The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

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  In at least one respect, Nancy was having an easier time during the 1984 campaign than she had four years before. The media was much gentler on her. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times observed: “These days it is generally acknowledged that the First Lady has grown into her role. She is still reserved, but she shows more humor about herself and has become a more relaxed speaker.”

  During the Republican convention in Dallas in August, Boston Globe syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote that “it’s hard to pinpoint the moment Nancy Reagan’s image started to improve. It’s harder to know whether it’s her image or her identity that’s been changing. At some point, said a friend, ‘she stopped crying and started to cope.’ ” Goodman added: “The most important changes are substantive ones. Nancy Reagan has become less associated with Beverly Hills and more associated with an antidrug campaign. She has gone from donating her designer clothes to museums to donating her time in a campaign against addiction.”

  The Reagans’ love story was one of the convention’s major themes. The night before Ronnie gave his acceptance speech, Nancy delivered a brief address that concluded with: “Let’s make it one more for the Gipper, and thank you.” The screen behind her suddenly lit up with a gargantuan image of Ronnie in shirt sleeves, sitting in his hotel suite and watching her on his television. She turned her back to the hall, waved at her husband on the screen, and he waved back. It was hokey, cloying—and in the eyes of most Americans, adorable. An eight-minute video tribute to Nancy that played before her speech included a scene of the Reagans strolling hand in hand through the sun-dappled woods. It was shot from behind and caught Nancy taking a flirtatious, gentle kick at her husband’s behind. As Ronnie spoke of his wife on the video, he appeared to be on the verge of choking up when he said: “I can’t imagine life without her.”

  Meanwhile, things were not going so well for the Democrats. At their convention in San Francisco, Walter Mondale accepted his party’s nomination with what turned out to be a politically disastrous pledge to raise taxes. His historic decision to put a woman on his ticket soon ran into trouble when the media began raising questions about the finances of New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro and her husband.

  Heading into the first debate with Mondale in Louisville on October 7, both Wirthlin’s tracking poll and a public one by the Washington Post gave Ronnie a hefty 55-percent-to-37-percent lead over the Democratic nominee, with a relatively small 8 percent of voters undecided. Still, Nancy was nervous. “I’m against debates,” she wrote later. “They’re long, often boring, and the incumbent is at a disadvantage. The candidate who has never held the office can just attack, without having to defend his own record.” What’s more, incumbent presidents often cruise into those matchups overconfident and rusty. That had happened to Ford in 1976 and to Carter in 1980.

  The president’s performance in Louisville was a disaster. Nancy called it “the worst night of Ronnie’s political career. Right from the start, he was tense, muddled and off-stride. He lacked authority. He stumbled. This was a Ronald Reagan I had never seen before. It was painful to watch. There was no way around it; that debate was a nightmare.” Mondale, on the other hand, showed a mastery of the issues. He mixed his jabs at Ronnie with enough deference to avoid alienating that segment of voters who liked the president but might have doubts about whether he deserved another term.

  Nancy was furious—predictably, not at Ronnie but at Deaver, Baker, Richard Darman, and the others who had been in charge of preparing him for the debate. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded when she saw Deaver back at the hotel. Campaign chairman Paul Laxalt, the Nevada senator and longtime friend of the Reagans, was channeling Nancy when he held a news conference to declare that Ronnie had been “brutalized by a briefing process that didn’t make any sense” and that his handlers had “filled his head with so many facts and figures that he lost his spontaneity and his visionary concepts.” The night had gone so badly that even irrepressible optimist Ronnie was down. “I have to say I lost,” he wrote in his diary. “I guess I’d crammed so hard on facts & figures in view of the absolutely dishonest things he’s been saying in the campaign, I guess I flattened out. Anyway I didn’t feel good about myself.”

  Decades later, Baker still bristled at Nancy’s contention that he and his team were to blame for Ronnie’s disastrous performance in Louisville. Baker insisted to me that they had prepared Ronnie exactly as they had in 1980, when he had “beat Carter like a drum.” This time, in Baker’s view, the problem was an overweening incumbent who had been too lazy to buckle down as he should have. Nancy “decided a head needed to roll, so it could be somebody else’s fault and not the president’s fault,” Baker said. “That head was going to be Dick Darman, who was in charge of the preparation.” Baker refused to fire his aide, telling Deaver and Spencer that he would do it only if he were ordered to by Ronnie himself. “I knew he wouldn’t,” Baker recalled. “That’s just the way he was. He would never. Anyway, he went on and said, ‘I didn’t do my homework,’ and he didn’t, but she didn’t like that.”

  Mondale had at last found an opening. The next week saw a wave of stories that brought to the surface the sensitive “age issue” that had been simmering all along, raising questions whether seventy-three-year-old Ronnie was too old to do the job. The Wall Street Journal ran a headline that said: “Fitness Issue—New Question in Race: Is Oldest US President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve.” Television networks repeatedly showed clips of him nodding off at the Vatican in 1982. They also replayed a recent photo opportunity at the ranch, where the president had been asked a question about US-Soviet talks on space weapons. As Ronnie hesitated, Nancy could be heard saying sotto voce, “Tell them we are doing everything we can.” After which, her husband piped up: “We’re doing everything we can.” Nancy claimed later she had been talking to herself and that Ronnie didn’t have his hearing aid turned up enough to have caught it.

  Unlike in 1980, when there had been only one debate between Carter and Ronnie at the very end of the race, there would be a second one in 1984, in Kansas City on October 21. “Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” Nancy demanded of Deaver. The number of rehearsals was reduced from five to two. His massive briefing book was trimmed down to twenty-five pages. Media consultant Roger Ailes, who would later become famous for building Fox News into a conservative media powerhouse, was brought in to rebuild Ronnie’s confidence. Even former president Nixon wrote a letter of encouragement and advice. The campaign held a warm-up rally right before the debate, so that Ronnie would go in with the cheers of his supporters and not his own self-doubt ringing in his ears. Aides also made sure that Nancy would be in the front row when Ronnie was on the stage and that he knew where to look for her. As the debate began, she plastered a smile on her face, but her stomach was in knots, and her hands felt cold as ice.

  The difference was dramatic. Ronnie was relaxed and confident; Mondale was combative. The former vice president’s campaign aides had also placed a piece of reflective white paper on his lectern, which threw off the lighting. It accentuated the bags under Mondale’s eyes and made his skin appear pasty. The coup de grâce came when moderator Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun asked whether Ronnie had any doubt that, at his age, he would be able to function were a crisis to hit.

  “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” the president answered, “and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Mondale had to laugh. The age issue, which had been the biggest remaining speed bump on Ronnie’s road to a second term, had been flattened with a single quip.

  It had once again been Nancy who knew what it was going to take to get Ronnie back into his groove. She understood, as author Garry Wills once put it, that “a Reagan without confidence would not be Reagan. It is against this background that we must interpret all ta
les of Nancy Reagan’s ‘ruthlessness.’ ” Nancy was constantly telling his aides that they must build him up, not knock him down. Lou Cannon wrote later: “In recognizing the actor’s truth that it is the performance that is crucial, Nancy Reagan had saved the day, however bruising and unfair her intervention may have been to Baker and Darman.”

  The day before the election, as Ronnie’s campaign plane headed for California, Rollins predicted boldly that the president would carry forty-nine states. In an informal poll taken at the back of the plane, even the Secret Service agents joined in the consensus that it would be a landslide of historic proportion. Ronnie demurred, saying as he always did that he would be happy with 51 percent of the vote. Nor was Nancy joining in any premature celebration. “Well, you better be right,” she told Rollins. “You’ve been so overconfident in this race, Ed, you better be right.”

  Rollins was indeed right. Ronnie won everywhere but Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Nancy would have no memory of much that happened the final two days before the election. She took a fall that Sunday night as she got out of bed at the Red Lion Inn in Sacramento to look for a blanket, which put a goose egg on her head. Though she was able to put in a full day of campaigning, news accounts noted that she looked drawn and tired.

  One last time, Ronnie and Nancy did their election night ritual of dinner at the Jorgensens’, followed by a victory celebration at the Century Plaza. In his diary entry the next day, Ronnie wrote: “Well, 49 states, 59% of the vote & 525 electoral votes. A short press conf. The press is now trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide or should I say a mandate?”

  But in what it took to achieve that victory, there were seeds of trouble ahead. A campaign that had been largely issue free had not provided a blueprint for governing in a second term, which is historically a rocky and treacherous time for presidents. Everyone was exhausted—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The bitterness and finger-pointing surrounding the debate in Louisville was a wound that would not heal.

  Baker wanted out of the White House and would soon arrange a job swap with Treasury secretary Don Regan. He took Richard Darman, his tough and savvy aide, over to Treasury with him. Deaver also had his eye on the exit and a life in the private sector that would provide enough money to afford the expensive tastes he had developed in his years of traveling in the Reagans’ circle. Spencer returned to California, where he could continue to advise when he was inclined to do so and maintain his distance from the palace intrigue when he wasn’t. As Lou Cannon wrote: “Although Nancy Reagan did not realize it sufficiently and Ronald Reagan realized it not at all, the landslide of 1984 had left the people who had done the most to help the president during his first four years burned out and disillusioned. Most of them couldn’t wait to leave the White House, where it was no longer Morning Again in America.”

  As the first lady’s most trusted allies were replaced by people she barely knew, her early-warning system in the West Wing was shut down. That meant she had no clue that a rogue operation was developing within the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, one that would lead to the Iran-contra scandal and come close to taking down Ronnie’s presidency. Only when it was almost too late would Nancy recognize what had happened. “If, by some miracle, I could take back one decision in Ronnie’s presidency, it would be his agreement in January 1985 that Jim Baker and Donald Regan should swap jobs,” she recalled. “It seemed like a good idea at the time—a little unusual, perhaps, but reasonable. Jim, who had served Ronnie well as chief of staff, was worn out, and Donald Regan was more than willing to come to the White House after four years as secretary of the Treasury. When Baker and Regan suggested the switch, there was no reason to expect that this new arrangement would lead to a political disaster.”

  The inauguration was perhaps a harbinger. In 1981 Ronnie had lucked out with some of the most pleasant midwinter weather on record. His second term began during an arctic blast that sent temperatures in the nation’s capital plummeting to four degrees below zero. Because January 20 fell on a Sunday that year, Ronnie took the oath privately. The ceremonial swearing-in scheduled for the following day had to be moved inside. Where 140,000 guests had been invited to the main event, only 1,200 could squeeze into the Capitol Rotunda to hear Ronnie declare that “our nation is poised for greatness.” On the grounds outside, an icy wind whipped around 26,000 empty chairs and a vacant platform. The people who would have been in those seats had to settle for watching the proceedings on television in their hotel rooms or in crowded restaurants, seeing just what they would have seen if they’d stayed home.

  All the other outdoor festivities were canceled as well. No one wanted to subject the 10,578 people slated to march in the inaugural parade to frostbite or worse. The few onlookers hearty enough to stand along the Pennsylvania Avenue route got only a glimpse of the presidential motorcade whizzing by. Nancy learned later that while she and Ronnie had been at church on the day of the private swearing-in, an intruder had sneaked into the White House with the Marine Band: “All I could think was: What if he had been carrying a gun? I prayed that this wasn’t a bad omen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The unusual White House power-sharing arrangement of the first four years, in which the operation was managed by the troika of Baker, Deaver, and Meese, had been ungainly from the start. It created internal fiefdoms, suspicion, and backbiting: the ideologues aligned against the pragmatists; the Californians against the Washington veterans. No one was ever sure whose hand was on the helm when it came to making any given decision. After Ronnie’s 1984 victory, it was clearer than ever that the deal that had been struck four years earlier had reached its expiration date. All three members of the troika wanted out.

  In February 1985 Meese finally moved over to the Justice Department as attorney general. His confirmation had been delayed for a year while an independent counsel investigated his financial dealings. Once in the job, Meese would continue to be at the center of controversy as he sought to translate into policy the Reagan administration’s stances on abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and religion. For fighting those battles, Meese would gain a place as a conservative hero. But many of his initiatives were blocked by Congress and the Supreme Court, and ethical questions continued to dog him. His legal difficulties culminated in his resignation in 1988, after yet another independent counsel probe. The prosecutor declined to indict him for filing a false tax return but portrayed him as disorganized and indifferent to appearances of impropriety.

  Nancy was glad to see Meese go. His ideological inflexibility had always troubled her, she wrote. “It also made me squirm that he kept getting into trouble in his financial life. He made a series of mistakes which embarrassed the presidency, and some men in his situation would have stepped down. Eventually he did, but in my opinion he waited far too long and weakened both the Justice Department and the presidency.”

  From Nancy’s perspective, the departures of Baker and especially Deaver would bring a more unwelcome change. They had been her most crucial allies, the cutouts through whom she could work her will in the West Wing without leaving fingerprints. The shuffle would also put into Baker’s place as White House chief of staff the man who would become her greatest internal nemesis: Donald T. Regan.

  Regan came from a blue-collar background in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard on scholarship. As a US Marine in World War II, he fought across the Pacific Theater from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, and then came home to work his way up from stockbroker and become the youngest-ever president of Wall Street behemoth Merrill Lynch. A CEO by temperament, Regan first proposed the idea of a job swap to Baker a few days after the 1984 landslide. Baker jumped at the opportunity. He was exhausted by the irregular hours at the White House and the constant barrage of what he called “javelins” from the Right. Though Baker had his eye on becoming secretary of state, George Shultz wasn’t going anywhere. Running the Treasury Department would als
o give him a central role in what was potentially the biggest domestic policy initiative of the second term: a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s tax laws. But to make it happen, Baker told Regan, “We need to get Deaver involved.”

  Part of it was courtesy. At one point, Baker knew, Deaver himself had wanted to be White House chief of staff. But there was another reason to loop him in: Deaver could make sure the idea went over with Nancy. When Baker arranged for Regan to have lunch with him and Deaver, Regan noticed Deaver “listened to our words with the polite air of a man who had already heard what he was now being told and had made up his mind how to react. I supposed that Baker had sketched in the details beforehand. In my innocence, the thought that Deaver had cleared the plan with the first lady before discussing it with me, or even the president, did not occur to me.”

  They presented their proposal to Ronnie in early January in the Oval Office. The president’s reaction struck Regan as surprisingly impassive. Ronnie asked only a few questions and showed little curiosity about how the new arrangement would work. “He seemed to be absorbing a fait accompli rather than making a decision,” Regan recalled. “One might have thought that the matter had already been settled by some absent party.” In fact, Ronnie was relieved. There would now be one person running operations in the White House, rather than three. He wrote in his diary that the job swap had the potential to “resolve a lot of problems.”