The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  As the years have gone by, appreciation has grown for the role that she played in her husband’s success. Among those who have acknowledged how essential she became was Richard Neustadt, considered the preeminent scholar of the American presidency. Neustadt, a liberal, advised every Democratic president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton and was a founder of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He saw Nancy as a vital player in Ronnie’s presidency because she had “a good ear and a fine eye.” She let neither political ideology nor personal attachment cloud her judgment in that regard. “Her husband’s close associates, however valuable or liked or even loved, were to be sacrificed, in her view, from the moment their continuation on the scene could compromise the president’s public relations,” Neustadt wrote, adding, “When it came to people, her targets seem well chosen, aim unerring, and timing right for someone who must wait for someone else to pull the trigger.” Every president, Neustadt added, would do well to follow this principle: “Never let your Nancy be immobilized.”

  Sometimes Nancy also had to dissuade her husband from doing things that appealed to his principles but had the potential to hurt him politically. In 1986, for instance, during a meeting with White House counsel Peter Wallison, Ronnie raised the idea of not disclosing his tax returns the following year. Though letting the country take a look at them is not required by law, Jimmy Carter had set a precedent for presidents to do so voluntarily. Nixon released his too, but only after those for one year were leaked. Ronnie complained that it was an unfair expectation of presidents, because average citizens did not have to make theirs public. Withholding their release would not benefit Ronnie much. He had less than two years left in office. But he contended that setting a new precedent would be helpful to whoever followed him in the White House.

  Wallison was about to argue that this break with normal practice would be hard to explain. Americans would not see it as a principled stand but rather a sign that Ronnie had something to hide. Before Wallison could make that point, however, Nancy beat him to it. “She could not bear the thought of the criticism such a step would bring, she said, and Reagan backed off,” Wallison recalled. “Every president, no matter how good his political instincts, needs someone to bring him back to reality on occasion, and Ronald Reagan—a president with a particularly idealistic streak—was especially in need of this kind of counsel.” So, the tradition of releasing presidential tax returns would remain unbroken for the next thirty years, until celebrity real estate developer Donald Trump was elected despite refusing to hand over his.

  Nancy was Ronnie’s early-warning system, determined to spot potential problems before they had a chance to become attached to him. “It really reaches a point where something’s gone much too far, in my opinion. So it seems to me, sometimes, that if you can catch it before it reaches that point where a lot of people are maybe hurt, then it’s easier to stop it right in the beginning, rather than let it build up a head of steam,” she said.

  That meant she had to be a consummate gatherer of information. Ronnie rarely made a telephone call, except when his advisers asked him to. Nancy was on the line constantly, working her network. She watched the president’s popularity closely and pored over the numbers in private sessions with his pollster, Richard Wirthlin. She was also vigilant about his coverage, devouring newspapers and newsmagazines, as well as what was being said on the nightly television broadcasts. During the day, Cable News Network, the twenty-four-hour channel that launched in June 1980, was on constantly in the residence. The first lady also went through thousands of pictures taken by the official White House staff photographers, tearing off the top-right corners of ones she found unflattering and writing “O.K., per N.R.” on images she deemed suitable for public release.

  Aides learned early not to try to wing it when Nancy interrogated them, because the chances were, if she asked a question, she already had an inkling of the answer from one of her other sources. “I always said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’ll find out,’ ” said her special assistant, Jane Erkenbeck. The first lady also wanted things done immediately. It would take Erkenbeck five minutes to get from the residence to her office in the East Wing. By the time she reached her desk, the phone was often ringing. Nancy was on the line, wanting to know whether her assistant had gotten the information or done the task of the moment. “I learned from her that things can be done very quickly. Especially when you say, ‘I’m calling for Mrs. Reagan,’ things get done,” Erkenbeck laughed.

  “There was always something wrong, always something wrong,” said Kuhn. In the office of Ronnie’s executive assistant, the phone had lines marked WH1 and WH2. When Kuhn saw WH1 light up late in the afternoon, he knew it was Nancy—and that she wasn’t calling to congratulate him on what a good job he was doing. Sometimes Kuhn would hear a long pause on the line when he picked it up. Nancy wasn’t going to tell him what was bothering her; she expected him to know and to tell her how it was being fixed. “Oh yeah, Mrs. Reagan, that thing didn’t go so well…” Kuhn would say.

  Her quirks and demands added to the stress of those around her husband. On overseas trips, a seat in the motorcade had to be saved for her hairdresser, which sometimes meant someone on the official staff had to find another means of transportation. Her forays into the West Wing, though relatively rare, were greeted with terror. But as difficult as she could be when she was worried or mad, Nancy was also the most valuable of partners for the top officials who recognized her power. She was indispensable when it came to convincing Ronnie to do something—or not to—if she could be persuaded that was in his best interest.

  In the internecine battles that were constantly going on within the tense and divided West Wing, Nancy usually sided with Baker and Deaver, who often infuriated conservatives by pushing Ronnie in a more moderate direction. “Whenever we had something we wanted to convince the Gipper of, we would try to enlist her support. When we’d get her support, we had a good shot at it,” Baker told me. “She didn’t want his goals subverted by ideology. She was a pragmatist, and she understood that we judge our presidents on the basis of what they can get accomplished, and so she was for those of us who wanted to get things done.” Their united front often isolated Ed Meese, the third member of the White House troika and the most ideological.

  None of which meant that she always won. Nor did she expect to. “Nancy Reagan had a better understanding than the entourage, a better understanding even than Deaver or [political strategist] Spencer, of how difficult it was to persuade her husband to oppose his instincts or his ideology,” Lou Cannon wrote. “Reagan often did not ask the right questions, or any questions at all, which made it possible to manipulate him or lead him down paths where he did not wish to go. But he did not like to be pushed by anyone, not even Nancy Reagan.”

  Still, Nancy had a keen sense of where the defenses were weak. She knew when to plant an idea herself, and when it was more effective to recruit others to do it for her. She knew when to pressure her husband, and when to withdraw and regroup. What she rarely did was give up. In 1982, the year after he won his huge tax cut, Ronnie was under pressure to reverse himself and strike a budget deal with Congress that included what was one of the largest tax hikes in US history. The legislation would restore one-third of the reductions signed into law the year before. Baker and Deaver decided that the president should sign it; that it was needed as a corrective to having gone too far in 1981. As Baker recalled, they feared that leaving the tax reductions in place would worsen and prolong the recession: “We cut taxes way beyond where we said we were going to do in the campaign because we got into a bidding war with the Democrats, and then we had to come back and recoup some of them. The Gipper didn’t want to do it. We all thought we needed to because we were afraid the markets were going to punish us.”

  Baker and Deaver convinced Nancy that it was crucial to change Ronnie’s mind on this, so she too started pressuring her husband to sign the legislation. “We finally got him to do it b
ecause she joined with us. We were united,” Baker said. But Ronnie wasn’t happy. He took his glasses off and threw them across the top of his desk. “All right. Goddamn it. I’m going to do it,” the president said. “But it’s wrong.” The tax hike was sold as “tax reform” rather than what it really was, which was an about-face on a signature issue of his presidency. Under fire from conservatives, Ronnie defended his decision to sign the bill as “the price we had to pay” to get Congress to go along with further spending cuts. But lawmakers reneged on their promise to trim spending by $3 for every $1 they raised taxes, and signing the bill turned out to be one of Ronnie’s greatest regrets. It became one of Baker’s, too: “He was right, and we were wrong.”

  Nancy would weigh in frequently when she was concerned that Ronnie was becoming too closely associated with highly ideological or unpopular causes. Baker noted: “She was with us on actions that tended to dull the hard edge that some [urged] on him—hard-core right-wingers particularly. Abortion was a tough issue for us. He was a strong right-to-lifer, but you didn’t see him going down and marching with Nellie Gray,” the antiabortion activist who founded the annual “March for Life.” The demonstration took place each year around the January 22 anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the country. Tens of thousands of antiabortion activists from across the United States would show up for it, braving frigid winter temperatures on the National Mall just south of the White House. Gray’s organizers were eager to have Ronnie speak to the crowd in person, which would have provided a powerful and indelible image in the media. Nancy preferred for him to keep his distance.

  There is no evidence that Nancy tried to change her husband’s mind on the abortion issue itself—nor could she have, given his deep convictions on it. But he already had the Christian Right firmly in his corner; to emphasize his opposition to abortion would only serve to alienate the majority of voters who had more conflicted feelings about it or who supported keeping it legal. So, she helped Baker and Deaver persuade Ronnie to address the March for Life by telephone from inside the White House, with his remarks broadcast over a loudspeaker. It set a precedent for Republican presidents. Not until Donald Trump in 2020 would one show up to speak to the marchers in person.

  Abortion foes were disappointed at how little Ronnie talked about the issue at all. As the president and his advisers were working on the 1987 State of the Union address at Camp David, Ronnie mentioned that he would like to add a line about abortion. Speechwriter Ken Khachigian recalled that Nancy, who was standing behind her husband when he proposed this idea, shook her head vigorously in opposition. According to Don Regan, who by then had replaced Jim Baker as chief of staff, the first lady was even blunter in a comment she made to him: “I don’t give a damn about the right-to-lifers.” At any rate, the State of the Union address that year made no mention of abortion. As noted earlier, it was not until 1994, more than five years after Ronnie left office, that Nancy would air her own differences with her husband on the subject. “I’m against abortion,” she said during an appearance before a George Washington University class. “On the other hand, I believe in a woman’s choice.”

  Nancy also dreaded Ronnie appearing before the raucous gatherings of the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an annual convention, begun in 1974, where the Right came together to exult in its influence. “She couldn’t stand that group,” said presidential assistant Kuhn. “She would go to the dinners, yes. They were really pushy, and they felt like they owned Reagan.” What annoyed Nancy most was that in CPAC’s own telling of history, it helped create Ronald Reagan. She felt the opposite was true. Kuhn recalled the first lady telling Ronnie after one CPAC event: “They’re here because of you. You’re not here because of them. Not one bit.”

  Within the White House, Nancy was wary of those who wanted her husband to stand inflexibly on principle. That included some of Ronnie’s truest believers. There was no one more loyal to Ronnie than presidential counselor Meese. From Sacramento on, he had been among the greatest boosters of the idea of Ronnie as the Moses who could lead American conservatism to the promised land. While officials in the White House such as budget director David Stockman and staff secretary Richard Darman privately slighted the president’s intellect and abilities, Meese would acknowledge no defect or weakness in this modern prophet. He once told a reporter: “On background, I want to say that the president is really doing a wonderful job.” But to Nancy, putting Ronnie on a pedestal for the Right to worship him was only setting him up for a fall. She also shared her husband’s view that getting part of what he wanted through compromise was better than walking away with nothing at all. “Ed and I were never close,” she wrote of Meese. “He was by far the most ideological member of the troika, a jump-off-the-cliff-with-the-flag-flying conservative. Some people are so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather lose than win a partial victory, and I always felt that Meese was one of them.”

  Nor did it help that Meese did not always show the best judgment when it came to maintaining the president’s image as a decisive and in-command leader. In August 1981 two navy F-14 fighter jets engaged in an air battle off the coast of Libya and shot down two Libyan fighters. It was late at night in the United States, and Meese made the decision not to wake Ronnie for another five and a half hours. Nancy did not forgive Meese for the ridicule that followed. “There are only two reasons you wake President Reagan: World War III and if Hellcats of the Navy is on the Late Show,” television host Johnny Carson joked. Early in Ronnie’s second term, Meese moved over to the Justice Department as attorney general. It was a happier fit all around, allowing him to pursue his chief passion, which was translating conservative philosophy into concrete social policies.

  During the Reagan years, the senior White House aides and Cabinet secretaries who fared the best tended to be the ones who figured out how to deal with Nancy’s concerns and who respected her instincts about what was best for Ronnie. There is a long list of those who did not, and her unseen hand was behind many of their departures. Most famous would be her epic battle in late 1986 and early 1987 to oust White House chief of staff Don Regan during the Iran-contra scandal. But by then, she had become well practiced in the art of making her internal adversaries disappear.

  The first of them had been short-lived national security adviser Richard Allen, who resigned in January 1982 amid the controversy over the payment from a Japanese magazine that was stashed in his safe. Nancy was even less enamored with Allen’s hard-line successor, William Clark, who had been Ronnie’s chief of staff in the California governor’s office. But given her husband’s long relationship with Clark, she had to be patient. As George Shultz, the secretary of state who later became one of her most important allies, wrote: “Ronald Reagan, with his soft heart, would never fire Clark, but at some point, Nancy would prevail upon him to act in his own interest.” Nancy sensed that she would not have to wait him out for long. Clark himself had a restless nature, and an opportunity to move out of the White House came along thanks to an opening created by the departure of James Watt as interior secretary.

  Gaffe-prone Watt was another hiring blunder on Ronnie’s part—and another one that Nancy helped to rectify. He was a nightmare for environmentalists and a running embarrassment for the administration. In 1983 Watt banned the Beach Boys, a beloved American rock-and-roll treasure, from playing at the annual Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall. Though they had performed there for the previous three years, Watt said they might attract the “wrong element.” In their place, he said, would be a “wholesome program” featuring Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton. The White House Press Office let it be known that Nancy had personally called Watt to let him know that she was a Beach Boys fan. The secretary of the interior emerged from his next meeting with Ronnie carrying a plaster of paris foot with a hole in it. And indeed, he had shot himself in the foot. To deepen his mortification, Nancy invited the band to headline an event at t
he White House for the Special Olympics on June 12. The Beach Boys dedicated their opening song, “California Girls,” to the first lady. Ronnie joked that they had shown up early for Independence Day and told them: “If you didn’t believe that our whole family had been fans of yours for a long time, just look at Nancy.”

  Not such a laughing matter was Watt’s comment at a September 21 US Chamber of Commerce breakfast, where he proclaimed the administration’s coal advisory commission had “every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple. And we have talent.” Senator Paul Laxalt, who had been a sponsor and defender of Watt, was soon on the phone with Nancy to discuss who might replace him. With internal polling showing that the interior secretary had become a drag on Ronnie’s reelection chances, Watt was gone by mid-October.

  Bill Clark stepped into the job, which meant that Nancy saw two problems solved at once. Watt was gone entirely, and, at least as importantly to her, Clark was out of the White House. “In Reagan’s mind, he was Cabinet, he was still part of the team,” Kuhn said, “and as far as Nancy’s concerned, he can’t do too much harm, hopefully.” She also knew that Clark would soon get antsy again. By early 1985, he decided he’d had enough of Washington. He told Ronnie that he wanted to return to his barley and cattle ranch in California rather than stick around for the second term.