The origins of Nancy’s disastrous endeavor went back to the Reagans’ very first state dinner on February 26, 1981. It was in honor of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had an especially close and important relationship with the president. In the Iron Lady’s toast to her host and hostess, she cracked a joke about the controversial White House makeover: “I’m told, Mr. President, that when you and Mrs. Reagan were inspecting your new home to see what refurbishment was needed, you came across some charred areas, vestiges of certain heated events in 1812.” Heated indeed. During the War of 1812, British troops burned Washington City, including the White House.
“I don’t think I need apologize for them,” Thatcher continued, “because I’m relieved to hear that Mrs. Reagan saw in this not a source of historical reproach, but an opportunity for redecoration.”
On the dinner tables that night was a mix of china patterns that had been purchased during past presidencies. News accounts left the impression that this was a tribute to Ronnie’s predecessors Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. In truth, Nancy claimed later, she had no choice but to commingle the settings because there wasn’t enough of one pattern to go around. Though Lady Bird Johnson had acquired some place settings suitable for luncheons when she and husband LBJ were in the White House, no complete set of formal china had been bought since the Truman administration. Over the years, many fragile pieces had broken—or been slipped into the handbags and pockets of guests. Today used White House dinnerware shows up regularly on eBay, and even Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep has confessed to lifting hand towels from the presidential powder room.
So, Nancy set about acquiring a new 4,732-piece set from Lenox, edged in her favorite color, red, with a raised gold presidential seal. Once again, her timing was dreadful. In September the White House announced the $209,000 purchase of 220 place settings, which meant they cost nearly $1,000 apiece. On that very same day, the Reagan administration made the declaration that the US Agriculture Department—which had slashed children’s lunch subsidies by a third—would classify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables for purposes of nutritional guidance on school cafeteria menus. The administration quickly pulled back the new regulation, but the damage was done. Columnists and cartoonists had a field day contrasting Nancy’s expensive tastes with her husband’s draconian policies.
One thing the controversy surrounding her china overshadowed was the shrewd, strategic approach that Nancy took toward entertaining in the White House—particularly when it came to state dinners. Over the course of the Reagan presidency, Ronnie and Nancy would host visiting foreign leaders at the rate of roughly one a month.
As Nancy saw it, “those weren’t parties, social life. They were instruments of foreign policy, and they were very effective,” said Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, who was chief of protocol at the State Department. “The dinners were beautiful. They were delicious, and the flowers she cared a great deal about.”
The first lady agonized over every detail. Even the smallest of decisions had to be run by her, at times to the frustration of the diplomats at Foggy Bottom. She demanded to be shown how the table settings would look and stressed out the kitchen staff with her insistence on tasting everything on the menu in advance, something that her recent predecessors had not done. Many of her selections were creative and bold. Nancy introduced what were then considered novel and exciting foods, such as pita bread (served at Australian prime minster Malcolm Fraser’s dinner in June 1981) and nasturtium salad (at Brazilian president José Sarney’s in September 1986.)
Nancy generally kept the guest lists to under a hundred, which made the events more intimate and more exclusive than those of other presidents, who would regularly invite upward of twice as many people. She also revived some of the regal traditions that had been dispensed with during the Carter years, including a uniformed color guard to herald the arrival of the Reagans and their guests of honor on the Grand Staircase in the main foyer. “Hail to the Chief”—a musical flourish that Carter had hated and banned—also made a return.
Much planning went into the seating charts. The placement of guests became, among other things, an opportunity to reward those who were in Nancy’s good graces. Later in her husband’s presidency, she and Secretary of State George P. Shultz developed a running private joke over the fact that she consistently put him next to the most beautiful and famous actress in attendance. “She always fixed me up with a hot Hollywood star at the White House dinners,” he told me with a laugh. “I got to dance with Ginger Rogers!” On that occasion, Nancy asked a White House photographer to take as many pictures as possible of Rogers, a Hollywood ballroom-dance legend, in the arms of the nation’s chief diplomat. She sent Shultz the entire pile of them—“enough to paper his entire office,” she recalled later.
* * *
Within the walls of the White House, Nancy was developing into a powerful force and an important ally to have. But to the outside world, she seemed icy, vain, and brimming with entitlement. By the end of her husband’s first year in office, postcards portraying “Queen Nancy” in ermine, jewels, and a crown were hot sellers in Georgetown gift shops and a frequent sight on the bulletin boards of Democratic offices on Capitol Hill. Headline writers feasted on her “New China Policy.” In October Rosalynn Carter delivered a measure of payback for Nancy’s constant insinuations that the Carters had left the White House a dump, telling a group of reporters that Nancy’s renovation had been completely unnecessary. “I think it was an excuse to do something,” the former first lady said tartly. “The White House was beautiful. I loved it. It was cared for.” The Carters had found the existing china adequate, she said, adding that tastefully mixing patterns enhanced the beauty of an occasion.
The headlines about Nancy’s profligacy kept coming. In early November, news broke of another improvement that she had made to the White House. The beauty salon in the residence, installed by Pat Nixon, had been refurbished with a bounty of donations by the National Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Among them: a $3,000 Peruvian rug, a $400 Louis XV lounge chair, a $346.65 shampoo bowl, two hairdryers worth a total of $1,200, a $720 hydraulic white leather salon chair, a $230 manicurist’s stool, and $1,800 in wall coverings. Redken Laboratories also donated makeup and other beauty products.
So toxic had Nancy’s image become that the president himself felt compelled to defend her at a testy, nationally televised news conference. Reporter Barry Cunningham of the Independent Television News Association, a national video service, put the question to him: “Your administration is being called ‘millionaires on parade.’ Do you feel you’re being sensitive enough to the symbolism of Republican mink coats, limousines, and $1,000-a-plate china at the White House when ghetto kids are being told to eat ketchup as a vegetable?” Ronnie retorted that he had not counted any mink coats, that the ketchup policy had been changed, and as for the china: “Nancy’s taken a bit of a bum rap on that. There has been no new china for the White House since the Truman administration, and the truth of the matter is that at a state dinner, we can’t set the tables with dishes that match.”
Nancy was also giving comedians plenty of fodder. Johnny Carson, for instance, quipped on the Tonight show that the first lady’s favorite junk food was caviar and her religion was Christian Dior. So, Nancy decided that her best defense—perhaps her only one—was to join in on the joke. On November 5 she traveled to New York to accept an award at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a white-tie event where big-name politicians poke fun at one another and themselves. Nancy enlisted White House speechwriter Landon Parvin, who had a knack for comedy, to put together some remarks for her. At the dinner, Nancy scoffed at the “Queen Nancy” postcards: “Now, that’s silly. I’d never wear a crown. It would mess up my hair.” She also announced that her newest charitable endeavor would be “the Nancy Reagan home for wayward china.”
It was a small step in the right direction. He
r most persistent critics, however, were unimpressed. “Good lines, delivered by a pro. But one-liners aren’t going to solve her problems,” columnist Judy Mann wrote in the Washington Post. “The fundamental problem with Nancy Reagan’s image is Nancy Reagan. She is a woman out of her times, a first lady out of the past. She would have been a smash in the 1950s.”
Soon after, Nancy found herself at the center of yet another storm, this one—for once—not of her own making. It came about because of an awkward discovery in the office of National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen. Inside a little-used safe there, military officers found an envelope holding $1,000 in $100 bills, which turned out to be a payment that a reporter and a photographer for a Japanese magazine had brought to an interview they did with Nancy the day after the inauguration. The kimono-clad journalists tried to hand the envelope directly to the first lady, in keeping with the Japanese custom of bringing expensive gifts to important business meetings. Allen recognized what was happening and snatched it. He gave the envelope to his secretary and planned to send it along later to the White House counsel’s office. Instead, it ended up in his safe and was forgotten.
Though Allen was later cleared of any wrongdoing, Nancy saw to it that he was gone. His reputation was far less important to her than the fact that his blunder was an embarrassment. What’s more, she already had misgivings about Allen, a stridently conservative cold warrior whom she considered out of his depth as Ronnie’s chief foreign-policy adviser. Years later, Allen expressed surprisingly little bitterness about his ouster and the role the first lady had played in engineering it. “There were roller-coaster times with Nancy Reagan, but even though, in the end, she was the principal cause of having me put out to pasture, I had no animus against Nancy. She was just protecting her man,” Allen said. National security adviser turned out to be a hard job to hold on to in the Reagan White House. Over the course of his eight years in office, Ronnie would go through six of them. The first lady played a key role in several of their departures.
Nancy, however, did not always get her way when it came to dispensing with aides whose loyalty or usefulness to Ronnie she doubted. The same month the Allen controversy broke, Atlantic Monthly magazine published an explosive story in which Reagan budget director David Stockman suggested that Ronnie’s supply-side economic philosophy was a fraud, meant to give a new luster to old trickle-down economic policies that heavily favored the rich. Stockman, a brainy, self-promoting former Michigan congressman, told journalist William Greider that he had adjusted figures in the Office of Management and Budget computers to reflect unrealistically rosy scenarios. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Stockman admitted.
Nancy joined Deaver and Meese in demanding that Ronnie fire Stockman. The president refused, arguing that he needed Stockman’s expertise and trusted his judgment. “Had it been up to me, Stockman would have been out on the street that afternoon. I saw him as a shrewd and crafty man who knew exactly what he was doing,” Nancy wrote later. “If Ronnie had thrown Stockman out when that story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, he would have made an example of him. It would have been a signal to everybody else who worked for Ronnie that he expected their loyalty.”
But Nancy also recognized that she herself was becoming a liability to the young Reagan presidency. Polls showed she had the ignominious distinction of being the most unpopular first lady in modern history, with negative sentiment toward her running double what it had against her predecessors. During one particularly rocky news cycle, she lamented to Sheila Tate: “You know, some days, I feel like if it rains, it must be my fault.”
The cold fact she had to face was that for Ronnie to succeed, she would have to do so as well. As 1981 came to a close, plans to rehabilitate her image were being put into place. Nancy’s chief of staff, Peter McCoy, who had come from the Beverly Hills art world, was moved over to the Commerce Department. In his place was installed canny thirty-two-year-old James Rosebush, who’d been special assistant to the president for private sector initiatives. He had been picked for the job after writing a memo to Deaver outlining a strategy for fixing Nancy’s public relations problems. Among his recommendations: she had to get out of the White House more, show more compassion for families and children.
Over the years to come, Nancy’s approval rating would go up and down. The portrait of a shallow socialite that was drawn by her critics early in her husband’s presidency would be replaced by one of a calculating power behind the throne, imposing her will on matters of state both foreign and domestic. The truth was, America never quite figured out what to make of her.
“Everything I did or said seemed to generate controversy, and it often seemed you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing a story about me,” she reflected later. “I don’t think I was as bad, or as extreme in my power or my weakness, as I was depicted—especially during the first year, when people thought I was overly concerned with trivialities, and the final year, when some of the same people were convinced I was running the show.
“In many ways, I think I served as a lightning rod; and in any case, I came to realize that while Ronald Reagan was an extremely popular president, some people didn’t seem to like his wife very much. Something about me, or the image people had of me, just seemed to rub them the wrong way.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nancy would always think of 1981 as “a lost year.”
She was not referring to her own blunders, though there had been plenty. What defined that first year in Washington for her—what made everything else seem inconsequential—happened in a split second on the afternoon of March 30. A deranged young man with a $47.95 handgun and a fixation on a Hollywood actress nearly robbed her of Ronnie. For the rest of his presidency, an assassination attempt that almost succeeded would leave Nancy even more anxious and protective of her husband, more wary of everything and everyone around him, and grasping for ways to control the dangerous, unseen forces that might be lurking around any corner. “Nothing can ever happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary during the sleepless night she spent after the shooting. “My life would be over.”
To the degree it could be said about any day at the White House, that Monday had started out as a routine one. Nancy spent the morning with Barbara Bush at a reception for the Washington Performing Arts Society at the Phillips Collection art museum, followed by a luncheon in honor of the two of them and Cabinet wives at the Georgetown home of Michael Ainslie, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. During the lunch, Nancy had felt an urge that she would later call a premonition; something telling her she should get back home. She excused herself a little early.
Shortly after she returned, Nancy met with interior decorator Ted Graber and chief usher Rex Scouten in one of her favorite retreats: the cheery third-floor solarium, where floor-to-ceiling windows offer a spectacular view of the Washington Monument and National Mall. The solarium was under renovation, and it was drizzling outside, but the cheery daffodils in the window boxes spoke to a warmer, brighter season ahead.
Their conversation was interrupted by the unexpected appearance of George Opfer, the head of Nancy’s Secret Service detail. Opfer was a blond, thirty-two-year-old New Yorker, so good-looking that he sometimes got fan mail from women who spotted him standing next to Nancy in photographs. Though Opfer had been assigned to Nancy for only a matter of months, he had already developed a bond of trust with her; an understanding that the two of them would always be honest with each other. Protecting a first lady—particularly one as demanding as Nancy—was an assignment many agents would have greeted with little enthusiasm. But Secret Service assistant director (and later director) John Simpson, who had known the Reagans since the 1968 campaign, advised Opfer: “Don’t listen to the stories, because they are wrong. Make your own evaluation when you get out there. And one more thing: the Reagans really are a modern-day love story. So be prepared for that.” Nancy introduced the incoming head of her detail to Ro
nnie for the first time at the Reagans’ home in Pacific Palisades, shortly after the election. The president elect looked him in the eye, and said: “Well, George, make sure you take good care of her.” From the edge in Ronnie’s voice, Opfer knew Ronnie was not merely making casual conversation.
Opfer had been in the Presidential Protective Division command post in room W-16, just below the Oval Office, when he heard the traffic that came over the radio at 2:27 p.m. First was the voice of Raymond Shaddick, assistant special agent in charge of the president’s detail: “Advise, we’ve had shots fired. Shots fired. There are some injuries, uh, lay one on.” Sixteen seconds later, Special Agent in Charge Jerry Parr invoked the president’s code name and assured the agents back at the White House that Ronnie had not been hit: “Rawhide is okay. Follow-up. Rawhide is okay.”
Opfer knew immediately he had to find Nancy, to make sure she didn’t get the news from anyone else. There wasn’t time to wait for an elevator. He sprinted from the West Wing and up three flights of stairs to the top floor of the residence. When she saw him there, Nancy knew immediately something was wrong. He motioned for the first lady to join him at the end of a ramp connecting the sunroom to the center hall, where they could speak privately. “There’s been a shooting at the hotel,” Opfer told her. “Some people were wounded, but your husband wasn’t hit. Everybody’s at the hospital.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 29
