Regan apparently never learned the name of the mysterious figure that Nancy referred to only as “my friend,” but he said her influence shaded much more than his desk calendar. “The president’s schedule is the single most potent tool in the White House, because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he is going to do it. By humoring Mrs. Reagan, we gave her this tool—or, more accurately, gave it to an unknown woman in San Francisco who believed that the zodiac controls events and human behavior and that she could read the secrets of the future in the movements of the planets,” he wrote later.
Others, including Henkel, have a different view. Quigley—despite the claims she would later make in a book—was not setting policy, he insisted. “At the end of the day, I think it was pretty benign, and I don’t think it was anything harmful,” Henkel said. “In the big picture, I think it was a positive because [Nancy] went into these events with a confidence based on her trust in Joan and what this stuff meant to her, and I think that’s an asset to the president, because they were so close. She was so supportive of him. I come from this whole thing with deep admiration for her.”
But that ignores the paradox of Nancy’s reliance on an astrologer as a security measure. It is hard to imagine anything more fraught with risk than giving an outsider, someone Nancy had not met in person more than a few times, intimate knowledge of the president’s movements, and even the power to determine when they would happen.
None of this might ever have come to light had it not been for the ugly ending of Regan’s tenure as chief of staff in February 1987. Nancy had engineered his firing, blaming Regan for the Iran-contra scandal that was threatening to swallow Ronnie’s presidency. Regan took his revenge against the first lady with the publication of a sensational memoir, for which he had received a $1 million advance from publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. He also signed a $125,000 deal with Time magazine to excerpt it. Newsweek, however, got the scoop in early May 1988, a couple of weeks before the book’s release date.
On the very first page of For the Record, Regan wrote: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” As soon as word got out about what he had revealed, Regan’s blast at Nancy was all anyone was talking about. “I’ve been in publicity eighteen years, but I can’t remember as much interest in a book as this one,” one book publicist told the New York Times.
How explosive this revelation would prove to be was slow to dawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sheila Tate, who had only recently left her job as Nancy’s press secretary, says she had been unaware of Nancy’s relationship with Quigley. The day the news broke, Tate returned from lunch to her office at a public relations firm and found at least fifty phone messages from reporters. Her first call was to Elaine Crispen, Nancy’s new spokeswoman. Crispen assured Tate it would be no more than a one-day tempest. “I could not have disagreed more. I told Elaine that unless they did something to diffuse it, this astrology business would be like an albatross around her neck,” Tate recalled. “I really felt heartsick.” As did Ronnie. “The press have a new one thanks to Don Regan’s book,” he wrote in his diary on May 3. “The media are behaving like kids with a new toy—never mind that there is no truth to it.”
Indeed, the claims that were making it into the press went far beyond Regan’s characterization of the astrologer’s role when it came to scheduling. One headline in the New York Post read: “Astrologer Runs the White House.” Everyone, it seemed, was weighing in. “As a Christian,” former president Jimmy Carter said, “I don’t think the guidance of our lives should come from the moving of stars.”
Though Regan did not mention Quigley’s name—and apparently didn’t know it—journalists soon tracked her down. Nancy begged her to say nothing, but Quigley felt that her professional reputation was on the line. She argued that she was not one of the charlatans and imposters in her field, and needed to “represent reputable astrologers honorably.”
Quigley soon had a book deal of her own. Published in 1990, it offered an often implausible version of events. Not only did the astrologer claim to have determined the timing of just about every major event of the Reagan presidency, she took credit for reshaping the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and even for deciding when the president’s cancer surgery should take place. There is no evidence those things were true.
Nancy was chastened by the stir she had created with her secret reliance on Quigley’s predictions, but she felt that she had only done what she needed to do to handle the uncertainty and anxiety of getting through every day. “What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine,” she wrote later. “Don’t criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it—except, possibly me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rehabilitating her image was not the only challenge that Nancy was grappling with as Ronnie’s presidency moved into its second year and beyond. Though most of the Reagan offspring were not around much, they continued to be a source of drama, stress, and awkwardness.
Where Ronnie’s recent predecessors had small children and adolescents living with them in the White House, the four Reagan kids were grown and trying to forge lives and identities of their own. Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron had little in common. Their temperaments and personal histories had taken them in different directions, and their connections to each other were tenuous. But each was struggling with a paradox that nearly all children of celebrated parents face: along with suffocating scrutiny comes a bounty of opportunities that they did nothing to earn. Expectations are thrust upon them that they will never be able to meet.
“There is a secret thought that the offspring of famous people keep tucked away,” Patti once wrote. “It becomes the focal point of our lives, although it takes years to see that. It’s what makes us run from who we are, rage against the huge shadow we feel dwarfed by, sabotage ourselves again and again. We vilify anyone who suggests we have a legacy to live up to, shoes to fill, a torch to carry. Because underneath it all, deep inside us, we think they’re right.”
For Nancy, the belated arrival of Loyal Davis in her life had salvaged her childhood. Claiming his name as hers gave her stability, a sense of belonging, an identity that finally seemed complete and whole. For Ronnie’s children, having a towering figure at the center of their existence had the opposite effect. It increased the gravitational pull of their own self-doubts and fueled their inner suspicions that they were no more than faint copies of an epic original.
In this particular family, there was also the off-balance dynamic of a husband and his second wife so closely bound together that his progeny—only two of whom were also hers—felt shut out. It was hard to miss the disconnect between Ronnie’s idealized view of American life and the impossibility for any flesh-and-blood family to live as though they were in a Norman Rockwell painting. “During Ronnie’s presidency, our family and its problems were written about constantly,” Nancy recalled. “Ronnie had run for office on a platform of traditional family values, which both of us believe in and try to practice. But I always felt hurt when people said we were hypocrites because our own family sometimes fell short of those values.”
Even Ron, his parents’ favorite, tested them. Ronnie and Nancy had been publicly supportive of Ron’s unconventional choice of a dance career in 1976. Their misgivings were evident, however. Ron had been dancing for more than four years before his parents attended one of his performances, at a benefit gala for the Joffrey Ballet in March 1981 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. The Reagans watched through binoculars from a center parterre box hung with a presidential seal. At intermission, Nancy threw her arms around her son and pronounced him “wonderful.”
His father wrote in his diary: “I think I held my breath until he finished, but he was good.” News accounts of that night, however, noted that the Joffrey stood to lose $200,000 in federal subsidies under Ronnie’s proposed budget cuts; two months later, the junior company’s artistic director warned publicly that Ron could be out of a job by that fall if the Joffrey did not find some way to make up the money through private sources.
Ron would soon decide on his own to give up his dance career. His performances had gotten favorable reviews. The New York Times’s Anna Kisselgoff called him “a talented dancer who has worked very hard and who has done extremely well for a late starter.” But he was making less than $300 a week and recognized he was never going to be a top star in a field that took a brutal toll on lithe young bodies. Though Ron was promoted to the Joffrey’s senior company in August 1982, his parents were relieved when he informed them a few months later that he had decided to become a writer instead of a dancer. Ronnie confided to his diary: “I can’t say I’m sorry although he worked hard & was getting along well—but there isn’t much of a future and it is a short career.”
Over the first two years of his father’s presidency, Ron and his parents engaged in a pitched battle over his demands to give up his Secret Service protection. After the assassination attempt, Ronnie and Nancy were understandably concerned about security in general, and Ron lived in an area of New York City where the violent Puerto Rican separatist group FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) was known to be active. In 1975 the group had brazenly detonated a lunch-hour bomb at the historic Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan, killing four at the site where George Washington had given his farewell address to the officers who served under him in the Revolutionary War. The youngest Reagan was also the only one of Ronnie’s four children whom intelligence sources had identified as being on terrorist target lists. “He thinks we’re interfering with his privacy. I can’t make him see that I can’t be put in a position of one day facing a ransom demand. I’d have to refuse for reasons of the Nation’s welfare,” Ronnie wrote on May 15, 1982.
The following April, Ron called his father, furious that the Secret Service had come into his Greenwich Village apartment while he and his wife, Doria, were in California. The agents had entered it to fix an alarm on a window. Ronnie told him that this was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to have done, and Ron hung up on him. Weeks went by, and father and son were still not talking when a distraught Nancy called Ronnie to tell him that Ron was planning to go to Paris and had not informed his detail until just a few days before. A couple of weeks later, Ronnie and Nancy finally threw in the towel. Ronnie summoned Don Regan, who as Treasury secretary oversaw the Secret Service, and informed him that there should be no more protection provided to his younger son. The president was angry about “Ron & his paranoia about S.S. Protection,” he wrote on May 19, 1983. “I think he’s being ridiculous & d—n unfair to the guys who are trying to protect his hide. This is settled—we let him sign off permanently—no protection.”
Ron became a contributor to Playboy magazine. He covered the 1984 Democratic convention, wrote a quirky travelogue of the Soviet Union, and showed up among the press corps at his father’s 1985 summit in Geneva with Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. “He never asked for special access or favors,” assistant press secretary Mark Weinberg recalled. “He worked hard at a small space in the press filing center at the InterContinental Hotel there and never used his status to his advantage.” Later, he worked as a journalist in television and radio, including a stint on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Ron was the only member of the younger Reagan generation who seems to have seen any humor in the prank that fate had played on them all. He did a 1986 ad for American Express, which was part of the company’s long-running series of “Do You Know Me?” spots. In it, Ron was shown being served ice cream in the first-class section of a jetliner and commented to the camera: “Every time I appear on a talk show, people ask me about my father. Every time I do an interview, people ask me about my father. Every time I pull out the American Express card, people treat me like my father.” Pause. “Come to think of it, that’s not so bad!” After an American Express card flashed across the screen with his name on it, the thirty-second spot closed with Ron in an airport phone booth, saying, “Hello, Dad?” Then he excused himself and slid the door shut to continue the conversation in privacy.
His parents were mystified when Ron hosted Saturday Night Live in February 1986. He opened the show wearing jockey shorts and socks as he danced to the Bob Seger hit “Old Time Rock & Roll” around a set that was supposed to be the White House. It fell to Weinberg, the assistant press secretary, to explain to the president and first lady that Ron was performing a parody—a hilarious one—of Tom Cruise’s most famous scene in the 1983 coming-of-age comedy Risky Business. “They had never seen the movie; in fact, they had fallen off the pop culture wagon sometime around the arrival of the Beatles,” Ron said.
Maureen, the daughter of Ronnie and Jane, was the only one who shared her father’s passion for politics. As she liked to point out, she became a Republican before he did, and spent many late nights stuffing envelopes at Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign headquarters in 1960. But hers was a different brand of conservatism than her father’s, particularly on the issue of women’s rights. She and Ronnie had spirited arguments over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which he was against and she supported. Ronnie contended that it was just another way for the government to interfere in people’s lives and that it would lead to women being drafted into combat.
Maureen was also keenly interested in closing a growing “gender gap” identified by pollsters during Ronnie’s presidency. It showed that women were increasingly less likely than men to support Republicans. “There are issues of unique concern to women, but these issues don’t end with women,” she told her father. “The problems of child care for working parents, equal pay for equal work, equal pension benefits, availability of credit, and enforcement of civil rights statutes all uniquely affect women, that’s true, but when a woman is discriminated against, her children are discriminated against, her husband is discriminated against, her community is discriminated against. All office holders have to address these women’s concerns, because they are also family concerns and community concerns.”
In 1982 Maureen, who previously hosted a radio talk show in Los Angeles, ran for the US Senate. She was one of eight people in that year’s hotly contested Republican primary. It had always been Ronnie’s practice not to endorse anyone in intramural GOP contests, and no one would have expected him to make an exception for his daughter. Things became uncomfortable, however, when the president told reporters that he did not want Maureen to run. Ronnie later insisted he meant the remark to be “facetious,” but the damage had been done.
There was no way of misreading her uncle Neil’s view of the race. Though Ronnie’s older brother had given away Maureen at her wedding only months before, he signed on as a campaign cochair for her leading opponent, San Diego mayor Pete Wilson, who ultimately won the race. “I don’t look well upon kids riding on their father’s coattails,” Neil Reagan told reporters. He later cut a radio commercial in which he declared: “We Reagans urge you to support Pete Wilson.” That Neil was speaking only for his wife, Bess, and himself was a detail meant to be overlooked.
Nor did it help when Ed Rollins, a top White House aide, observed to the Sacramento Bee’s Leo Rennert that the president’s daughter “has the highest negatives of any candidate I’ve seen.” Rollins added: “Her campaign has not caught fire, and she has serious financial problems. She’s been strident on some issues, and, while the president has been scrupulously neutral, there’s an impression that Maureen is not the overwhelming choice of the Reagan boys.”
Rollins, who thought what he told the reporter was off the record, apologized to Ronnie. As Rollins recounted the conversation, the president replied with a chuckle: “Well, Maureen was a little
worked up about this. But, hell, Ed, don’t worry about it. I know she shouldn’t be in this race. There’s nothing you said that I haven’t thought to myself. I wish she weren’t running, too, but we’ve both got to be careful. I’ve said something I shouldn’t have said, too.”
Maureen’s campaign spiraled into oblivion. She got no help from the network of wealthy Californians who had bankrolled her father’s career. Where three of her opponents had raised upward of $500,000 each by April, she had only $3,438 in her campaign coffers. She came in fifth in the June 8 Republican primary, with only 5 percent of the vote. Ronnie tried to make amends by having Maureen named a special consultant to the Republican National Committee. He valued her political instincts and blunt advice, and her role with the national party organization brought her to Washington frequently. Maureen became a regular presence in the White House, living in the Lincoln Bedroom for long stretches. She bonded with Nancy over their shared mission of watching the president’s back. When his spokesman Larry Speakes had occasion to go to the family quarters with business for Ronnie, he would sometimes find Nancy and Maureen in their bathrobes, “chatting like schoolgirls.” Maureen even began calling Nancy “Mom”; she still referred to her own mother as “Jane.”
There would be no such warm moments with Michael, the son who had grown up feeling that being adopted meant he was not quite a real Reagan. A rank aroma of opportunism arose around nearly everything he did, and with it a potential to embarrass and compromise his father. As Speakes would later recall: “Michael Reagan always had schemes for making money from his father’s position, and Fred Fielding, who had to deal with potential conflict-of-interest problems as the president’s counsel, would come around and say, ‘Well, Sonny Boy’s at it again.’ ”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 39
