The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  There were others. What was right, in Nancy’s view, was less important than what was necessary. Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan stepped down in March 1985 as he was being investigated for fraud and grand larceny. Nancy was glad to see him go. “In politics, even the appearance of wrongdoing can be enormously damaging. I could see that this was going to be a long, drawn-out ordeal which would severely limit Donovan’s effectiveness in the Cabinet,” Nancy wrote. “The Donovan affair, which dragged on for months, was draining both to Ronnie personally and to the office of the president. Donovan resigned when the indictment was handed down, but as I told Ronnie on any number of occasions, it would have been better for everyone if he’d stepped down earlier.” Two years later, Donovan would be acquitted and ask the plaintive question: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” While Nancy felt sorry for him, she did not regret pushing for his removal. “When a political appointee turns out to be more of a problem than an asset, even if it’s not his fault, he should step aside,” she contended.

  Getting rid of Secretary of State Al Haig had been another project on Nancy’s to-do list. The retired four-star army general and former NATO commander had a reputation as a self-promoting leaker, prone to saying disparaging things about Ronnie to make himself look good. No doubt Nancy was also put off by the fact that Haig did not bother to hide his own presidential ambitions. The first lady would write later that the appointment of power-hungry Haig was “Ronnie’s biggest mistake in the first term.”

  In her memoir, Nancy delivered a long bill of particulars: “Haig was obsessed with matters of status—with exactly where he stood on a receiving line, or where he was seated on a plane or helicopter. If he didn’t think his seat was important enough, he’d let you know. He had a prickly personality and was always complaining that he was being slighted.

  “He also struck me as eager for military action. In the first month of Ronnie’s administration, he apparently implied to Tip O’Neill that he wanted to invade Nicaragua. Tip, and many others in Washington, assumed that Haig spoke for Ronnie. But in reality, Haig alarmed Ronnie and his top advisers with his belligerent rhetoric. Once, talking about Cuba in a meeting of the National Security Council, he turned to Ronnie and said, ‘You just give me the word, and I’ll turn that f_____ island into a parking lot.’

  “If Ronnie had given him the green light, Haig would have bombed everybody and everything.”

  She was far from the only one in the White House who wanted Haig out. He had gotten the job in part on a memo of recommendation from Richard Nixon. Ronnie’s diaries show that the secretary of state was an irritant from the start, constantly testing the president’s patience. After one of his early phone calls with Haig, Ronnie wrote in his diary: “He talked of resigning. Frankly I think he’s seeing things that aren’t there. He’s Sec. of St. and no one is intruding on his turf—foreign policy is his, but he has half the Cabinet teed off.”

  Eventually Haig threatened to quit one too many times. Ronnie finally took him up on it in June 1982. The president noted wryly and with relief in his diary: “Up to Camp David where we were in time to see Al read his letter of resignation on TV. I’m told it was his 4th rewrite. Apparently his 1st letter was pretty strong—then he thought better of it. I must say it was O.K. He gave only one reason and did say there was a disagreement on foreign policy. Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec. of State did.”

  George Shultz, who replaced Haig, was a man of accomplishments deep and broad: PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; former dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; secretary of labor, budget director, and Treasury secretary in the Nixon administration; followed by a stint as the president of the global engineering firm Bechtel Corporation. When Shultz replaced the hard-line Haig as the nation’s chief diplomat, he was shrewd enough to use his diplomatic skills on the influential first lady as well. He quickly became a personal favorite of Nancy’s and is one of the few top Reagan administration officials that she wrote about with unbridled admiration in her memoir My Turn: “I trusted George completely; if he said it was raining, I didn’t have to look out the window.”

  Beyond her protectiveness and vigilance, there were other things people noticed about how Nancy dealt with those around her husband. “She was tougher on women that worked with him and for him than she was on men,” her son, Ron, told me. “Men she got along with pretty well, unless they did something that really crossed her or him. Women, she was much more wary of.” Ron suspected there might have been some “totally unfounded paranoia” on Nancy’s part, given that while his father did not disguise his appreciation of female beauty, he was “the last person on the face of the earth who would ever have cheated on his wife.” One of the women with whom she waged a long-running cold war was the comely Helene von Damm, who had been Ronnie’s secretary in Sacramento. Von Damm did that same job briefly after he became president and then moved to a loftier post running the Office of Presidential Personnel for the next two years. She was part of the dwindling old crowd from California, a hard-line conservative, and she considered Nancy “a schemer married to someone who was unable to conceive of a Machiavellian thought.”

  Nancy was furious when Ronnie appointed his former secretary as ambassador to von Damm’s native Austria in 1983. To Ronnie, it was the culmination of an inspiring story about an immigrant who endured Soviet occupation and came to America with dreams of a better life. Von Damm was an early believer in Ronnie and moved across the country to volunteer for his first gubernatorial campaign. At the State Department, however, Austria experts were skeptical that von Damm was the right pick to represent the United States in a country known for its adherence to propriety. The first lady summoned von Damm to the residence for a “private talk” and told her to turn down the ambassadorship. Nancy said the president needed von Damm to stay in her current job and added that maybe there might be another assignment for her in the future.

  “I could only conclude that for some reason this posting was something she simply didn’t want me to have. Apparently, in her eyes, my career had progressed far enough. I felt as if someone had slapped me in the face,” von Damm wrote later. Nancy never took another one of her calls. Nor did the first lady go with Ronnie to von Damm’s swearing-in in the State Dining Room.

  Once in the job, von Damm did some impressive work, bringing Frank Sinatra to Vienna for a charity concert and building goodwill by helping with projects for schools and museums. She was regarded, as she once put it, like “a homecoming queen.” But she kept hearing from her sources back in Washington that Nancy was still working to undermine her. “Her position was hardening toward me: more and more with each new success I achieved,” von Damm recalled.

  Then again, perhaps Nancy’s instincts were right once again. Von Damm got tongues wagging in Vienna when she left her third husband to marry young and wealthy Peter Gürtler, the owner of the city’s famous Hotel Sacher. The ambassador was also photographed wearing a shockingly low-cut gown to the Vienna Opera Ball. Her defense was that décolletage is an old tradition at the ball, and “anything less would have seemed underdressed.” Shultz finally told her that the president thought it would be a good idea for her to step down. When von Damm resigned in July 1985, Newsweek’s headline proclaimed “Die Playgirl Bows Out!” On top of everything, Gürtler left her not long after. He remarried, and shot himself to death in 1990.

  Von Damm was not the only woman in the administration to feel a chilly vibe from Nancy. Chief of protocol Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, a daughter of Lebanese Druze immigrants who was married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, recalled Deaver telling her: “Lucky, there’s one thing you have to understand about Nancy. She doesn’t really like dealing with women—she prefers to deal with men. Don’t eat your heart out worrying about how Nancy feels about you or what you are doing. If you don’t get any complaints, you can assume you’re okay.” Perhaps as a result of t
hat warning, Roosevelt felt too intimidated to follow another piece of advice that Deaver gave her. He told her to call Nancy regularly, just to talk, because the first lady would love hearing the latest that Roosevelt was picking up from the social circles of New York and Washington. On the few occasions she did, Roosevelt was surprised at how friendly Nancy was and how happy she seemed to hear from her.

  In 1990 Roosevelt wrote a memoir that made headlines with its criticism of Nancy, whom she described as “on guard, suspicious of anyone she thought was trying to use or manipulate her.” But nearly three decades later, Roosevelt told me that she had grown to realize that she hadn’t really understood Nancy and regretted having written those passages. “She really would have warmed up to me if I had made the effort to warm up to her,” Roosevelt said. “I never had a chance to correct the misconceptions in my book.… The only part of that book I don’t feel good about is my estimation of her.”

  For all her hostility toward the media, Nancy also selected a few favorites among journalists, for whom she became a source of tidbits and insights about the internal workings of the White House. First among them was columnist George F. Will. “The person that all of us giggled about was George Will. I think she had a big crush on him,” Nancy’s brother, Dick, told me. “They would have lunch together. It was all out in the open, but still. One Christmas, she left the president and my family alone. We were up in the living quarters, and she was downstairs showing George Will all the Christmas presents, the big cake, and so on and so forth.” Kuhn recalled an instance when the ever-punctual Ronnie got impatient with his wife for delaying the liftoff of their helicopter so that she could finish a chat she was having with Will about thirty yards away. “Goddamn Sam, what’s going on here?” Reagan asked Kuhn. “What the hell are they talking about?” Nancy also once had Kuhn personally deliver a Valentine card to Will’s house.

  “We had lots of lunches together. We went lots of places. We had lunch set up in Gunston Hall in Northern Virginia, George Mason’s house,” Will told me. (Mason, a statesman and delegate to the US Constitutional Convention of 1787, played an important if undersung role in the early United States.) “We spent a lot of time together; toured the battlefield at Bull Run.” Nancy would also slip away from Camp David to have lunches with Will at the historic Yellow Brick Bank Restaurant in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. At a state dinner for Indonesian president Suharto in the fall of 1982, Nancy made sure Will was put at Ronnie’s table. “This was a big honor, and all that stuff, and I hated it, because it was full of people just taking turns telling the president how wonderful he was, which bored him and bored everyone else,” the columnist recalled. Will refused to go to another, until December 1988, when Nancy was able to lure him to one for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with a promise that she would seat Will, a consummate baseball fan, with Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio.

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  Pretty much everyone who was in the know in Washington sensed Nancy’s hand at work when Will wrote a scathing column in early 1986 about George H. W. Bush. It was a critical time for the vice president. With Ronnie in his second term, his Number Two was trying to lay the groundwork for his own run for the presidency. Will declared that Bush lacked any core principle beyond his unbridled desire for the top job: “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny ‘arf’—the sound of a lapdog.”

  Nancy’s distaste for the Bushes, which had been so evident on the convention stage the night Ronnie selected his pick for the 1980 ticket, had not abated. Nancy’s and Barbara’s hostility toward each other was one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. “It’s too bad, but it was what it was. No doubt about it, it was not a warm and friendly relationship,” James Baker told me. “The Bushes felt that Nancy treated Barbara rather shabbily.”

  One explanation—perhaps the simplest—is that the acrid taste of the 1980 primary battle between their husbands still lingered for both women. It was always clear to Nancy which of the two men Barbara thought should be sitting in the Oval Office rather than attending funerals of foreign leaders as a stand-in for the other. “I think in politics, the political wives often form more lasting animosities than their husband-competitors do,” Will speculated, when I asked him about the rivalry. “I’ve always thought that the reason you don’t want women in combat is they wouldn’t obey the rules of order. They’re too fierce.”

  George H. W. Bush told his biographer Jon Meacham that the tone of the relationship had been set early. He got a startling visit right after the 1980 election from Kitchen Cabinet member William Wilson. “It turned out he was carrying water for Nancy on this. The message was, ‘Stay out of the paper, get a lower profile, back down. Tell the Shrubs to keep a lower profile,’ ” Bush said. “We weren’t taking a high profile, not doing the Washington thing of saying this or that, and it burned me up, and it burned Barbara up. She was very unhappy about it, deservedly so. We couldn’t back down if we hadn’t backed forward. We hadn’t done anything. Hadn’t done a damn thing. And I was very careful about that, always. Still don’t know what drove that. But Nancy and Barbara just did not have a pleasant relationship.”

  If Nancy wanted the Bushes to keep their heads down, it may have been in reaction to the vice president’s undisguised ambition to run in 1988 for the job he had failed to win in 1980. Nancy was suspicious that Bush put his own future ambitions above the imperative of contributing to Ronnie’s current success, and that the Bushes were counting the days until the Reagans would leave. She also told family members of one conversation with Barbara that offended and infuriated her. During the Iran-contra scandal, the lowest point of the Reagan presidency, Barbara suggested that Ronnie should consider the possibility of resigning, Nancy claimed. That way, the vice president could assume the nation’s highest office and then run in 1988 as an incumbent. It is hard to imagine that even blunt-spoken Barbara Bush would have been so direct and insensitive at what was a fragile moment for the Reagans. But the fact that Nancy took whatever Barbara did say that way, or that Barbara might have implied anything that could be so interpreted, spoke to the depth of their mutual mistrust.

  The tensions put White House chief of staff Jim Baker, who was also Bush’s closest friend and adviser, in a difficult spot. “When I first went in there, I bent over backward to make sure everybody knew that my loyalty was with Ronald Reagan and not with George Bush, but I also did everything I could behind the scenes to help the vice president, like making sure he had a private meeting with the president every week,” Baker said. “They cemented a really wonderful relationship. He was the perfect vice president. You never saw him out there being quoted on anything. He never said anything in internal meetings because he knew nothing was secret, and so he always gave his recommendations [privately] to the president. The president came to really rely on him.” The real problem, Baker insisted, was not between the president and the vice president, but between their wives.

  In talking to people who had known both women, I sensed that there were undercurrents deeper than politics to their enmity. Pretty much everything about Barbara Bush triggered Nancy’s insecurities, her sense of inadequacy and self-doubt. The vice president’s wife was an old-money WASP who could trace her ancestry to the Mayflower. Nancy would always be associated with the parvenu culture of Hollywood. Where Nancy got torn apart by the media, she complained to friends that Barbara was bathed with glowing coverage. It annoyed Nancy that stories about Barbara never seemed to mention that she, like the first lady, had a closet full of expensive designer dresses. (“I wonder if it ever occurred to her that George Bush paid for my clothes,” rather than accepting donations from designers, Barbara fumed in her diary.) And then there was the fact that the Bushes were a constant reminder of what a tight-knit, functional family looked like.

  “Nancy does not like Barbara,” George Bush wrote in his journal in June 1988. “She feels that Barbara has the very things that she, Nancy, doesn’t hav
e, and that she’ll never be in Barbara’s class.… Bar has sensed it for a long time. Barbara is so generous, so kind, so unselfish, and, frankly, I think Nancy Reagan is jealous of her.” That is a testament to Bush’s admiration for his wife, but not exactly a full picture of Barbara’s character. Despite her image as America’s grandmother, Barbara Bush had a sharp tongue, an imperious manner, and instilled fear in those around her. “Barbara could be kind of a bulldozer in private, and you weren’t going to shove Nancy Reagan around,” recalled Ronnie’s assistant Jim Kuhn.

  In public appearances, Barbara Bush often made jokes about the comparison between her own frumpy wardrobe and Nancy’s glamorous outfits. Her self-deprecating schtick had an unmistakable edge. Once, on a 1986 trip to New Hampshire, Barbara went back to the press section of Air Force Two and entertained the reporters there with a brutal imitation of the first lady. The Washington Post’s Lou Cannon later warned Barbara that a lot of people had heard this, which meant it was certain to get back to Nancy through her extensive network of internal spies. Barbara replied: “I know.”

  The Bushes were almost never invited to the White House residence while the Reagans were living there. On Christmas Eve 1988, after George Bush was elected president, he told Edmund Morris that Ronnie was “a prince of a feller; I’d never say anything against him. Nancy neither.” But then there was a pause, as he and Barbara exchanged glances. “Well, sometimes,” the president elect confided, “I kinda wished they’d shown… y’know, a little appreciation. Didn’t seem to want us upstairs in the White House.”