The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Show people tend to be superstitious by nature: no hats on the bed, or whistling in the dressing room, or shoes on a shelf that is higher than your head. Once, when Ronnie saw his executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, cross the fingers on both hands for luck during a close congressional vote, the president cried: “Don’t ever do that! Don’t ever cross your fingers on both hands, because one cancels out the other.” Before he boarded an airplane, Ronnie made sure he was wearing what he called his “lucky cuff links,” which were tiny gold replicas of a calendar page with his and Nancy’s wedding anniversary marked by a purple stone. He was open to—or at least indulgent of—concepts that might seem irrational to other people. Ronnie was a science-fiction fan who, in his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, suggested that the two countries would need to cooperate if the earth were invaded by space aliens. Gorbachev, taken aback, changed the subject. Both Ronnie and his daughter Maureen thought it possible that the Lincoln Bedroom was haunted by a ghost.

  Nancy’s interest in astrology continued as she and Ronnie moved into politics. For a while after he became governor, she regularly consulted Jeane Dixon, an astrologer celebrated for supposedly predicting John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nancy was far from the only important figure who talked to Dixon. Her voice also shows up on one of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes. Dixon told the president during a May 1971 visit to the Oval Office that “destiny cannot be denied Richard Nixon.”

  As Ronnie was considering whether to run for president in 1976, Nancy made regular visits to Righter at his Beverly Hills mansion. She would arrive wearing sunglasses and a scarf, and identify herself as Nancy Davis. People magazine quoted one Righter associate as saying: “Carroll told Nancy that this was simply not the time to try. She was very, very angry. When she didn’t like what she was hearing, she became really whiny. She really wanted him to explain why it wasn’t a good time.”

  Ronnie himself had generated a stellar controversy shortly before the 1980 Republican convention, when he told a reporter that he checked his horoscope every day. He also recounted a story about how Dixon had discouraged him from running for the White House in 1968, advising he could do more good by staying in California. Those statements brought an admonishment from a group of scientists, including five Nobel laureates, who said they were “gravely disturbed” by the revelation that a leading presidential candidate appeared to take astrology seriously. “In our opinion, no person whose decisions are based, even in part, on such evident fantasies can be trusted to make the many serious—and even life-and-death—decisions required of American presidents,” they wrote in a letter to Ronnie. He replied: “Let me assure you that while Nancy and I enjoy glancing at the daily astrology charts in our morning paper, we do not plan our daily activities or our lives around them.”

  But after Ronnie’s brush with death, Nancy was desperate to find any means of comfort and reassurance she could. She was surely pleased to see new security measures put in place. When the president arrived at a hotel or other public venue, canvas tents were placed around the entrances, so that his movements were not visible. The Secret Service finally got the magnetometers it had long been seeking, allowing agents to screen for hidden metal on anyone who passed through the devices. They were astonished to discover that hundreds of visitors had been coming in and out of the White House with guns. Many were tourists, overly anxious about their safety on the streets of the nation’s capital.

  When planning a public event, however, the Secret Service’s wishes often clashed with those of Ronnie’s political team, who wanted to pack in big audiences and give them a sense of connection with their president. It was impossible to work a crowd and shake hands from behind a sheet of bulletproof glass, the handlers complained. The Secret Service’s concerns over Ronnie’s safety also sometimes prevented the president from attending big outdoor events such as the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. As the internal battles grew more intense, the agents regularly turned to Nancy for backup. “If we weren’t comfortable with it, all you had to do was talk to her, and it wouldn’t happen,” recalled Joe Petro, who was assistant special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division.

  The agents also appealed to Nancy in situations where they wanted Ronnie to put on the uncomfortable protective vest that the president called his “iron T-shirt.” She and Petro developed a system of communicating without words. As Ronnie prepared to go to an engagement, the first lady would give the agent a questioning look and point at her chest. If Petro nodded, Nancy would order her husband to put on the vest. “He hated it,” Petro said. “But he never said no.” Nancy, on the other hand, rarely wore hers.

  Ronnie made a visit to Korea in November 1983, just weeks after an assassination attempt on its president killed nineteen people in a bombing in Rangoon, Burma. Nancy told Mike Deaver that there were to be no outside events. She vetoed both an arrival ceremony at the airport and plans to have the American president participate in a wreath laying to honor Korean War dead. The Koreans, Petro said, “were very upset. This was an affront to their sovereignty.”

  None of the precautions was enough for Nancy, however. In the weeks and months after the assassination attempt, she cried constantly when Ronnie wasn’t around. Sometimes she cried when he was, though she tried to do it in the bedroom or the bathroom, so he wouldn’t see. She sought out religious leaders such as Billy Graham, as well as their old pastor Donn Moomaw. But faith had never come as naturally to Nancy as it did to her husband. So, while Ronnie found solace and peace in the idea that God had preserved him because He had a plan in mind for this president, Nancy turned her gaze to the heavens in a different way. About a month after the assassination attempt, she expressed her anxiety during a phone call with TV producer and talk show host Merv Griffin, an old friend with whom she shared an interest in astrology and a July 6 birthday. Griffin told her that there was an astrologer in San Francisco whose charts had shown March 30 to be a dangerous day when Ronnie should have stayed home.

  Nancy was acquainted with the woman he mentioned. Joan Quigley was a regular guest on Griffin’s syndicated show. He had given Nancy her number back in 1973, and the two of them had been talking once a year or so ever since. Quigley had also called several times during the 1980 presidential race with suggestions about good and bad times for Ronnie to do things, such as the best windows for him to talk to the media and what hour was most auspicious for his chartered campaign plane to take off on the day of a debate.

  When Griffin said Quigley had foreseen the danger for Ronnie on March 30, 1981, Nancy was thunderstruck. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I could have stopped it!” She hung up on him and immediately dialed Quigley. “I’m so scared,” Nancy told the astrologer. “I’m scared every time he leaves the house, and I don’t think I breathe until he gets home. I cringe every time we step out of a car or leave a building. I’m afraid that one of these days somebody is going to shoot at him again.”

  Fiftysomething Quigley was a blonde, Vassar-educated socialite who grew up in a penthouse apartment in San Francisco’s exclusive Nob Hill area. Her father owned a hotel, and when she and her sister were young, they were chauffeured to parties in a Rolls-Royce. In other words, she might have fit right in with the friends that Nancy had cultivated in California, Washington, and New York. Quigley was also a good listener. Nancy was soon confiding many of her concerns: her problems with Patti and Michael, her rough relations with the media, her worries about the health of her parents.

  Later, in her 1989 memoir, Nancy would reflect on how her dependence on the astrologer deepened. “My relationship with Joan Quigley began as a crutch, one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie. Within a year or two, it had become a habit, something I relied on a little less but didn’t see the need to change. While I was never certain that Joan’s astrological advice was helping to protect Ronnie, the fact is that nothing like March 30 ever happened again,” she wrote. “Was astrol
ogy one of the reasons? I don’t really believe it was, but I don’t really believe it wasn’t. But I do know this: it didn’t hurt, and I’m not sorry I did it.”

  Nancy initially hoped that Quigley might offer her services for free, as she had during the 1980 campaign, but the astrologer insisted she be paid by the hour, with a $3,000-a-month retainer. Nancy received Quigley’s billing statements in an envelope marked with her private five-digit zip code so that it would not get lost—or noticed—in the deluge of White House mail. Checks to an astrologer signed by a first lady created obvious potential for embarrassment. So, Nancy arranged for payments to be made through a friend in California, whom she reimbursed. Nancy did not name the friend, but Quigley later said that both Mary Jane Wick and Betsy Bloomingdale acted as intermediaries at various points. If true, both of them were highly discreet. Mary Jane’s son Doug told me he was never aware of his mother having any dealings with an astrologer on Nancy’s behalf.

  Within the White House, Nancy turned to the ever-obliging Deaver to make sure that Quigley’s recommendations were carried out without anyone—including, for a while, the president—knowing where they had come from. As she put it: “I wanted Ronnie to know about it, but I wasn’t exactly dying to tell him, and I kept putting it off.” One day, after she had been talking to Quigley for many months, the president walked into the bedroom while they were on the phone. When he asked what the conversation had been about, Nancy came clean. Ronnie told her: “If it makes you feel better, go ahead and do it. But be careful. It might look a little odd if it ever came out.”

  That Deaver managed to keep all of it under wraps was a remarkable feat and a testament to his willingness to take flak at Nancy’s behest. “Mike is a born chamberlain, and to him it was simply one of the many little problems in the life of a servant to the great,” Don Regan wrote acidly in a score-settling memoir of his rocky time as White House chief of staff. Regan’s predecessor in the job, Jim Baker, told me he had a general sense of what was going on, though he didn’t know Quigley’s identity and preferred to leave the whole thing in Deaver’s hands. “When we wanted to schedule something like a big press conference, he’d say, ‘Let me take a look at it,’ ” Baker said. “Then we figured [Deaver and Nancy] would talk about the date. Now it’s clear that they were clearing it all with her, with the astrologist. Maybe not clearing it, but talking to her about it.”

  There were others as well who were aware of the astrologer’s role. Elaine Crispen, who was Nancy’s special assistant during Ronnie’s first term and her press secretary in the second one, knew about Quigley. So did Jane Erkenbeck, who took over the special assistant role from Crispen. Erkenbeck answered Nancy’s phone and would normally check with the first lady before connecting her to a caller. “But when Joan Quigley would call, I would put her through right away because we thought we knew who Joan Quigley was,” Erkenbeck said.

  Still, Erkenbeck thought the stories that were told about Quigley’s influence became far overblown. “Sorry, a lot of people go to see astrologers,” she insisted. “The president’s life was not governed by Joan Quigley, but if it suited the schedule to change him from one day to the other, I think that happened.”

  In retrospect, Deaver acknowledged that he was probably too willing to accommodate Nancy’s compulsion. “When I look back, perhaps I should have tried harder to veto the whole business, but who was I to tell her it was a bad idea when she was convinced the well-being of her husband was at stake?” he wrote later. “I don’t believe that we can see the future in the stars, but if Nancy did, and if taking note of the stars made her feel better, that was good enough for me. While Joan was a minor inconvenience to me, I could see how important this was to the first lady. Nancy was the strategist of the first couple, the worrier, the one who could never just sit back and let fate happen the way her husband could. She needed to be in action, and an astrological consultation every few weeks seemed to me then—and still does—an innocent enough quirk.”

  Deaver also claimed that he refused to carry out Quigley’s recommendations if an event or trip could not be moved without major disruption, and that in those cases, Nancy accepted that the arrangements not be tampered with: “The consultations were never a burden—far from it, they were a comfort to Nancy during a very hard time. Contrary to press reports, the astrologer had no impact on Reagan’s policies or his politics. Nada. Zero. Zilch.”

  Others in the White House were aware only that the scheduling process was unnecessarily aggravating. Deaver would dither over making a decision and then insist, for instance, that the president’s plane take off for a foreign trip at precisely 2:11 a.m. He concocted stories to tell the traveling press about why the timing was so peculiar and inconvenient. A predawn takeoff? It was deemed to have been dictated by medical advice on how to avoid jet lag.

  At the State Department, Chief of Protocol Selwa Roosevelt was perturbed that dates for state visits by foreign leaders had to be confirmed with the first lady. “I assumed it had to do with checking their social engagements and public commitments, but the reasons were always a bit murky. So much so, I wondered if Mrs. Reagan understood the foreign-policy implications of some of her decisions. I thought it a bit outré that she could overrule the State Department and the NSC with regard to the dates and desirability of a visit,” Roosevelt recalled.

  In the months after the 1984 election, Deaver began to seriously ponder departing from the White House. The pressure of the job had landed him in the hospital with kidney failure, which was complicated by high blood pressure. His secret alcoholism was catching up with him. He had also developed a taste for high living that could not be supported on a $60,662-a-year government salary. But before Deaver could leave, Nancy’s most loyal and indispensable ally knew he was going to have to hand off this delicate part of his portfolio. One afternoon in mid-November, he asked William Henkel, the director of presidential advance, to join him in his office for a drink. After pouring them each a tall one, Deaver said: “Now, Bill, I’ve got to start giving you some information why your job is going to be so sensitive…”

  Henkel was flabbergasted by what he heard. Suddenly he understood why Deaver had been torturing the scheduling operation.

  “Holy shit, Mike! I thought you were a madman. I can’t believe you had to do this!” Henkel told him.

  “Hey, at least this one’s not crazy,” Deaver said drily, in reference to Quigley. “Jeane Dixon was nuts.”

  Shortly after that, Henkel was summoned to a meeting with Nancy in the residence. “Bill, I want you to understand and feel what it was like the day my husband was shot. I am the daughter of Loyal Davis. I went into that room, and I saw six doctors with panic in their eyes. My naked husband lying on that thing. I knew he was dying,” she told him. Then she explained how Quigley had known this would be a dangerous day for Ronnie to leave the White House.

  “The thing that was paramount with her was that it came down to good days and bad days. Is it a bad day for the president’s safety? Is this a day he should go out of the White House and do a public event?” Henkel said. So as Deaver had done before him, Henkel began giving Nancy proposed schedules to run past Quigley—both long-range, going out over the next year, and near-term ones, for the next two weeks. Sometimes Nancy would complain to Henkel that she needed more details to provide the astrologer, who was getting paid by the hour: “Bill, this is costing me money. I wish you could be more precise.”

  Henkel told me that Quigley also weighed in on decisions that were not directly related to the president’s physical safety: Which day might be good to give the State of the Union address? Which was most auspicious to hold a press conference? In 1985, after Margaret Thatcher told Ronnie that the new leader of the Soviet Union was different from his predecessors and might be someone it was possible to work with, Nancy had Quigley do the chart of Mikhail Gorbachev. Quigley advised the first lady that Gorbachev’s sign, Pisces, aligned well with Ronnie’s. “She came back saying, ‘These two ha
ve some coincidental things.’ It was a very favorable thing in terms of these two people have, by the stars, some good vibes,” Henkel recalled.

  Nancy generally spoke to Quigley on Saturday afternoons while she was at Camp David and then called Henkel on Sundays at home. His wife could not understand why he would excuse himself and take the call somewhere out of earshot. “Bill, what’s wrong with you?” she used to ask. “Why so secret?” Meanwhile, at the White House, Henkel was getting grief from the new chief of staff, Don Regan. A brusque and demanding former CEO of the investment firm Merrill Lynch, Regan had been Ronnie’s first Treasury secretary, and then swapped jobs with Jim Baker in February 1985. Regan regularly berated Henkel over the fact that the schedule was always in a mess. “He was beating the shit out of me,” Henkel said.

  So Henkel went to Deaver and Nancy and told them the chief of staff had to be let in on the secret. Regan thought it had to be a joke when Deaver first informed him about the astrologer. “Humor her,” Deaver advised him, and Regan soon realized he had no choice but to do so. He began keeping a color-coded calendar on his desk, with the dates highlighted like a traffic signal: green for good days, red for bad ones, and yellow when the outlook was iffy to send the president out for speaking events or to commence negotiations with foreign powers.