The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Still other letters in the file denounced Kelley herself. New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith, whom Kelley portrayed as a first-class suck-up to Nancy, wrote: “She is pathetic. She is also a shit. Forget her. The backlash in your favor has already begun. Love—Liz.” Letitia Baldrige, the etiquette expert who had been Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary and later assisted Nancy in the White House, wrote from Washington to assure her: “It will give you great satisfaction to know that she is finished. No one here will invite her anymore. No one will speak to her.”

  Screen legend Marlene Dietrich advised Nancy to sue both the author and her publisher, Simon & Schuster (which is also the publisher of this book). “Please don’t give up!!!” the eighty-nine-year-old Dietrich wrote on April 21 from Paris. “Stop any further publication. Threaten lawsuits if sold outside USA. All the lawyers fees are worth it! That pig of a woman—and Simon & Schuster—should suffer.”

  But the sensation around the book had one unexpected result: it created a wave of sympathy for Nancy. The New York Times, in an editorial denouncing the book, wrote: “Funny thing is, the more that Americans wanted to believe wonderful things about their 40th president and the more Teflon they conferred on him, the more they seemed willing to believe the worst of his wife. Lightning rods have had it better than Nancy Reagan. O.K., so she probably deserved more than a few of the jolts. But truly, nobody deserves this.” Kelley suspended her publicity tour and claimed to Newsweek that she had gotten a message on her answering machine from “a minor hood” of her acquaintance warning her: “Kitty, please be very careful. There is a hit on you.”

  * * *

  The furor over the book eventually settled down, and there were soon other events that put the Reagans in the news in a more favorable and dignified light. The library’s November 4, 1991, dedication was a triumph, bringing together five living presidents for the first time in US history. Also in attendance were the six living women who had served as First Lady. Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush were seated uncomfortably in the scorching sun, which they privately agreed must have been Nancy’s doing.

  In the months before the library opening, there had been a power struggle over its direction that pitted Nancy against some of the more conservative figures who had been with Ronnie from the beginning. Ed Meese, Bill Clark, and Martin Anderson were quietly dropped from the Reagan Foundation’s twelve-member board. Economist W. Glenn Campbell, who had shaped the Hoover Institution at Stanford, had been nudged out earlier. The reason given for their departures was that they had come to the end of their six-year terms, but no one took that at face value. The moves were seen as a purge engineered by Nancy.

  “Reagan never even knew about this until after it happened,” one longtime friend of the former president told the Washington Post’s Lou Cannon. “Unfortunately, this reinforces the view that Nancy’s in charge and that Reagan doesn’t really know what’s going on.” The bitterness broke into the open when Ronnie’s former spokesman Lyn Nofziger wrote an August 4 op-ed for the Post that was headlined: “A Reaganite’s Lament.”

  “Ronald Reagan,” Nofziger began, “you have broken my heart. Finally.”

  “Today the papers told us what I have been hearing for some time: that you have given up, which maybe at age 80 you have a right to do. But in doing so, you appear to have forgotten old loyalties and to have walked away from old friends,” Nofziger wrote in the open letter to his old boss. “You have let Nancy and the rich and beautiful people with whom she has surrounded herself and you force off the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library three of the most dedicated and selfless Reaganites there are—men who stayed with you through the good days and the bad, men who never had a bad word to say about you or your performances as governor or president, men who dedicated good parts of their lives to you and your success because they believed that if you succeeded the state and the nation would benefit and prosper.”

  Nofziger recounted how the trio most recently ousted from the board had contributed to Ronnie’s rise: Meese and Clark, the loyalists who had served Ronnie from the dawn of his governorship; Anderson, the brainy academic and domestic policy adviser who had so often been called upon to defend Ronnie’s positions.

  “So how have you rewarded them?” Nofziger wrote. “You have let Nancy, who, for reasons I don’t understand, has a vendetta against them, arrange to have them not reappointed to the board of your library. Indeed, if they had not protested, they would have been thrown off en masse before the opening of the library in November. And this probably would have been done without your even knowing or caring.”

  Others who were involved in the power struggle described it differently. They say that the three men had created tension with the remaining board members by pressing for a different agenda for the new library. In their vision, it would become not a monument to Ronnie’s presidency but a conservative power base. Among their proposals were that it should have cottages for what they said would be “visiting scholars,” but which other members of the board believed they planned to turn into their own homes away from home. They even suggested that the library build and stock a wine cellar. Said one person who worked closely with the board at the time: “Clearly, they would meet beforehand and come up with what the agenda would be. It would be orchestrated. It was planned in advance. ‘What do you think about this? All in favor?’ Things would just move.”

  Nancy, who had an acute sense of when others were trying to use her husband for their own purposes, grew worried that Ronnie’s vision for the library was being thwarted. William French Smith, the former Reagan attorney general who was chairman of the foundation board at the time, suggested the simplest and cleanest solution would be not to reappoint the conservative board members when their terms expired. They left shortly after the library opened. Ronnie wrote them each a note, thanking them for their support and friendship.

  But if the launch of the library caused a rupture with some of Ronnie’s oldest backers, it also brought about a long-overdue reconciliation. There was only one person who had the skill it would take to pull off an event as ambitious as the library opening: Michael Deaver. Fred Ryan wasn’t sure how Nancy would react when he broached the idea of bringing back the disgraced former aide. She immediately embraced it. Her closeness with Deaver was something she had greatly missed.

  In fact, Deaver had already made an overture. He happened to be in Los Angeles in February 1991. It had been three years since he had seen the Reagans; longer than that since he’d talked to them. He had their number in his address book and decided to call. Nancy answered. He told her that he was in town and would like to come over and see them some time in the next few days. “Of course,” she said. “Why don’t you come now? We’re both here.” She gave him directions.

  Deaver drove to Bel Air and up St. Cloud Road. Their new home “was larger than their old house in Pacific Palisades, with a contemporary California feel to it and a commanding view of the Los Angeles Basin. I still wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision in calling them. Perhaps I should go back and write a letter, I thought. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a face-to-face meeting,” Deaver recalled.

  He was still thinking it over, delaying his entrance by making small talk with the Secret Service agents outside, when Nancy came to the door. She pulled him in and hugged him. Ronnie poured them all iced tea in the den. “It’s important to me to say that I am really sorry for some of the things that happened over the last few years,” Deaver began.

  “Mike, forget all that,” Nancy said, taking his hand. “We’re just glad you’re back with us.” Ronnie told him it was the best eightieth birthday present he could ask for. That was when Deaver suddenly realized the date: February 6. How could he have forgotten?

  This, however, would be a new chapter in Deaver’s relationship with the couple that had loomed so large over his life. He would understand them in a way he never really had before. “I had doubted Reagan’s affection for me during our silent period from 1987
to 1991, and it was difficult for me to fully understand,” he wrote later. “In time, though, I came to realize that Reagan is so totally complete in himself that the only person he really needs is Nancy. Yes, I am a very special person in his life, but if I am out of sight for a few weeks or years, that’s okay, too. It’s Nancy that he wants and needs to be around all the time.”

  Though Nancy was devoted to assuring her husband’s place in history, she was not without a sense of her own political power. In 1994 she inflicted an overdue measure of payback against Oliver L. North, the National Security Council aide at the center of the Iran-contra scandal. North had been indicted on sixteen felony counts and convicted of three, but the verdict was vacated on appeal in 1990 because the evidence had been based in part on testimony he had given to Congress on the promise it would not be used against him. In the years since, he had become a godlike figure with right-wing groups.

  In September 1993 North declared his candidacy for the Senate against vulnerable Democratic incumbent Charles S. Robb, who in 1967 married Lynda Bird, the daughter of Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson, in a lavish White House wedding. Both Reagans endorsed Ronnie’s former budget chief James C. Miller III in the GOP contest, but North easily won the nomination at the state party convention the following June. That year, the tides were running with Republicans across the country, and North raised upward of $20 million, more than any other Senate candidate.

  One day Nancy was having lunch with the Reagans’ longtime political consultant Stuart Spencer, when Spencer asked: “You still hate Ollie North?” Nancy began fuming about the possibility that someone who had betrayed Ronnie as North had done might actually end up in the US Senate. “I want to get even with him, too,” Spencer said. Then he told Nancy there was a way she might be able to throw a roadblock into North’s path.

  “I didn’t have to argue very hard,” Spencer recalled, still delighted nearly a quarter century later about the plan the two of them hatched together. Nancy’s opportunity arose less than two weeks before the election, when she made an appearance in New York with talk-show host Charlie Rose, and the topic turned to the hot Virginia Senate race. “Ollie North—oh, I’ll be happy to tell you about Ollie North. Ollie North has a great deal of trouble separating fact from fantasy,” Nancy said. “He lied to my husband and lied about my husband—kept things from him he should not have kept from him. And that’s what I think of Ollie North.”

  Robb’s internal polls had shown him 4 points behind North before the former first lady’s comments hit the news on October 28. On the stump, the embattled Democratic senator began adding a new punch line to his attacks on his Republican opponent: “Just ask Nancy Reagan.”

  Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who was working for Robb, tracked a remarkable shift in the final days before the election. “After Mrs. Reagan’s criticism of North on October 28, the race swung back in Robb’s direction, with a significant drop in support for North,” Garin told me. “Her impact was important because she put a dead stop to North’s efforts to normalize himself as an acceptable option for Republicans. The television campaign was very negative at this point, and Mrs. Reagan’s intervention broke through the ugly clutter and made it harder for right-leaning voters to cast a vote—either for North himself or for [independent candidate] Marshall Coleman—that would put North in the Senate.” On election night, Republicans swept to victory across the country. They won back control of the House for the first time in four decades and picked up eight seats in the Senate. It was a political tsunami across the map, with one conspicuous exception: Virginia. North lost to Robb by less than 3 percentage points. Nancy’s aim had been precise, well timed, and deadly.

  However, there would be no opportunity for Nancy to savor the moment; no sweetness to her revenge. Three days before the election, Ronnie shook the country with an announcement that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  After years of being Ronnie’s physician, John Hutton could tell instantly that something was wrong—very wrong. It was February 3, 1994. Twenty-five hundred people were gathered in the magnificent Pension Building in downtown Washington, DC, for a black-tie gala celebrating the Gipper’s eighty-third birthday. The event was also a high-dollar fund-raiser for the Republican Party. Ronnie’s great friend Margaret Thatcher, now three years out of office as British prime minister, was on hand to introduce the former president.

  Ronnie came to the microphone and, looking dazed, began to speak haltingly, a little out of sync. He did not seem to be able to find his words, even though they were written on cards that he was holding in his hand: “Frankly… for a minute there… I was a bit concerned… that after all… these years away from Washington… you all… wouldn’t… recognize me.” Nor did Ronnie apparently realize there was a teleprompter right in front of him. To Hutton’s practiced and professional eye, it was clear he was confused and on the verge of humiliating himself.

  The doctor leaned over to Cathy Busch, who was the Reagans’ spokeswoman. “Have you seen this before?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  Fred Ryan was also in the audience. “What’s wrong?” he thought. “Something is not right here.”

  Then, within seconds, Ronnie was his old self. It was as if someone had flipped a light switch. He saw the teleprompter and gave a speech that was as good as ever. He had the audience laughing and cheering. Some people got so emotional they started crying.

  This had not been Ronnie’s only mental lapse that evening. At the predinner reception, Nancy had sensed something was amiss. She urged Ryan to make sure the event did not fall behind schedule. “We’ve got to keep this thing moving,” she said. In the holding room backstage, it got worse. Ronnie, though delighted to see Thatcher, did not appear to know where he was or why. The former prime minister touched her old friend and said gently: “Ronnie, you’re in Washington.”

  After the dinner, Hutton went back to the Reagans’ hotel with them. Ronnie entered their room first, took about five steps, and stopped. “I’m going to have to wait a minute,” he said. “I’m having a little trouble. I don’t know where I am.”

  Nancy grabbed Hutton’s arm. “John,” she said, “this has been happening even in his own house.”

  No one knew it then, but the man known as the Great Communicator would never give a major speech in public again. Nine months after that near disaster in Washington, on November 5, 1994, Ronnie revealed to the nation in a heartbreaking handwritten letter that he was “one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.” The same affliction had struck his mother (though at the time, the name for it wasn’t widely known) and his older brother, who for years had been showing symptoms of cognitive decline. But neither Ronnie nor the woman he loved fully grasped what lay ahead. “Like most people then, I didn’t know much about Alzheimer’s (looking back, I suppose that was just as well), but I was certainly going to learn!” Nancy recalled.

  Precisely when the fortieth president of the United States showed the first signs of impairment has been a subject of much debate and speculation, and no doubt will continue to be among historians and scholars for many years to come. The most important question, of course, is whether it affected his performance while he was in office. Answering that is made all the more difficult by the nature of the man himself. Ronnie’s intellect was always underestimated; he was smarter and more well read than his critics—and even some of his admirers—gave him credit for being. But even when he was in his prime, those who saw him every day came to understand that his amiable exterior cloaked an inner complexion that was detached, remote, and ultimately unknowable. He was uninterested in details. He was prone throughout his life to mixing up facts and fuzzy at remembering names.

  There is no bright line to define where these characteristics turned into something more serious than the ordinary slippage that comes with getting older. Hutton and the three other doctors who served as R
onnie’s White House physician are on record saying that they do not believe Ronnie’s mental capacities dropped sharply until after his presidency. “His behavior was so absolutely the same, day after day, his punctuality, his habits, his method of speech, etc. It never gave me any cause for alarm at all,” Hutton recounted in an oral history for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Lawrence K. Altman, a physician who was the leading medical writer for the New York Times, heard pretty much the same from Hutton’s predecessors. “They saw and spoke with him daily in the White House, they said, and beyond the natural failings of age never found his memory, reasoning, or judgment to be significantly impaired,” Altman wrote in 1997.

  Biographer Edmund Morris was also adamant that, in his research and observation, he saw no signs that Ronnie suffered cognitive decline while in the White House. “I’ve read every word of the Reagan diaries,” Morris told me in a 2017 interview. He insisted that although Ronnie “became a very old man at the end,” the president’s sentences continued to be “structurally perfect,” and his handwriting remained uniform throughout the eight years in which he recorded near-daily entries in his journals. In Morris’s massive biography of Ronnie, he posited that the president’s diaries offered “no hint of mental deterioration beyond occasional repetitions and non sequiturs; and if those were suggestive of early dementia, many diarists including myself would have reason to worry.”