The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Not much happened, however, until early 1982. Turner was preoccupied with carrying out Ronnie’s order that he clean up the drug problem in the military. Nancy was concerned with her husband’s recuperation from the assassination attempt and finishing up her redecoration of the White House. She had scheduled a few events around the issue in the early months of Ronnie’s presidency, but they had been infrequent and generally got lost in all the negative coverage of her china purchase, her wardrobe, and the White House makeover.

  With the arrival of Ronnie’s second year in office, fixing Nancy’s image problems had become a priority, though some top officials at the White House had misgivings about a first lady taking on a battle as dark and seemingly unwinnable as fighting drug abuse. Turner told Nancy’s staff that the first thing she should do is get out of “this firing range”—the DC media—and “get out to where the real people live. You need to get her out to where people can see and she can feel.” On his advice, Nancy took a two-day swing through Florida and Texas in February. It was only her second big trip on her own as first lady, the first having been the PR disaster of the royal wedding the previous summer.

  In Saint Petersburg, she visited a facility for Straight Inc., one of the most well known of a growing number of programs around the country that took a “tough love” approach to young drug users. The kids, many of whom had been brought to the program against their will by their parents, were strip-searched on arrival and could not even go to the bathroom without being monitored. Straight Inc. was becoming controversial for using allegedly abusive tactics on young people and had already been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union.

  Nancy—accompanied by almost a dozen Secret Service agents, 20 members of the press, and 3 aides—met for nearly three hours in a hot auditorium with 650 parents and 350 kids enrolled in the Straight program. What she heard was horrifying and heartbreaking. Asked whether they had ever gotten their younger brothers or sisters high, more than half of the young people raised their hands. Some said they had also given drugs to their pets and to children they babysat. Most also admitted to having been arrested or overdosing. They told of being high at the dinner table and hiding narcotics under a parent’s mattress. Nearly all of them said they had started with pot. Each of their testimonies ended with the words “I am a druggie.”

  It was a cathartic event, punctuated by tearful apologies on the part of the children and forgiving hugs from their families. Nancy “just cried. I mean, she just balled up and cried. And you could see the emotion flowing out of her,” Turner said. “She really knew she was doing something right. She had it in her gut that she was doing something right, and she had to do it.” Something else happened, Turner added: “In the plane back from Dallas, this transformation occurred. She went out and talked to the press on her own. That’s the first time. She felt secure.”

  News about Nancy was all over local and national newspapers and on television. And for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t negative. A picture of the first lady surrounded by children in a school classroom spread across three columns of the front page of the New York Times. In the Washington Post, reporter Donnie Radcliffe wrote that Nancy “was finally being noticed more for her social awareness than her social life” and had “scored some stunning media successes as she observed the drug abuse programs. After months of publicity about her tastes in clothes, china, and White House redecorating had been contrasted with the country’s growing economic problems, the first lady’s often-stated interest in drug abuse prevention was claiming the headlines.”

  The morning after she returned from the trip, her staff took advantage of the new glow around Nancy to clean up one controversy that lingered. They announced that the first lady had decided she would no longer accept free designer clothes, because people were “misinterpreting” her efforts to draw a spotlight to the American fashion industry. (It was a promise she would break.)

  Then her aides set about filling her schedule with more trips to promote her antidrug campaign. Nancy was soon venturing out across the country just about every other week, hitting sixty-five cities in thirty-five states over the course of her years as first lady. In 1983 she played herself on NBC’s popular situation comedy Diff’rent Strokes, starring fourteen-year-old Gary Coleman, which had an audience of twenty-eight million and was the most popular show in the country among children between the ages of six and eleven. That same year, she shared anchoring duties on a broadcast of ABC’s Good Morning America that was devoted entirely to the subject of drug abuse. With popular actor Michael Landon, who had starred on the long-running Little House on the Prairie, she cohosted a two-part program called The Chemical People that aired on three hundred public television stations. The number of community-based antidrug groups across the country tripled to three thousand. Nancy was also getting a thousand letters a month on the issue, which accounted for half the correspondence she received. “I’ve tried to get the message across through hundreds of interviews, tapings, speeches, events, and visits,” she said in a speech to newspaper publishers in May 1987. “Every mile, every meeting has been worth it. My work against drugs has provided me with the most fulfilling years of my life.”

  Nancy also took her message global. In 1985 she hosted drug abuse “summits” at the White House and at the United Nations for dozens of wives of world leaders. These sessions were not without their moments of awkwardness and tension. Nicaraguan first lady Rosario Maria Murillo—whose husband, President Daniel Ortega, had been branded by Ronnie as “the little dictator who went to Moscow in his green fatigues”—told Nancy categorically that her country had no drug problem, thanks to its Marxist form of government. In truth, Nicaragua had a thriving cocaine trafficking industry, some of which was linked to top officials in Ortega’s own government. The year before, DEA agents in Florida had seized 1,452 pounds of cocaine that had been flown in there from the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.

  In October 1988, near the end of Ronnie’s presidency, Nancy addressed the United Nations as the leader of the US delegation to a session on youth, families, and crime prevention. For someone who disliked speech making, this was a daunting moment. She was accompanied by George Shultz, who recalled that she insisted upon arriving an hour early. When she took her seat in the chamber, she noticed that it was nearly empty. Nancy turned to the secretary of state, her eyes brimming with tears. “George,” she asked, “doesn’t anybody want to hear what I have to say?”

  “Don’t worry, Nancy,” he assured her. “When it’s your turn, this place will be jammed.”

  Shultz was right. The delegates showed up and were spellbound. But the message that Nancy was there to deliver caused heartburn within her husband’s administration. Where US officials had been pushing Asian and Latin American countries to get tougher on cutting off the supply of drugs coming into the United States, Nancy contended it was time for this country to quit blaming other ones for a homegrown problem. “Frankly, it is far easier for the United States to focus on coca fields grown by three hundred thousand campesinos in Peru than to shut down the dealer who can be found on the street corners of our cities,” she told the UN delegates. “It is often easier to make strong speeches about foreign drug lords or drug smugglers than to arrest a pair of Wall Street investment bankers buying cocaine on their lunch break.”

  As Shultz recalled: “The drug bureaucracy in Washington went bananas.” Before her speech, administration officials had pressured Ronnie to get his wife to tone down her words. “She stuck to her guns,” Shultz said, and afterward, many of the delegates came up to her to thank her for her more balanced, honest view of the forces that were driving the drug market.

  Though she was getting plenty of attention, Nancy struggled against the doubts that many, particularly in elite and liberal circles, continued to hold with regard to her credibility to speak on such a thorny and serious problem. Views of her work also split along party lines. When a 1983 Washington Post survey asked whether she visited drug ce
nters “mostly to get better publicity for herself and her husband or mostly because she wants to help fight drug addiction,” 65 percent of Republicans gave her credit for caring about the cause, while only 41 percent of Democrats did. Independents were about evenly split.

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  The skepticism would never lift entirely, and some efforts to improve her image and achieve recognition became especially uncomfortable. In 1982 her alma mater, Smith College, received a discreet feeler from White House social secretary Muffie Brandon, another alumna: Might Smith consider giving Nancy an honorary degree for her “very strong, very respectable, very worthy” work against drug abuse? Over the years, Nancy’s relations with the increasingly progressive college had been strained. She stood apart as one of Smith’s most famous graduates. But she never attended reunions or participated in alumnae activities. She complained to friends that Smith had not reached out to her, either. Not until 1978 did she even write a check to the college, and her $1,000 donation was accompanied by a note complaining that the speakers invited to campus were “tilted in one direction without any attempt to provide a balance to give the students a chance to hear differing viewpoints.”

  The college turned down Brandon’s request to award Nancy an honorary degree, partly because it feared the first lady’s appearance on campus would spark protests over her husband’s policies. In a memo to Smith’s president, Jill Ker Conway, dated April 26, 1982, the college’s public affairs director, Ann Shanahan, described her conversation with Brandon this way:

  I said that we were trying very hard to think of the appropriate way to acknowledge her contribution as First Lady but that we had to consider the political climate, the cuts to Federal aid to education, etc., and that we didn’t want to invite her into a situation where she would be embarrassed by picketing, etc. Muffie said that they understood the difficulties but reiterated that she felt that by a year from now an honorary degree would be ‘very justifiable’ for her work on drug abuse. I said that such a decision was made at a higher level than mine, but that I would certainly pass the information along.

  Nancy was constantly asked how to square her concern about drug abuse with her husband’s cuts to programs that were designed to deal with that and other social problems. In the fall of 1982, she and retired All-Pro football star Carl Eller went to Little Rock’s Central High School. It was the site of a famous 1957 showdown between segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower, who federalized the state’s National Guard and deployed the US military to maintain order and protect nine African American students who were being denied entrance to the school, in violation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. On the day of Nancy’s visit, a local African American activist named Robert McIntosh showed up wearing a devil costume and a rubber Ronald Reagan mask. “If they are that concerned about our youth and their future, then why did the president use his presidential power and cut out millions of dollars in summer jobs that you could have had?” McIntosh asked a group of about fifty students who were milling around outside the school.

  Over and over, Nancy would reply to this kind of criticism with some version of a response she gave during a radio talk show interview in Des Moines: “I’ve never thought that money buys parent involvement and care. I just don’t think money is the answer.”

  One quandary was how to brand her effort. It needed a slogan, maybe a catchword. Turner asked the National Institute on Drug Abuse to suggest something simple that would sum up the message. NIDA offered “Say no,” which seemed too blunt and terse. A New York advertising firm was also brought in. But, as the origin story goes, inspiration finally sprang from the mouth of a babe. At a meeting with schoolchildren in Oakland, a girl raised her hand and asked the first lady what she should do if somebody offered her drugs.

  “Well, you just say no,” Nancy told her.

  At the time, “it didn’t enter anyone’s mind that this would be the theme,” says James Rosebush. But that three-word slogan—“Just Say No”—caught on and was pushed in a massive public service advertising campaign. By the end of Nancy’s tenure as first lady, nearly fourteen thousand Just Say No clubs had formed in schools and youth organizations in all fifty states. Their total membership was estimated to be nearly 460,000 children, whose average age was nine years old. Nancy saw “Just Say No” as a mixed blessing. While it was memorable and catchy, she knew that it was also easy to dismiss as facile—and an unfairly glib summation of an effort that had many facets. “I never thought that the ‘Just Say No’ slogan would solve the drug problem. How silly!” she told syndicated columnist Liz Smith in 1990. “It was simply a phrase that caught on, but certainly there is much more to do about drugs. Public education and treatment centers are the answer.”

  Decades later, there remains a lot of doubt as to whether the “Just Say No” message really had an impact. Was social pressure an adequate substitute for putting more government resources into the fight to get children off drugs and keep them there? Did it portray drug use as a moral failure and personal choice rather than a mental-health concern? Was it family-friendly camouflage for the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” that incarcerated disproportionately large numbers of men of color?

  While the question of how effective her campaign was will never really be settled, there is significant evidence that drug use among the young dropped sharply during the 1980s. The Monitoring the Future project, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has been conducting surveys of the problem since 1975. In 1979 more than 54 percent of high school seniors said they had used an illicit drug within the past twelve months; by 1992, that number had fallen by nearly half. Young people’s attitudes about drug use shifted just as dramatically over that same period. Where only about a third of high school seniors in the late 1970s said they would disapprove of a friend trying marijuana, the percentage had more than doubled by the early 1990s.

  Among the admirers of Nancy’s efforts was Joseph A. Califano Jr., a prominent Democrat who served as top domestic policy adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson and health education and welfare secretary under Jimmy Carter. He is also the founder of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. “Just Say No” was more than empty words, Califano insisted. “It was a great message. It was simple, and it was clear, and it was what you wanted kids to do. It also sent a message to parents: ‘This is what you should be telling your kids.’ ” In 1995 Califano asked Nancy to join his board of directors, where she served for five years. Betty Ford was also a member. Califano always sensed a tension between the two former first ladies, rooted no doubt in their personal history but also in how they viewed the drug problem. Nancy wanted to see more emphasis on preventing drug abuse; Betty Ford, on treating it.

  Nancy also continued her involvement with the Foster Grandparents program, which she had promoted when she was California first lady. In late 1982 she and coauthor Jane Wilkie published a book, To Love a Child, to benefit the program. She also got Frank Sinatra to record a song with the same title. Her Hollywood connections—an asset that her predecessors did not have—were an important element in Nancy’s efforts to bring visibility to the projects that she cared about and that were helping to repair her image. Most prominent among those friends in the entertainment industry was Sinatra, who became a fixture at the Reagan White House, planning the entertainment and adding wattage to presidential events. Ronnie had less use for him, though, and the White House aides who had to deal with Sinatra found having him around to be more trouble than it was worth. He was there largely because of Nancy, who had been enamored with him since the days when they were both working on the MGM lot. “She twinkles when he arrives,” one friend told the Washington Post.

  This created no small amount of tension with Sinatra’s wife, Barbara, who was annoyed at all the things her husband was being called upon to do at Nancy’s behest or on her behalf. “Nancy Reagan was never a close friend, and it had no
thing to do with the fact that she seemed to have a crush on my husband. After all, I was quite used to that, and if I’d wanted to, I could have flirted right back with hers,” Barbara Sinatra wrote in her memoir. “What I wasn’t so accustomed to was the time and commitment she expected of Frank for the causes that she and Ronnie espoused. I felt that she took a little too much advantage of Frank’s huge heart. As well as making him director of entertainment at the White House, Nancy appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and she got him involved in her Just Say No antidrug campaign, as well as her charitable organizations for children and foster grandparents. Frank was completely unfazed, of course. During their long-distance telephone calls and their lunches together whenever they were in the same town, I think he became Nancy’s therapist more than her friend.”

  Author Kitty Kelley would later intimate in her book that there was more going on during those long lunches than dining and conversation. No one I spoke to seemed to give the likelihood of a sexual liaison much credence. But there was an emotional dependence between Sinatra and Nancy that seems to have gone both ways. The entertainer was one of the first people she summoned after the assassination attempt. Nancy was someone Sinatra turned to as well during difficult times. His daughter Tina—not a fan of her father’s fourth wife—described Nancy as her father’s “close confidante,” and someone he leaned on for emotional support during the rough patches of his marriage to Barbara. In one particularly difficult stretch when the Sinatras were separated, Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra “were speaking every night, at an appointed time, and my father was pouring his heart out,” Tina Sinatra wrote. (When Sinatra died in 1998, his widow tried to exclude Nancy from his funeral in Beverly Hills. Tina Sinatra insisted that the former first lady be invited.)