But Nancy also found some unlikely defenders. The day after the Safire column appeared, Washington Post columnist Judy Mann, who had been among the first lady’s harshest critics in the past, offered a rebuttal: “The gentlemen who could exercise the greatest influence on the president couldn’t do the job. Mrs. Reagan did the dirty work for them, and now they are out to get her.… The first lady is the only one on the White House team who can’t be fired. That put her in a position to do something that no one else was able to do: get the presidency back on track. The president doesn’t look like a wimp. He had a wife who understood what had to be done and was willing to do the dirty work. That makes him a pretty lucky man.”
It didn’t help things for Nancy when Howard Baker, the incoming chief of staff, added more fuel. As he was flying up to Washington from Florida to assume his new job, Baker told his airline seatmate, the executive editor of the Miami Herald: “When she gets her hackles up, she can be a dragon.” So, it was inevitable that the next time reporters had a chance to question Ronnie, one of the first things he was asked was: “What is Mrs. Reagan’s role in running the government?”
“Not the one that has been bandied about in the press,” the president retorted.
Then came the follow-up: “Which part of it do you have the greatest objection to, Mr. President, of the many reports that have been written about that?”
Normally, Ronnie deflected questions such as these. He didn’t this time: “Well, the idea that she is—you realize I’m breaking my rule here, but you’ve touched a nerve here with that—but the idea that she’s involved in governmental decisions and so forth and all of this and being a kind of a dragon lady. There is nothing to that, and no one who knows her well would ever believe it.”
A reporter pointed out that the “dragon” comparison had been made by the president’s chief of staff, who, as it happened, was sitting on a couch nearby. Baker smiled sheepishly, which brought laughter all around—except from Ronnie. The president doubled down on his defense of his wife, insisting falsely she had had nothing to do with Regan’s departure. He repeated the fictitious narrative he had been using about the chief of staff’s resignation: “As I stated in my statement, he had spoken to me months before about his desire to leave. And then when all of this came up, decided that he would see it out and wait until after the Tower Commission report came in.” Baker tried to clean up the mess he had made. “The first lady is a distinguished citizen of this nation,” he said. “She’s a great lady, and she obviously is a lady of strong conviction. That’s what I meant.” He added that he planned to give Nancy a call. When reporters asked what they would talk about, Baker said, “Whatever she wants.” That brought another round of laughter.
Despite its uncomfortable start, Nancy’s relationship with Baker turned out to be a far smoother one than she had known with Regan. She became especially close to Deputy Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, who handled many of Baker’s management responsibilities and succeeded him as chief of staff in Ronnie’s final year as president. Duberstein respected the first lady, tolerated her frequent phone calls, and solicited her input. “She became my partner, a major help,” he told me. “She had an uncanny understanding of her husband that nobody else had, and she was willing to share that with me.”
The two of them developed an amiable routine. Nearly every weekday, Nancy would call Duberstein about a quarter to nine, as Ronnie was heading out of the family quarters toward the Oval Office. She let Duberstein know what her husband had read in the paper that morning, what his mood was like, how he was feeling, whether there was anything in particular Ronnie had on his mind. With that intelligence, Duberstein was able to quickly catch up on what he needed to have in hand before the president arrived. As Ronnie made his way to the office, he would usually stop at the office of White House physician John Hutton to say hello. Duberstein left his door cracked open, and Hutton would stick his arm in to signal Duberstein that the president was on his way.
In May 1987 Nancy had an opportunity to explain her role as first lady, as she had grown to understand it, to a group of newspaper publishers at an Associated Press luncheon in New York City. Never fond of giving speeches, she knew that this one would be listened to closely and could help to shape her own legacy as her husband’s time in office entered its final stretch. Once again, she turned to Parvin to draft it. She told him she wanted to make it clear that she was not a bit sorry for acting as the most steadfast guardian of her husband’s well-being. Nancy started with a joke: “I’m delighted to be here. I was afraid I might have to cancel. You know how busy I am—between staffing the White House and overseeing the arms talks. In fact, this morning I had planned to clear up US-Soviet differences on intermediate-range nuclear missiles. But I decided to clean out Ronnie’s sock drawer instead.”
Nancy acknowledged that she had been “terribly naive” and surprised by the scrutiny she had endured as first lady. Though she had been in public life for a long time before entering the White House, she said, “I just didn’t expect it to be that concentrated. And I was even more unprepared for what I read about myself in the papers.” But she also said that she found an opportunity to make a difference from the “white-glove pulpit” that a first lady is given, and that her work against drug abuse “has provided me with the most fulfilling years of my life.”
And then Nancy got to the heart of it.
“In spite of everything I’ve learned these past six years, there’s one thing on which I’m inflexible. The first lady is, first of all, a wife. That’s the reason she’s there,” Nancy said. “A president has advisers to counsel him on foreign affairs, on defense, on the economy, on politics, on any number of matters. But no one among all those experts is there to look after him as an individual with human needs, as a flesh-and-blood person who must deal with the pressures of holding the most powerful position on earth.… I see the first lady as another means to keep a president from becoming isolated. I talk to people. They tell me things. They pass along ideas. And, sure, I tell my husband. And if something else is about to become a problem or fall between the cracks, I’m not above calling a staff person and asking about it.
“I’m a woman who loves her husband, and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare. We have a genuine sharing marriage. I go to his aid. He comes to mine. I have opinions. He has opinions. We don’t always agree. But neither marriage nor politics denies a spouse the right to hold an opinion or the right to express it. If you have anything less, it’s not marriage.”
Nancy recalled that in her first professional role as a stage actress, she had played a character who was locked in an attic and allowed only a few lines. “Recently, there are those who think first ladies should be kept in attics, only to say our lines, pour our tea, and then be put away again,” she said. “Although I don’t get involved in policy, it’s silly to suggest my opinion should not carry some weight with a man I’ve been married to for thirty-five years.”
She began speaking out more forcefully in other new ways. That same spring, Nancy gave a commencement speech to the May 1987 graduating class of Georgetown University Medical School. Instead of offering the customary bromides and platitudes that speakers do so often on those occasions, she slammed the medical profession for having ignored the extent of the country’s drug abuse problem. She cited surveys showing physicians and medical students were themselves using marijuana and cocaine at alarming rates. “Doctors should do more than simply reflect current trends in drug use,” Nancy said. “You have a higher obligation because you are the best and the brightest. You are held more accountable because of the profession you’ve chosen. To put it plainly, doctors should know better, and their patients deserve better.
“My father always believed that the best doctors are good teachers, and I think that is what you must be,” Loyal Davis’s daughter noted. “I know the insurance companies won’t pay you for doing this. I know you won’t be reimbursed for your troubles. B
ut you are more than that terrible phrase—‘health care providers’—would imply. You are doctors. Your patients are more than consumers. They are the sick and the hurt.”
Nancy would never win over her harshest critics on the Left or the Right. But as her influence was becoming more clearly recognized, much of the country was beginning to see her in a different way: as someone Americans were glad to have as a partner to their president. She even found some surprising new fans. In June Gallup released a poll in which it asked men aged twenty-five to thirty-four to name which woman they would most like to spend an evening with. Nancy came in first. Granted, she got only 3.7 percent of the vote in this open-ended survey. But that total bested the number received by Hollywood stars such as Heather Locklear, Raquel Welch, Lynda Carter, and Cybill Shepherd. “We never dreamed that young guys would answer ‘Nancy Reagan,’ ” marveled editor Andy Kowl of Fast Lane, the lifestyle magazine for men under thirty that had commissioned the survey. “If this had been a multiple-choice question, we would never have included her name.”
Nancy, traveling in Sweden to promote her antidrug cause, was amused and more than a little delighted when she learned of the survey result. “I talked to my husband last night,” she told reporters on her plane. “He said, ‘I’m sitting here with a poll in my hand, and I think you’d better get over here real soon.’ ”
Iran-contra continued to make headlines during 1987. One key remaining question was whether Ronnie had known of the illegal diversion of money from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels. In July Oliver North, wearing a uniform bedecked with ribbons and medals, delivered his testimony to the House and Senate select committees investigating the scandal. He spoke under a grant of limited immunity from prosecution, which meant that nothing he said to the lawmakers could be used against him. The television networks cleared their normal broadcast schedules to carry it live, and tens of millions of Americans tuned in. “Throughout the conduct of my entire tenure at the National Security Council, I assumed that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved it,” North said.
But the critical juncture came days later, when former national security adviser John Poindexter told those same committees that he had deliberately withheld information from Ronnie about the funneling of profits from the arms sales to the contras “so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the president if it ever leaked out.” Poindexter was the only living person who had both known of the diversion and who had met with the president alone. His statement, given under oath, did not reflect well on how the White House had been managed or the president’s competence as a chief executive. However, it ensured that Ronnie would not be held directly accountable for the illegal secret operation that had grown out of the disastrous arms sales.
His presidency seemed to be getting back on track, and his job-approval rating began inching back toward positive territory. At the end of the year, he and Gorbachev held their summit in Washington, and there would be another in Moscow before he left office. Ronnie was moving closer and closer to the place in history that Nancy envisioned for him, which was as a peacemaker of historic significance.
In November it was announced that he had settled on a spectacular, hundred-acre site in California for his presidential library. It would be built on a mesa in Simi Valley, a small city in eastern Ventura County. The land was nestled among the mountains and, on the clearest of days, offered a view of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. Prominent conservatives, including Ed Meese and Bill Clark, had pressed for locating the library at Stanford University, where it would work in tandem with the conservative Hoover Institution, a preeminent think tank of the Right. But some on Stanford’s faculty protested that having both Hoover and the Reagan Library on campus would compromise Stanford’s independence by tying it to right-wing Republicanism. And Ronnie wanted it in Southern California, where it would be easier for him to visit.
Wherever it was located, the project would require raising massive amounts of private funds, which meant the Reagans were once again turning to wealthy benefactors. Robert Higdon, who had been brought aboard by Mike Deaver in the mid-1980s to help set up the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, recalled that Ronnie had little appetite for this part. Nancy, on the other hand, had no reservations about doing what had to be done. At events with big donors, “he would show up. He would never ask anybody for a cent, where she wouldn’t hesitate. She was a closer,” Higdon said. Under the law, however, the Reagans were not allowed to know who had contributed or how much until after Ronnie was out of office.
In August 1987 the Reagans tapped assistant to the president Fred Ryan to begin organizing for the years after Ronnie would leave the White House. At that point, Ryan—who decades later would become publisher of the Washington Post—had been working for two years on planning for the library. A Californian, he relished the chance to return to his home state when the Reagans did and to serve as the chief of staff for Ronnie’s postpresidential operation. “I talked to him about what he wanted when he left office. Did he want to retire and go to his ranch? Nobody could have held anything against him for doing that. He was in his late seventies, and that would be a natural thing to do. Or did he want to have a limited involvement?” Ryan recalled. “He made it very clear that he wanted to continue to speak out on the issues he’d spoken out on as president, and things he thought of as unfinished business that he wanted to devote time to.”
Ryan began sounding out opportunities for the soon-to-be-ex-president to work with a speaker’s bureau and write his memoirs. He pondered how much partisan activity would be appropriate for a man who had spent eight years in the White House. Scouting for potential office space, Ryan found what he thought was the ideal building: a brand-new one among the shiny high-rises in Los Angeles’s Century City area. It was close to the house where the Reagans would be living, and, looking west, it offered a view of the ocean, something Ryan knew the president wanted. He was initially told there were no vacancies. But suddenly the top floor became available, after the makers of the movie Die Hard finished using it for the famous action scene at the end of the 1988 thriller in which there was a shootout with hostage-holding terrorists, and the roof of the building went up in a ball of flame. Wandering through, Ryan saw gaping holes in the walls. On the floor were piles of fake broken glass and spent movie-prop shells. “I loved it, and when I came back and showed the Reagans the photos and the diagrams, they thought it was perfect,” Ryan said. The Secret Service was not so enamored with their choice of a building, however. A major motion picture had just been made showing how to blow it up.
The Reagans also asked Ryan to begin planning events that could stand as symbolic milestones during Ronnie’s final year: sentimental visits to places that had been important to his life and his presidency, and ceremonies honoring figures who had played a role in his success. “Tie it up with a bow,” Nancy told Ryan. There would be a trip to Notre Dame University to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of legendary coach Knute Rockne, giving Ronnie a chance to reprise the movie line that had become his political battle cry: “Win one for the Gipper.” Margaret Thatcher had been celebrated at their very first state dinner, so she would also be honored at their last. The bow itself: ground would be broken for the library.
Ronnie’s presidency, it appeared, was moving toward a successful finale. For Nancy, however, late 1987 brought personal sadnesses: her breast cancer; her mother’s death; her continuing estrangement from her daughter. Another was a growing distance from the man who for decades had been her closest ally and adviser.
Michael Deaver had left the White House in 1985 to make his fortune as a lobbyist. Though he had been practically a surrogate son to the Reagans, Deaver learned what so many others had: once you were out of the president’s orbit, you practically ceased to exist for him. That was the thing about Ronnie. With the exception of Nancy, he didn’t really need anyone. “It never
bothered him when people left,” Lyn Nofziger told Lou Cannon in 2002. For Deaver, the idea that Ronnie could do without him so easily was a shock. After his departure from the White House, he would occasionally call the president to offer a word of advice on whatever was happening at the moment. “Well, Mike,” Ronnie would reply, “we have people here now who take care of those things.”
Nor was Deaver well prepared for the pressures and temptations of life outside the one he had known for practically his entire adulthood. He had initially stayed in close touch with Nancy, and the two of them worked together during the difficult early months of the Iran-contra scandal. But Nancy had deepening misgivings as she saw how Deaver operated once he was freed to establish his own identity and steer his own destiny. He went from being an image maker to being a fixer. As she put it later: “Somewhere along the line in Washington, Mike Deaver went off track and caught a bad case of Potomac fever. He had suddenly become a national figure, a genius of public relations, and when something like that happens, it can be hard to keep your perspective.”
Nancy had spotted an early sign of trouble ahead in 1986, when she saw her old confidant on the cover of Time. Deaver posed in the back of a limousine with a telephone to his ear and the Capitol in the background. “Who’s This Man Calling?” read the headline. “Influence Peddling in Washington.” The article inside depicted Deaver as the face of a new kind of sleaze, valued not for any expertise but rather for his access. It noted that Deaver, alone among departed Reagan aides, was allowed to keep his White House pass and that he chatted regularly with Nancy. All of which drew clients willing to pay an annual retainer of $300,000 and up.
The first lady called Deaver and said: “Mike, you’ve made a big mistake, and I think you’re going to regret it.” She was right. He was soon under investigation for violating the restrictions in the Ethics in Government Act, a post-Watergate reform that forbade high-ranking officials who had left government from lobbying their old agencies on issues on which they had participated “personally and substantially.” Deaver ultimately was charged not with breaking that law itself but with lying to Congress about his involvement with the governments of Canada and South Korea and two private firms, Trans World Airlines and Smith Barney Harris Upham & Company.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 55
