The operation went smoothly. A large polyp was removed, along with two smaller ones and nearly two feet of intestine. A few minutes after seven o’clock, Nancy and her brother, Dick, went into the recovery room. Ronnie was groggy, with a tube coming out of his nose and another one going into his arm. For the first photograph that would be released publicly after the surgery, Nancy leaned in to kiss her husband, positioning her head and his so that his nasogastric feeding tube would not show.
Two days after the surgery, on July 15, a pathology report confirmed that the tumor was malignant. The doctors assured Nancy and Ronnie that they had gotten it all. The president should have every expectation of making a full recovery and leading a normal life, they said, though he would no longer be able to eat the popcorn that he loved. In the future, Ronnie would deny that he had even had cancer. As he saw it, “I had something inside me that had cancer in it, and it was removed.”
Nancy closely monitored the briefings that her husband’s medical team was giving the reporters who were clamoring for information. The first lady was aghast to see diagrams of her husband’s insides being broadcast on national television. She was also concerned that one of those providing information to the media was Dr. Stephen Rosenberg, the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, who had been blunt with the Reagans in private conversations about the fact that someone who has had cancer is never entirely out of the woods. Sure enough, Rosenberg began his presentation by making a statement in the present tense, not the past: “The president has cancer.” Nancy, watching from her husband’s hospital suite, was furious. “Goddamn it,” she said, “I knew he was going to do that.”
Ronnie was in the hospital for a week, during which Nancy and Don Regan were at loggerheads over the chief of staff’s insistence that the president return to conducting business right away. “For three days, she insisted that he see no one in the hospital. She wouldn’t let him see George Bush. She wouldn’t let him see Bud McFarlane, George Shultz, Weinberger—nobody,” Regan told Lou Cannon later. “Because in her opinion, he couldn’t be tired out this way, he couldn’t risk not having a good recuperative period, that he might exhaust himself doing that. On the other hand, I reminded her that he was still the president of the United States and different from most mortals and that he had to carry on the business of state and that it looked very peculiar.” Regan argued that other world leaders, as well as the American public, would become “a little bit apprehensive as to, is this man all right?”
It also annoyed Nancy that Regan was taking a government helicopter back and forth from the hospital each day, while she was commuting by car. “I must have had some inkling, even then, of what increasingly bothered me about Don Regan, which was that he often acted as if he were president,” Nancy recalled later. Regan tried to shrug off her complaints, until he got a call from Ed Hickey, who was in charge of scheduling military transportation for the White House. “I’d cancel the helicopter if I were you, Don,” Hickey said. “The first lady’s staff are talking about it.” Regan argued that the drive would take forty-five minutes each way, but when Hickey told him, “The buzzards are out,” Regan finally gave in. “Okay,” he said, “cancel the damn helicopter.”
Nancy was not entirely successful in keeping out visitors. One who made it into Ronnie’s room was national security adviser McFarlane. Nancy had told Regan that if McFarlane had anything that the president needed to know, he could put it in writing. But McFarlane insisted that he had to see Ronnie in person. The brief meeting in Ronnie’s hospital room five days after his surgery would later be recognized as a fateful one. McFarlane told the president that there were signals from Iran suggesting the possibility of establishing a dialogue after years of having no relations. Ronnie confided to his diary that the “strange soundings” coming from Iran might also provide an opening to solve another problem that was weighing on his mind. In March 1984 William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, had been kidnapped by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with ties to Iran. Over the next fifteen months, six more Americans had been taken hostage.
Ronnie still had the impulses of the young lifeguard who more than a half century before had saved seventy-seven souls from drowning in the Rock River. Opening a channel to Tehran, he wrote, “could be a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back.” The president authorized McFarlane to meet with two Iranian government representatives in a neutral country. So began a series of events that would lead to the swap of US weapons for hostages—the core transaction of the Iran-contra scandal that would blow up the following year.
Shortly before Ronnie left the hospital, he delivered his regular Saturday radio address, in which he said: “I’d like to indulge myself for a moment here. There’s something I want to say, and I wanted to say it with Nancy at my side, as she is right now, as she always has been. First ladies aren’t elected, and they don’t receive a salary. They have mostly been private persons forced to live public lives, and in my book, they’ve all been heroes. Abigail Adams helped invent America. Dolley Madison helped protect it. Eleanor Roosevelt was FDR’s eyes and ears. Nancy Reagan is my everything.”
At the end, Ronnie added, “By the way, are you doing anything this evening?”
What neither of them knew was that they had not put the subject of cancer behind them. When doctors had pulled the tape from Ronnie’s nasal tube, his nose started bleeding. Then the skin crusted and began bleeding again. Ten days later, a biopsy revealed that what appeared to be a pimple was actually basal cell carcinoma, a common and normally curable form of skin cancer. Nancy, still sensitive about all the intrusive news coverage about Ronnie’s colon cancer, wanted it to remain a secret. The name on the biopsy report was Tracy Malone, who was actually a sixty-two-year-old female military nurse. The first lady insisted that the statement the White House put out about it on August 1 contain neither the word cancer nor biopsy. By then, however, the media had figured out that something was up—it was, quite literally, as clear as the nose on the president’s face—and in a news conference on August 5, Ronnie admitted the truth. The whole episode damaged the White House’s credibility, but it also taught a lesson that transparency is a better policy on matters of presidential health. Ronnie told Speakes that he was never again to withhold medical information about him from the public.
* * *
A little over two years later, the situation would arise again, only this time it was Nancy who faced a cancer diagnosis. On October 5, 1987, she and White House physician Hutton went to Bethesda for her annual mammogram. Nancy’s stomach tightened when the nurse said they wanted to take a couple of images over again. Afterward, Hutton entered the examination room and asked the nurse to leave. He told Nancy that there were three flecks of calcium in her left breast, which were signs of cancer, though only a biopsy could tell them for sure.
“What do we do next?” she asked.
He and the first lady discussed her options. She wanted a team from the Mayo Clinic to be in charge, supervised by her longtime friend Dr. Oliver Beahrs. He was a former top surgeon at Mayo and had been a student of her father’s at Northwestern University Medical School. When Nancy was still in her teens, Beahrs was a frequent guest at the Davis apartment and performed magic tricks at Edie’s parties. Hutton called Beahrs, who said he would be on the next plane.
The trip back to the White House on the George Washington Parkway felt interminable to Hutton. He and Nancy were silent for much of it. She told the White House physician that he would have to deliver the news to her husband. When they arrived at the south entrance, Nancy straightened her posture and greeted the awaiting staff as though nothing was amiss. She headed for the family quarters to lie down in the bedroom, and Hutton turned toward the Oval Office. “I need to see the president right now,” he told assistant Jim Kuhn, who was sitting at his desk outside.
When Hutton walked in, Ronnie was writing on a yellow pad. Hutton felt so overwhelmed that, for a moment, he couldn’t find h
is voice. “Sir,” he said finally, “we’ve just returned from the Naval Hospital, as you know, and I’m afraid we’ve made an early discovery that will necessarily require surgical removal and macroscopic examination on Mrs. Reagan’s left breast. We won’t know if it is definitely malignant until the area in question is removed, and if it is positive, we will have various options of treatment, depending on her wishes. The best news is that it is an early discovery, which is very much in her favor.”
Ronnie was dumbstruck. “I’ve seen him taken aback, but he was stunned. He absolutely couldn’t digest this information,” Hutton recalled. “It was totally, totally out of character. It was just more than he could really understand.”
The president finally spoke, slowly and in a frail voice that Hutton had never heard before: “I know you doctors will take care of it.”
Hutton was astonished at the president’s odd and detached reaction, though he would later realize that there was an explanation for it. For the first time, Ronnie was being forced to imagine the unthinkable: a life without Nancy. The doctor left, figuring Ronnie wanted to be alone for a bit. Hutton assumed that, once Ronnie had a few moments to recover from the initial shock, he would summon the doctor back to provide more information and advice. No call came. So, Hutton went to the family quarters to see how Nancy was doing.
He was still there when Ronnie arrived home that day, a little earlier than usual. “Well, how are you?” Ronnie asked his wife matter-of-factly and gave her a hug. “It was as if there was no issue at all. It was the ultimate in denial for these two wonderful people,” Hutton recalled later. The doctor excused himself and departed.
The next morning, the buzzer went off in Hutton’s office. The president wanted to see him. Ronnie told Hutton that he wished the physician had stayed with them that night.
“Why, sir?” Hutton asked.
“Because I needed a good kick in the rear end,” Ronnie said. He admitted he had avoided any conversation with his wife that evening about the diagnosis and upcoming surgery. “We never discussed it. We never discussed it.”
The next morning, Ronnie apologized to Nancy for his insensitivity, but Hutton said the whole episode didn’t seem to bother her. “He’ll come around,” Nancy said. “It will be all right.” The couple carried on with their schedule that day, greeting the crown prince and princess of Japan upon their arrival in Washington and hosting a state dinner for them in the evening.
After conferring with doctors, Nancy decided that if it turned out to be cancer, she wanted to have a mastectomy rather than the less drastic lumpectomy that was becoming more common in cases like hers. Nancy knew that, given her anxious nature, she’d be constantly worrying about a recurrence. She wanted the extra assurance that the malignancy was out, even if it meant losing a breast. A mastectomy would also spare her the radiation therapy that would be required if surgeons preserved her breast.
“Listen, I know a little bit about cancer,” she told Hutton. “What do I need a breast for, number one. Number two, I know about multicentricity. If you have a lump here, you may have a lump there in two or three years. Why not just take all the breast tissue away?”
“Perfectly logical,” Hutton told her. “I think if it were my wife, that’s what I would say.”
Nancy also had other things to consider. She told her doctors she had a busy schedule over the next weeks, including a charity dinner in Chicago at which she was to accept a $100,000 donation to the Nancy Reagan Drug Abuse Foundation that she was getting off the ground. After that, there was an event in New Hampshire for the Foster Grandparents program. Her physicians assured her there would be no problem with a short delay, so they scheduled her surgery for October 17.
On the flight to Chicago, Nancy told her press secretary, Elaine Crispen, and her assistant, Jane Erkenbeck, what was going on. As they all cried, the three of them agreed to keep it secret until right before she went into the hospital. Nancy spent that night in the Drake Hotel, looking over the same view of Lake Michigan that she had seen so often from her childhood apartment. She wished for her parents. But Loyal had been dead for five years, and Edie no longer knew who she was.
The evening before the surgery, Nancy checked into the hospital and watched the gripping televised rescue of Jessica McClure, a little girl who had been trapped in a well in Midland, Texas. The first lady awoke at six thirty the next morning, an hour before the operation was scheduled, to find that the Washington area was shrouded in fog. That meant Ronnie and her brother, Dick, who had come down from Philadelphia, could not take a helicopter. Ronnie became frantic and demanded a car, which got him there just in time to give Nancy a kiss before they put her under.
The operation took fifty minutes. When her doctors came out of the operating room, they told Ronnie that the seven-millimeter tumor was indeed malignant. The president collapsed into a chair, dropped his head, and wept. Hutton wasn’t sure what to do. It occurred to him that in this moment, Ronnie needed to be in the hands of a woman. Hutton found Paula Trivette, a nurse he knew the Reagans loved, and asked her to go into the room where Ronnie was. As she put her arm around the president’s shoulder, Ronnie felt that he had been visited by an angel. Trivette’s quiet words, he wrote later, “lifted me from the pit I was in and kept me out of it.”
The initial White House announcement, issued while Nancy was still in surgery, described the first lady’s tumor as a “noninvasive intraductal adenocarcinoma of approximately seven millimeters in size.” Her decision to undergo a modified radical mastectomy for a small cancer that had not spread, rather than lumpectomy, which involved removing only the tumor and a small amount of surrounding tissue, was the subject of no small amount of second-guessing. Rose Kushner, the executive director of the Breast Cancer Advisory Center, a group that counseled women, told the New York Times that Nancy “set us back ten years.” Kushner added: “I’m not recommending that anyone do it her way.” Nancy, justifiably, resented the carping about what for her had been an intensely personal decision.
The first lady also opted against breast reconstructive surgery. But she worried what her husband would think when he saw how she had been disfigured. “I still haven’t shown Ronnie—me,” Nancy wrote in her diary a week after the mastectomy. “Even though he says it doesn’t make any difference, and I believe him, I somehow can’t bring myself to do it yet. I’ll know when the time is right.” In that same diary entry, she noted that she had received “the dearest letter” from Ron’s wife, Doria: “It was full of love and concern, and I’ll save it forever. I couldn’t help wishing it had come from my own daughter.”
Nancy became a prominent public advocate for women to get routine mammograms and a private source of comfort to others in her situation. When Los Angeles Times reporter Betty Cuniberti was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of thirty-six in 1988, a letter arrived from Nancy on the very day that doctors were explaining to Cuniberti the procedures for her own operation. “Believe me, no one knows better than I how you feel right now (although you’ll probably find a lot of people you know have had it done and you didn’t know—at least, I did),” Nancy wrote. “When they use the word ‘malignant’ or ‘cancer,’ your heart stops, really stops.… After it’s over, you’ll find, I think, it really isn’t so bad.”
But her cancer diagnosis would shortly be followed by another blow. Nine days after her mastectomy, Nancy was on the phone with her son, Ron, when the bedroom door opened, and her husband walked in. “Honey,” Ronnie told her, “Edie is now with Loyal.” Though it had been a long time since Edie had been able to talk to her, Nancy felt sad and guilty that she had not been there for her mother’s end as she had for her father’s. She arranged quickly to get to Phoenix. When she and Ronnie walked into the mortuary the following day, Nancy was taken aback to see her mother lying in her robe, her gold beads, and the little red mittens that Edie in her final years wore summer and winter. As Nancy began to sob, Ronnie took her in his arms and tried to absorb her grief. The most
powerful man in the world felt helpless. He had never seen his wife in such pain.
Nancy took the mittens as a keepsake and then told her mother one last time how much she loved her, how grateful she was for the woman whose drive and example had made so much possible for her daughter. No doubt the pain and emptiness of Nancy’s early years without Edie stirred again as she faced the fact that this time, her mother’s absence would be permanent. In one last nod to the life story that Edie had written for herself, the obituaries cited her age as ninety-one, which was eight years younger than she actually was.
Edie’s funeral service took place in a Catholic church that, at Nancy’s request, was decorated with white flowers all around. Though Edie was not herself a Catholic, Nancy appreciated that the parish’s priests had come to the nursing home to give her mother communion every Sunday. In his homily, the pastor recalled an episode years before that was pure Edie. When he introduced Nancy’s mother to the bishop of Phoenix, she gave the prelate a saucy little curtsy, and then turned to the priest and said: “Well, aren’t you and I going to kiss? We always do that when the bishop isn’t here!”
Ronnie delivered a graceful eulogy. He described his mother-in-law as a woman who “gave wit and charm and kindliness throughout her life.” Meeting her was “like opening a bottle of champagne,” the president added, paraphrasing what Winston Churchill once said about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Afterward, there was a reception at the home of Edie’s old neighbors, the Boiches. Patti did not show up for any of it. “There was no visit, no call, no wire, no flowers, no letter—nothing,” Nancy wrote. “My mother deserved a lot better than that, and so, for that matter, did Patti’s mother.” Her press secretary, Elaine Crispen, told reporters that Patti’s absence was “another crack in an already broken heart.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 44
