The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  “Immunity?” North quipped. “If I had immunity, I wouldn’t have this bad cold.”

  “Not funny, sonny,” Nancy retorted to the image on the screen.

  As was her wont, Nancy decided that any fault in all of this lay not with Ronnie but with his subordinates. Starting with his chief of staff. “I called Don Regan from my office to let him know how upset I was. I felt very strongly that Ronnie had been badly served, and I wanted Don to know,” she later recalled. “Maybe this was unfair of me, but to some extent I blamed him for what had happened. He was the chief of staff, and if he didn’t know, I thought, he should have. A good chief of staff has sources everywhere. He should practically be able to smell what is going on.”

  Regan, she believed, took too much credit when things were going well and didn’t protect Ronnie as he should have when they weren’t. As the Iran arms sales controversy was exploding, Regan gave the New York Times a wide-ranging, self-serving interview. “Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follow a parade down Main Street cleaning up,” Regan said in the article, which appeared on November 16. The president’s chief of staff left little doubt whom he considered to have left behind the sloppy, stinking mess.

  From the start of Regan’s tenure at the White House, the former Merrill Lynch chairman acted as though he were still a chief executive. Regan styled himself the “prime minister,” and operated with an imperious manner that alienated the Republicans who were Ronnie’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill. He ordered a flagstone patio to be built onto his office that was larger than the one off the Oval Office. Unlike earlier White House chiefs of staff, Regan demanded regular Secret Service protection. He also made sure he got his own introduction at the president’s speeches and had a habit of placing himself in the middle of photo ops, including a historic one of Ronnie with Gorbachev in Geneva. “He liked the word ‘chief,’ but he never really understood that his title included the words ‘of staff,’ ” Nancy observed drily. She had no higher regard for “the mice,” as the cadre of obsequious aides that Regan brought over from the Treasury Department were known.

  Regan was also a sexist of the first order. He dismissed calls for economic sanctions against the racist regime in diamond-producing South Africa by saying that America’s women weren’t “prepared to give up all their jewelry.” During the Geneva summit, he posited that female readers of the news would be interested only in the social doings of Nancy and Raisa because they couldn’t possibly “understand throw weights [the maximum payload that missiles can carry] or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human rights.” Still, Regan and the president got along wonderfully. Where the chief of staff was arrogant with the White House staff and with Congress, he and Ronnie connected as two old Irishmen, tickled by the fact that they had such similar last names. Regan had a member of his staff come up with a joke each day, usually a bawdy one, that he could share with the president.

  “Ronnie never saw the Don that everybody else saw, because Don didn’t let him,” Nancy told journalist James Mann in a 2005 interview. “So Ronnie never knew all the things that were going on in the office, and all of the people who were coming to me, saying, ‘You’ve got to do something to get that man out of there.’ ” She told Mann that Regan once tried to fire Kathy Osborne, who had served as Ronnie’s secretary going back to Sacramento, because Osborne let a letter get through to the president without Regan seeing it first. “Don thought he was the president many times. But Ronnie never—he never knew,” Nancy said. “Those were hard times.”

  Regan did little to hide his contempt for Nancy or his exasperation with her constant phone calls. At one point, he told her that if she had anything she wanted to let him know, she should talk to his deputy. “When I need something, I’ll call you directly,” Nancy replied. “I don’t see any need for an intermediary.”

  The tart exchange showed how badly the chief of staff misread Nancy and the silent power she wielded in her husband’s White House. “I’m not the chief of staff of the first lady. I’m the chief of the staff of the president. I’m not taking her shit,” he fumed to Ed Rollins, who was political director at the time.

  “Don, I’m just telling you. You’re making a big mistake,” Rollins warned. “You’ve got to deal with her, and it sometimes can be burdensome, but you have to deal with her, because, ultimately, it will do you in.”

  Nancy soured on Regan “right off the bat,” Rollins told me. He recalled hearing the first couple arguing over the chief of staff not long after Regan took the job in early 1985. Rollins was following the Reagans one day as they walked through the colonnade that connects the West Wing and the residence. “I was about ten feet behind them, and they’re going at it,” Rollins said. “And finally, he stops, and he turns, and he said to her, ‘Nancy, I heard you the first time. I heard you the second time. I heard you the third time. I don’t want to hear you a fourth time,’ and turned and walked off.”

  Nancy had her first direct confrontation with Regan about five months after he became chief of staff, when Ronnie was operated on for colon cancer. The protective first lady and the abrasive Regan battled over her refusal to allow anyone to visit her husband as he recuperated in the days after the surgery. She said Ronnie needed more time and privacy to heal; Regan insisted that a president could not be seen as incapacitated.

  During this period, as earlier noted, an event occurred that set into motion the Iran-contra scandal—or, as it also became known, Iranscam. On July 18 Nancy lifted her ban on visitors and allowed National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, whom she liked, to meet with Ronnie in his hospital room. This was only five days after Ronnie’s surgery. Just that morning, doctors had removed his feeding tube and the metal clips from his incision. During what would later become an infamous twenty-three-minute private session, McFarlane informed the president that there were new signals of openness coming from some factions within the regime in Tehran. Ronnie authorized him to begin meeting with Iranian emissaries in a neutral country.

  Regan, who was present throughout, said later that he heard no mention of swapping arms for hostages. The president would claim he had no recollection at all of McFarlane’s visit. But Ronnie’s diary entries make it clear that, from the start, he viewed the initiative as having the potential to provide “a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back.” His own words suggest that freeing the hostages—and not seizing a supposed strategic opening to Iran—was the president’s priority. “Okay,” he told McFarlane. “Proceed. Make the contact.”

  Ronnie’s willingness to explore a deal for the hostages was a direct contradiction of what he was saying publicly. Exactly a month before his meeting with McFarlane, he had declared at a news conference: “Let me further make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices, wherever they may be, that America will never make concessions to terrorists—to do so would only invite more terrorism—nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so. Once we head down that path, there would be no end to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilized nations must pay.” As the Iran-contra scandal unfolded, America was learning that the president had done exactly what he had vowed not to.

  After that hospital visit, Bud McFarlane did not last much longer as national security adviser. He left at the end of 1985, frustrated over his frequent clashes with Regan, who claimed foreign policy as part of his turf. On December 5 Ronnie noted in his diary: “N.S.C. Briefing—probably Bud’s last. Subject was our undercover effort to free our 5 hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. It is a complex undertaking with only a few of us in on it. I won’t even write in the diary what we’re up to.” McFarlane was replaced by his deputy, John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral. It was a poor choice. Poindexter was a career military man with little political experience. A recluse by nature, he was not inclined to question or challenge the wishes of the commander in chief, at least as he understood them, or assertive enough to mediate
the constant disputes between the Pentagon and State.

  Meanwhile, the “complex undertaking” continued after McFarlane’s departure, run largely by North with guidance from CIA director William J. Casey. The secret arms sales to Iran faced growing internal opposition from other members of Ronnie’s fractious national security team. Secretary of State Shultz and Defense Secretary Weinberger—who disagreed on many other issues—were united in their view that it could have disastrous consequences and should be abandoned. Regan also argued against it. But the president was enthralled at the prospect of bringing home the hostages, a goal that North and Casey kept telling him was within reach if they forged ahead. McFarlane continued to act as an emissary in the mission he had launched, but he, too, had growing misgivings about it. The channels of communication within the operation became irregular, opaque, and dysfunctional. Shady operators outside the government were brought in to handle sensitive parts of it.

  Once the whole big mess was exposed, it seemed no one—and least among them, the president—had a clear command of the facts. Nancy grew terrified for her husband’s political survival and worried that those around him were too busy looking out for their own hides to be trusted to take care of his interests. All day long, she kept CNN on the television in the family quarters, which put her in a constant state of panic. She found it hard to eat and dropped another ten pounds off her already spare frame. The press was drawing comparisons to Watergate. A poll by the New York Times in early December showed Ronnie’s job approval number had dropped more than 20 percentage points in just a month. Starting in January, both houses of Congress would be run by the Democrats. The incoming Senate majority leader, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, was calling for a select committee to look into the scandal, which would mean nationally televised hearings. Impeachment was beginning to look like a real possibility—a cinch, if it turned out that the president knew about the illegal diversion of funds to the contras.

  Ronnie only grew more stubborn. He refused to admit that the arms sales had been a mistake. Nor did he agree with Nancy that all of this called for a major overhaul of his White House staff, starting at the top. Her hectoring only made the president more determined to stand by his chief of staff, even as calls for Regan’s head were growing on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Nancy’s I-told-you-so’s were wearing on her husband. “I was right about Stockman. I was right about Bill Clark,” she argued. “Why won’t you listen to me about Don Regan?”

  The Reagans started quarreling constantly. Peter Wallison, who was White House counsel at the time, heard one spat when he made a visit to the family quarters with some work for the president. The chief of staff had done nothing wrong, Ronnie insisted to his wife, so there was no reason to fire him. But Nancy wouldn’t let up. Finally, Ronnie told her: “Get off my back!”

  That phrase—and some saltier versions of it—apparently became Ronnie’s regular refrain. One weekend at Camp David, Jim Kuhn was working where he often did, at a desk in the kitchen pantry. The Reagans were going at it in the living room. Kuhn heard Ronnie scream: “Get off my goddamn back!” It was louder than Kuhn had ever heard any human voice, and thoroughly out of character for good-natured Ronnie. Though the executive assistant had witnessed plenty of arguments between the first couple, there had never been anything like this. “I grabbed my papers and folder,” Kuhn said. “I got out of there.”

  A report that Ronnie had told his wife to get off his goddamn back also made it into the Washington Post. The White House considered demanding a retraction. It backed off when word got around that Ronnie’s daughter Maureen—who had joined Nancy in her campaign to get rid of the chief of staff—was the likely source of the story. She did not get along with Regan any better than Nancy did. At one point, he told Maureen that she was “a pain in the ass.”

  Though Ronnie and Nancy’s differences over Regan were putting a strain on their marriage, he wanted her near during his time of crisis, as much as he ever had. He still hated to spend a night without her. Two weeks after the scandal broke, the president wrote in his diary: “Nancy came home from New York about 5 p.m., so there’s a different feel at the W.H.—It’s been a barn for about 36 hours.” Meanwhile, as Nancy realized that her own efforts to budge her husband were getting nowhere, she looked around for reinforcements. She marshaled the Reagans’ California friends to press for Regan’s ouster. She brought in Mike Deaver, though he by then was under federal investigation for allegedly violating conflict-of-interest laws as a lobbyist. She also turned to her old reliable troubleshooter Stu Spencer. Both Deaver and Spencer agreed with her that Regan had to go, but they knew as well as Nancy how intractable the president could be in a situation like this.

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll throw somebody else out to save my own ass,” Ronnie told Deaver during one meeting.

  “It’s not your ass I’m talking about,” Deaver told him. “You stood up on the steps of the Capitol and took an oath to defend the Constitution and this office. You’ve got to think of the country first.”

  At that, Ronnie threw his pen onto the carpet with such force that it bounced. “I’ve always thought of the country,” he retorted.

  There was another public relations problem developing. Nancy’s internal campaign against the chief of staff was becoming the talk of Washington. It was evident that she was the unseen force behind many of the negative stories about Regan that were making their way into the press. The image of his wife trying to take charge only added to a growing perception that Ronnie himself was not on top of things. When Nancy appeared in front of the White House to greet the arrival of that year’s official Christmas tree on a horse-drawn wagon, reporters took advantage of the ceremonial photo op to ask her whether the president should fire Regan. “I think that’s up to my husband. It has nothing to do with me whatever,” the first lady fibbed. “I’ve made no recommendations at all.”

  The very next evening, on December 4, two visitors came to the official residence at her invitation to meet with the president. One of them was William Rogers, a fixture of the Republican establishment who had been secretary of state under Nixon as well as Eisenhower’s attorney general. The other was Democratic Party chairman Robert Strauss, a gregarious Texan known as one of Washington’s most savvy and well-connected insiders. Nancy wanted Ronnie to hear advice from respected figures outside the White House; men who had seen presidents face trials in the past and who could give him a sense of how this thing might play out.

  So that no one would spot their arrival, Deaver led the two men through an underground tunnel that connects the Treasury Department basement to the subbasement of the White House’s East Wing. Its existence is little known even by longtime Washingtonians. The passage had been built right after the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor as an escape route and bunker for the president and his key staff; a tomblike refuge of last resort. As Deaver, Rogers, and Strauss made their way through its zigzagging route, they passed bunk beds and a hospital. When the three men reached the living quarters, Nancy greeted them and led them to the sitting room. Over the next two hours, she asked most of the questions, while Ronnie sat back and listened.

  Rogers, a friend and golf partner of Regan’s, was no help to her cause. He said little and predicted all of this would blow over. Strauss, however, had a lot he wanted to tell Ronnie.

  “Mr. President,” he began, “let me tell you about the first time I was up here in the residence. LBJ was in office, and a few of us came to see him about Vietnam. When my turn came to speak, I held back. I didn’t tell the president what I really thought. Instead, I told him what I thought he wanted to hear.

  “When I went home that night, I felt like a two-dollar whore. And I said to myself, if any president is ever foolish enough to invite me back, I hope I show more character.”

  Strauss said he had no quarrel with Regan, “but you’ve got two serious problems right now, and he’s not helping you with either one. First, you’ve got a political problem on the Hill
, and Don Regan has no constituency and no allies there. Second, you’ve got a serious media problem, and Regan has no friends there, either. It makes no difference how earnest he is, or how much you like him, or how well the two of you get along. He’s not the man you need. You’re in a hell of a mess, Mr. President, and you need a chief of staff who can help get you out of it.” Strauss also told the president that his news conference had been a mistake, and advised him not to hold any more until he got his facts straight.

  Nancy had never heard anyone outside of Ronnie’s closest advisers speak to her husband so bluntly and forcefully. Later that night, she called Strauss and thanked him for confronting the president with hard truths that no one else had been willing to deliver. “He has to have his mind opened and his eyes open on this and see what’s happening to him,” she said. But Ronnie was unmoved. With his typical optimism, he kept assuring Nancy that everything would all work out. So, failing to convince her husband to act, Nancy decided to pressure the chief of staff directly. In her phone calls to Regan, she was not subtle. He often picked up the line to hear a sarcastic greeting: “Are you still here, Don?”

  Nancy also looked for help from Vice President Bush, who agreed with her that Regan should go and had told the president so repeatedly. She pressed him at a White House Christmas party to just go around Ronnie and issue the order for Regan to leave himself.

  “Nancy, I’ve got some hang-ups on that, based on my relationship with the president,” Bush told her.

  “Well, I do it all the time,” Nancy replied, “and it is important that you do it.”

  Bush’s reluctance only reinforced Nancy’s view—harsh, and probably unfair—that the vice president was too weak to be an effective partner for her husband. She also believed he was more concerned about protecting his own political future than Ronnie’s survival.