show” and wrote that in Sinatra’s hands, “the inauguration has been turned into a show business abomination run by an entertainer whose alleged connections to the underworld are being investigated.”

  The entire cost of the inauguration and events leading up to it, which were funded largely by private donations, reached a record $16 million. That was more than four times higher than the tab for the humble “People’s Inauguration” that Jimmy Carter had put on four years before, where there had been hundreds of free concerts, and no ticket cost more than $25. An eighteen-car train called the “Peanut Special” had carried the Carters and a contingent of hard-partying Georgians to the capital. Ronnie’s inauguration, in contrast, saw National Airport jammed with two hundred private jets. The press dubbed it “Lear Lock.” Limousines had to be brought in from as far away as New York to ferry revelers to the festivities.

  For Carter’s inaugural balls in 1977, Rosalynn had donned a six-year-old, off-the-rack blue chiffon ball gown purchased when her husband became governor in Georgia. Nancy dazzled in a one-shouldered white beaded sheath donated by her favorite designer, James Galanos, whose creations went for upward of $10,000. It was accessorized with a diamond-necklace-and-earring set—given by or borrowed from jeweler Harry Winston, depending on who you talked to—with an estimated retail value of $480,000. Her handbag alone was reported to cost more than $1,600.

  All of this opulence struck even some of Ronnie’s supporters as too much, given that the country’s unemployment rate was 7.5 percent and going up. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who had seen seven inaugurations, complained publicly: “When you’ve got to pay $2,000 for a limousine for four days, $7 to park, and $2.50 to check your coat, at a time when most people in the country just can’t hack it, that’s ostentatious.” Nancy Thompson, vice chairman of the Republican Women’s Task Force, an organization of GOP feminists, took aim at Nancy’s pricey wardrobe: “I think it’s outrageous. You don’t have to spend that kind of money on clothes to look wonderful, not when there are people out there who are being eaten up by inflation.”

  But on Inauguration Day, what the country wanted more than anything else was a fresh start and a jolt of optimism. Jimmy Carter had spent a sleepless final night in the Oval Office working on the final deal for the release of the fifty-two Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days in Iran. Just minutes after Ronnie finished his inaugural address, the first of two 727s carrying them to freedom lifted off from Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport.

  The swearing-in ceremony itself was conducted with impeccable stagecraft. Where Ronnie’s predecessors had taken the oath of office on the East Front of the Capitol, which overlooked a parking lot, Ronnie recited his on the opposite side of the building, which affords a view of the monument-studded National Mall and, beyond that, looks toward the rest of the country, spreading westward.

  His left hand rested on Nelle’s crumbling, taped-together Bible. Ronnie’s late mother had written on the inside of the front cover: “A thought for today: You can be too big for God to use, but you cannot be too small.” Nancy held the book, which was open to 2 Chronicles 7:14, a passage in which the Lord offers an assurance to Solomon that “if my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” In the margin of that page was another squib of Nelle’s handwriting: “A most wonderful verse for the healing of the nations.”

  At a postinaugural lunch in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, the new first lady sat with larger-than-life House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. Edie was on O’Neill’s other side. Nancy later wrote: “My strongest memory of that lunch is of watching Mother and Tip swapping stories as if they had been friends all their lives.”

  Before heading out that evening to the inaugural balls—Ronnie and Nancy went to ten of them over four hours—the extended Reagan family posed for an official portrait in the Red Room. Loyal and Edie are missing from the photo, but everyone else related by blood and marriage is there: Nancy’s stepbrother, Dick, and his wife, Patricia, with their children, Geoffrey and Anne. Maureen and her fiancé, Dennis Revell, who would soon become her third husband. Michael, standing behind his wife, Colleen, and holding his two-year-old son, Cameron, Ronnie’s only grandchild to date. The president’s brother, Neil, and his wife, Bess. Patti, managing a smile. Ron with Doria. As Edmund Morris wrote of the family tableau: “It glows with a common desire to restore harmony.”

  In the photo, the relatives are crowded on and behind two sofas, forming a backdrop that is slightly removed from Ronnie and Nancy. The couple appears both central to and apart from the rest of them. Nancy is seated on a chair in front, radiant in her beautiful gown and upswept hair. Ronnie hovers behind her, splendid in white tie. His hands rest on the back of her chair; his fingers seem drawn toward her tiny, bare shoulders.

  Ronnie’s first few days in office were a blur of daily Cabinet meetings, national security briefings, and sessions with congressional leaders eager to hash out details of his economic plan. Tuesday, January 27, saw a joyous ceremony on the White House lawn to welcome home the hostages. That same day, Ronnie set aside some time to pen a private letter to Jane Wyman. Ronnie’s ex-wife, who was in the process of moving, had come across his old varsity letter from Eureka College and had sent it to him. Ronnie did not want his thank-you note to go through the normal White House mail system, where it surely would have been seen and generated gossip. He had someone drop this letter in an ordinary postbox,
with a fifteen-cent stamp attached. It said:

  Dear Jane

  Thank you very much for

  my letter “E”. Of course a gold

  football only goes with winning

  a championship—but then I

  guess maybe this job constitutes

  something of a winning—at best

  it was as hard to do. Already

  I’ve found though there are

  days when you wonder if you won.

  All in all though it’s good to

  be here and to think maybe I

  can do something about the things

  that are wrong.

  Thanks again & thanks for

  your good wishes & prayers.

  Sincerely,

  Ron

  The new president had ample reason to be confident in what he could achieve. No one could read anything but a mandate for change in the fact that he had won forty-four states against a sitting president. And while the House of Representatives was still in Democratic hands, his victory across the map had swept in a dozen new Republican senators, marking the first time since 1955 that the party controlled either chamber in Congress.

  But while Ronnie was riding high, his wife and her wealthy friends were becoming an increasing source of concern for the president’s team. For Ronnie’s seventieth birthday on February 6, Nancy threw a lavish celebration—supposedly a surprise, though advance word got out to the press—in the East Room. The Annenbergs, Wilsons, Jorgensens, and Deutsches footed the bill for the black-tie party, where a hundred guests were served lobster, roulade of veal farcie, and a dozen birthday cakes each topped with a rearing white horse. Everyone danced between courses. One notable image of the evening was a photo of Ronnie, with a look of annoyance on his face, cutting in to take Nancy from the arms of Sinatra. The celebration continued the next night over an eight-course meal that their friends Charles and Mary Jane Wick put on at the Watergate Hotel’s pricey Jean-Louis Restaurant. Pretty much everyone from their California circle had come in to be there. Nancy stood at Ronnie’s side as he toasted them: “If it weren’t for the efforts of this group, I’d be making this speech before the Chamber of Commerce.”