The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Dear Mrs. R.

  I still don’t feel right about your opening an envelope instead of a gift package.

  There are several much beloved women in my life and on Christmas I should be giving them gold, precious stones, perfume, furs and lace. I know that even the best of these would still fall far short of expressing how much these several women mean to me and how empty my life would be without them.

  There is of course my “First Lady.” She brings so much grace and charm to whatever she does that even stuffy, formal functions sparkle and turn into fun times. Everything is done with class. All I have to do is wash up and show up.

  There is another woman in my life who does things I don’t always get to see but I hear about them and sometimes see photos of her doing them. She takes an abandoned child in her arms on a hospital visit. The look on her face only the Madonna could match. The look on the child’s face is one of adoration. I know because I adore her too.

  She bends over a wheelchair or bed to touch an elderly invalid with tenderness and compassion just as she fills my life with warmth and love.

  There is another gal I love who is a nest builder. If she were stuck three days in a hotel room, she’d manage to make it home sweet home. She moves things around—looks at it—straightens this and that, and you wonder why it wasn’t that way in the first place.

  I’m also crazy about the girl who goes to the ranch with me. If we’re tidying up the woods, she’s a peewee power house at pushing over dead trees. She’s a wonderful person to sit by the fire with, or to ride with or just to be with when the sun goes down or the stars come out. If she ever stopped going to the ranch I’d stop too because I’d see her in every beauty spot there is, and I couldn’t stand that.

  Then there is a sentimental lady I love whose eyes fill up so easily. On the other hand, she loves to laugh, and her laugh is like tinkling bells. I hear those bells and feel good all over even if I tell a joke she’s heard before.

  Fortunately all these women in my life are you—fortunately for me that is, for there could be no life for me without you. Browning asked; “How do I love thee—let me count the ways?” For me there is no way to count. I love the whole gang of you—Mommie, first lady, the sentimental you, the fun you and the peewee power house you.

  And oh yes, one other very special you—the little girl who takes a “nana” to bed in case she gets hungry in the night. I couldn’t & don’t sleep well if she isn’t there—so please always be there.

  Merry Christmas you all—with all my love.

  Lucky me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nancy’s initiation into being first lady could hardly have been rockier, but she was not unappreciative of the amenities that came with the job: a plumber arriving the moment there was a problem, a man to wind the clocks, a maid to take away her soiled clothes while she was bathing—and most usefully, given her addiction to the phone, switchboard operators who could track down anyone she cared to talk to. Her son, Ron, called the White House an eight-star hotel. Living over the store also meant plenty of time for Nancy and Ronnie to be together alone—or, at least, as alone as any first couple ever is. Two butlers served them dinner, which they usually ate on tray tables in Ronnie’s study as they watched the evening news. Most nights, they were in bed by ten. Nancy pushed a button twice to let the usher know it was time to turn out the lights and to hold any calls that were not urgent until the morning.

  But there wasn’t freedom to do something so ordinary as take a long walk. That is why one of the side benefits that both Reagans found they loved the most was the rustic solitude of Camp David, about an hour away from Washington on the Catoctin Mountain ridge in northern Maryland. “I never expected that we would use it practically every weekend, but it became a regular and welcome part of our routine,” Nancy recalled.

  Built in 1935 by the Works Progress Administration, the site was converted to a retreat for Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after the beginning of World War II, giving the president, disabled by polio, a place to escape the pressure and heat of Washington. So enamored was FDR with the setting and the view that he christened it Shangri-La, after the fictional Himalayan paradise in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The existence of the retreat was still a state secret back then. For FDR, it became a secluded venue not only for relaxation but also for sensitive business. He and British prime minister Winston Churchill did some of the planning for the D-day invasion there. Years later, President Dwight Eisenhower, who had grown up on a Kansas farm, decided that the name Shangri-La was a tad too fancy for a place where he went to kick back. He changed it in 1953 to Camp David, after his five-year-old grandson. The retreat’s most famous moment came in 1978, when Jimmy Carter hosted weeks of summit negotiations there that produced the Camp David Accords, a framework for Middle East peace signed by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

  The Reagans used Camp David more than any other first couple before or since. Occasionally, they would entertain foreign dignitaries there. But the routine most weekends was far more quiet and intimate. For Nancy, it was a release, a place to get their thoughts in order, a place to focus on each other. Security was more relaxed. “She loved Camp David. They were alone. We gave them fifty yards,” said Joseph Petro, who was on Ronnie’s Secret Service detail for four years. As often as possible, the Reagans headed there from the White House on Fridays around three. If the weather was good, it would take just a half hour to get there by helicopter, though Nancy preferred to drive and enjoy the scenic countryside as they put Washington behind. They allowed only a small retinue of aides to accompany them.

  Each of the lodges at Camp David was named for a type of tree. The Reagans stayed at Aspen; there was a conference center in Laurel, from which Ronnie gave his Saturday radio addresses. Nancy, as was her wont, went to work redecorating throughout, sometimes enlisting her husband to help her hang pictures. The president also ordered some renovation of his own. He was appalled to discover that Richard Nixon, who tooled around the place in a golf cart, had paved over the trails. So, he had them ripped up and restored to paths suitable for the horseback riding that he loved.

  At eight o’clock every Friday and Saturday night, they invited a few people who were staying there to watch movies on a screen that came down from the ceiling of the Aspen living room. Among those who most often joined them were John Hutton, who was White House physician during Ronnie’s second term; assistant press secretary Mark Weinberg; executive assistant Jim Kuhn; presidential valet Eddie Serrano; their helicopter pilot; the camp commander; and their Secret Service agents. Ronnie and Nancy alternated classic pictures with the newest releases. The Reagans preferred movies with sunny plotlines, strong heroes, and patriotic themes, and frowned on ones with a lot of sex and profanity. As Nancy and Hutton’s wife were often the only women there, they saw a lot of Westerns. And, yes, Ronnie and Nancy’s own movies occasionally made the playlist.

  After each film, Ronnie would start the conversation by offering his critique, which often led into behind-the-scenes stories about actors and other characters he had met in the business. He fixated on the technical details. The president once told director Steven Spielberg that the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which was a fantasy about a friendship between a space alien and a little boy, made him nostalgic for an era when Hollywood was cranking out more heart-warmers. But he had one criticism: the end credits seemed to go on forever. “In my day, when I was an actor, our end credits were maybe fifteen seconds long,” Ronnie said. “Three and a half minutes, that’s fine—but only show that inside the industry. Throughout the rest of the country, reduce your credits to fifteen seconds at the end.”

  Chief among the many reasons that Nancy loved Camp David was the restorative effect it had on Ronnie. If he couldn’t be at his beloved ranch in California, this was the closest thing to it. She pushed back against the tendency of his aides to load him down with briefing papers and other work to take with him on t
heir weekends. “Reagan was a voracious reader. You could give him one page or five hundred pages, and he’d read the five hundred pages,” his executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, told me. “He’d complain about it. He’d say, ‘Jim, they’re telling me more than I need to know. I already know all this stuff.’ But he read it anyhow.”

  Richard Allen, Ronnie’s first national security adviser, was surprised when Deaver once handed him back a thick packet of documents that Allen had sent to Camp David the previous weekend. Cut any future ones by three-quarters, Deaver told him.

  “He reads it all,” Allen protested.

  “Yes, I know,” Deaver replied. “That’s what I’m telling you. I want it cut by seventy-five percent.”

  What Allen didn’t realize at the time, he said later, was that Deaver “was on a mission from Nancy, because the president had his nose buried in this stuff on weekends.”

  * * *

  Nancy also encouraged Ronnie’s sojourns at Rancho del Cielo. She had never loved it there; she went because she knew how much he did. While he chopped brush and busied himself with repairs, she would plant herself in a chair by the pond and spend hours on the phone with her friends. Nor did she share his love of riding. At ten thirty each morning, Ronnie would saddle both their horses—his, English style; hers, Western—and ring a bell to summon Nancy. “I can’t tell you how many times he rang it more than once,” Secret Service agent Petro recalled. Once Ronnie got her out on the trails, Nancy pleaded with him constantly to make the horses go slower. Returning from their rides, they would stop alongside each other. Ronnie would dismount and walk around to her horse. Nancy would then throw a leg over the saddle and leap into his waiting arms. Watching this ritual one day, White House physician John Hutton thought to himself: “Good Christopher Columbus, how does anybody keep a romance going for this many years with that intensity?” The doctor was slightly embarrassed—and yet mesmerized—by it all. “I felt like I was a kid watching a sister necking on the couch with her boyfriend. I felt guilty about doing it, but I couldn’t resist,” Hutton said.

  On the front door of the modest 2,400-square-foot, two-bedroom house was a sign that summed up Ronnie’s vision of the perfect retreat from the stress and pressure of Washington:

  ON THIS SITE

  IN 1897

  NOTHING HAPPENED

  The Reagans spent a total of 335 days of his presidency, adding up to more than eleven months, at the ranch. But every day the two of them were there, a government car would drive up the winding road with a stack of mail, newspapers, and documents for Ronnie to read. And even when Ronnie headed out in his battered red 1962 CJ-6 Willys Jeep for the tranquility of the brush and woodlands, he was followed by Secret Service agents, a doctor, and a military aide with a portable telephone.

  Once they got back to Washington, Nancy stood guard over Ronnie’s schedule, continuously battling against the tendency of aides and advisers to jam it with more than she thought he could handle. At receptions, she watched her husband closely for the first sign of fatigue. She’d tug at his sleeve gently—and sometimes rudely—to tell him it was time to go.

  That someone needed to resist unreasonable demands on the endurance and strength of a man in his seventies became clear on his first presidential trip to Europe in June 1982. The ten-day itinerary was brutal: Ronnie, who was never able to get much sleep on airplanes, flew overnight and landed in Paris on the night of June 2. He had a day of meetings with Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand, and hosted a formal dinner at the American ambassador’s home that night. The next day, he helicoptered to Versailles for economic summit talks with Thatcher and Mitterrand, plus the heads of government of Japan, West Germany, Canada, and Italy. Their three-day summit ended with a banquet that lasted until one in the morning, after which Ronnie met with Al Haig and others for an update on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that day.

  With only a few hours of sleep, he headed to Rome on June 7 for a meeting with Pope John Paul II. The papal library where they met was overheated, and as the pope held forth in his tranquilizing voice, Ronnie nodded off. Nancy, sitting behind him, cleared her throat and shuffled her feet, hoping to wake her husband, but by then, it was too late. The assembled press had seen it all. As Helen Thomas of United Press International recounted: “While the pope spoke, Mr. Reagan sat in an armchair next to him. His eyes closed on at least three occasions. His chin fell to his chest, and at one point reporters observed that he seemed to slide down in his chair.” All of the news accounts mentioned the president was seventy-one years old.

  And the trip had only just begun. After that, the presidential entourage flew to England, where Ronnie went horseback riding with Queen Elizabeth II, gave an address to Parliament, lunched with Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, and attended a white-tie banquet put on by the queen at Buckingham Palace. (The press took note: it didn’t seem to bother Elizabeth that she didn’t have enough china to serve all her guests with the same pattern.) And then, thoroughly worn out, he had to speak before foreign leaders at a summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West German capital of Bonn. Along the way, he took a step across the Berlin Wall into East Germany; confronted hecklers at his speech to the Bundestag, West Germany’s parliament; and addressed cheering US soldiers at Tempelhof Airport.

  The reviews of his performance were withering. In a column headlined “Dissareagan,” conservative New York Times columnist William Safire wrote that Ronnie had been “stripped of his dignity” and “treated with cool contempt” by the other leaders at the economic summit. As Ronnie forged ahead through his punishing itinerary, the traveling press corps was kept at a distance, hemmed in by security and unable to ask the president many questions or even to get basic information from the White House staff. “This is my fourteenth trip abroad with presidents, and it’s far and away the most ineptly organized,” Newsweek’s Tom DeFrank told the Washington Post.

  That newspaper’s senior White House correspondent was more brutal, saying the logistical difficulties revealed deeper problems. “Reagan managed to raise doubts about his capacities and mastery of detail among those who saw him close up,” Lou Cannon wrote. “He also reinforced his image with the huge US press entourage of an isolated president, surrounded by a cocoon of advisers who are afraid to let him loose in public lest he reveal ignorance about some of his administration’s policies.” Not until the end of the European trip did Ronnie manage to recover his footing and his confidence. While reaffirming his loathing of Communism, he began talking in Germany about his eagerness to negotiate with the Russians to reduce nuclear weapons.

  Nancy was livid and directed her fury at Mike Deaver, who had organized the trip. Her most trusted aide had paid more attention to setting the president against spectacular backdrops for dramatic photo ops than to the substance of what Ronnie hoped to achieve. Deaver told her he had shown the itinerary to Ronnie, warned him that it would be punishing, and that the president had approved it. But from there on out, the First Lady made sure she was the one who had the veto power on these matters. “At first, she had trusted Deaver to make the right decisions,” said television correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who covered the White House for NBC. “That was the first time she said to Deaver, ‘Don’t let that happen again.’ ”

  It didn’t. Ronnie was never again overscheduled abroad. Extra days would be added to make sure the president made his way across time zones in a leisurely fashion, with time to adjust and arrive rested. When Ronnie traveled to China in 1984, for instance, Nancy decreed that they proceed slowly across the Pacific, with a stop in California, a few days in Hawaii, and a night in Guam before heading to Beijing. It paid off. Ronnie did well in his meetings with top Chinese officials and pronounced that the two countries had reached “a new level of understanding.” Deaver still managed to arrange for some of the visuals that were his trademark. Ronnie and Nancy strolled on the Great Wall and made a visit to see the life-size terra-cotta warriors excavated near Xi�
��an, the cradle of Chinese civilization. They also took a trip to a child care center. That became the pattern. Cannon wrote later that Ronnie “was a relaxed and effective performer on the three major foreign trips he took during a seven-month period from mid-November 1983 through mid-June 1984, all planned as events in his reelection campaign.”

  * * *

  If taking care of Ronnie’s physical well-being was at the top of what Nancy regarded as her chief duties as a first lady, keeping an eye on those around him was a close second. Ronnie was discomfited by infighting and uninterested in internal intrigue. Not one to nurse grudges, he was generous with offering second chances. He was also a famously detached manager, taking little interest in details so long as he believed his overall vision was being carried out. As he told Fortune magazine in 1986: “I believe, first of all, that you surround yourself with the best people you can find, and you delegate authority, and you don’t interfere.”

  Nancy approached things from the opposite point of view. For her, confidence was a precious and perishable commodity. It was to be earned, not assumed, and withdrawn at the first inkling of doubt. “I don’t get involved in how to balance the budget or how to reduce the deficit or foreign affairs or whatever, but I do get involved in people issues,” she said. “I think I’m aware of people who are trying to take advantage of my husband, who are trying to end-run him.”

  But it is among the oldest of Washington truisms that “people issues” are policy. Controlling who is in the room when there is a decision to be made or advice to be given can preordain the outcome. That is why the city’s favorite spectator sport has always been figuring out who’s in and who’s out. And no first lady in memory was more in the middle of White House personnel matters than Nancy Reagan.

  She was not the political naif that she had been when she arrived in Sacramento. After eight years as a governor’s wife and two grueling presidential campaigns, she had a far better understanding of both the extent and the limits of her power. When Betty Ford was asked where she exercised her influence, she answered: “pillow talk.” Nancy knew that she had to do far more than whisper in her husband’s ear to get her way. She picked her shots, chose with care her allies and her weapons, and learned to gauge whether patience or urgency better suited the challenge at hand. Ronnie’s personal aide, Jim Kuhn, saw Nancy in action many times. “She knew how to lay the groundwork. She knew how to put things together. She knew how far she could go with ‘Ronnie.’ She knew what she could get away with,” he said. Nancy acknowledged as much. “Does the president sometimes say no to me? Sure,” she told NBC’s Chris Wallace in 1985. “Does his no always end it? Not always. I’ll wait a little while; then I’ll come back at him again.”