The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  As debate intensified, Bush threatened to veto the bill, which he ultimately did. Nancy realized that she had to speak up. The opportunity came on May 9, 2004, when actor Michael J. Fox, who had gone public five years before with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and was a leading advocate for stem-cell research, presented her an award at a fund-raising dinner for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

  “Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him. Because of this, I’m determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain. I just don’t see how we can turn our backs on this,” she said. “Science has presented us with a hope called stem-cell research, which may provide our scientists with many answers that for so long have been beyond our grasp.

  “We have lost so much time already. I just really can’t bear to lose anymore.”

  * * *

  One thing that might have finally emboldened Nancy to make her voice heard was realizing how little time Ronnie had left. Though his mind had left him, the body of which he had been so proud refused to give up. At ninety-three, he was only the third US president to make it into his tenth decade. He outlived by nearly three years his longest-surviving predecessor, John Adams. It was a longevity record he would not hold for long, as Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter would all remain alive past that age.

  Death finally took Ronnie on June 5, 2004, a Saturday, when the jacaranda trees were showering the ground with their purple blooms. In the days before, Nancy summoned the family and notified their closest friends that Ronnie’s time was near. There were also arrangements that had to be set in motion. The previous Monday, she had telephoned Robert Higdon. It was Memorial Day, and her call caught Higdon as he and his partner were driving to see the newly opened World War II memorial on the National Mall.

  “The doctors were just here,” Nancy told Higdon. “And I think you need to get ready.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “By the end of the week,” Nancy said.

  Higdon and Fred Ryan were to be in charge of the funeral logistics. The two of them and former advance man Rick Ahearn quietly set up a command center at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown DC. They contacted Washington National Cathedral and stayed up all night Thursday putting together the politically and diplomatically sensitive list of 3,700 people to be invited and deciding where each person should be seated in the cathedral. Nancy air-shipped Higdon a pair of Ronnie’s brown leather riding boots, which were to be placed backward in the stirrups of a riderless horse that would follow the caisson carrying his casket to the Capitol, where Ronnie’s body was to lie in state.

  On that Saturday morning, Ronnie’s breath was so shallow it was barely perceptible. His eyes had not opened for days. And then, just a bit after one o’clock in the afternoon, they did. “He opens his eyes—both eyes—wide. They are focused and blue. They haven’t been blue like that in more than a year, but they are now,” Patti wrote. “My father looks straight at my mother, holds onto the sight of her face for a moment or two, and then gently closes his eyes and stops breathing.”

  The room was silent, except for the sound of Nancy weeping softly. “That’s the greatest gift you could have given me,” she whispered.

  As word of Ronnie’s death shot around the world, Nancy and the family sat with his body for four hours. They could hear the sound of helicopters circling over the house. “A great American life has come to an end,” George W. Bush announced at the White House, blinking back tears. “Ronald Reagan won America’s respect with his greatness and won its love with his goodness. He had the confidence that comes with conviction, the strength that comes with character, the grace that comes with humility, and the humor that comes with wisdom. He leaves behind a nation he restored and a world he helped save.” Massachusetts senator John F. Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, noted the late president’s gift for “goodwill in the heat of the partisan battle” and declared: “Ronald Reagan’s love of country was infectious.”

  Presidents are required to begin planning their funerals while they are still in office. There had been many meetings to discuss this one in the years during and after Ronnie’s presidency. Decisions had to be made: Would he lie in state? Would there be a Washington ceremony as well as one in California? What military bands would play? What Scriptures would be read and which hymns would be sung? While he was still healthy, Ronnie had to attend these sessions, but this “was an area he had no interest in,” Fred Ryan said.

  The plans also kept having to be updated. Ronnie outlived some of the clergymen who initially had been expected to lead his services. In the end, Nancy settled on former senator John C. Danforth, an Episcopal priest who was not particularly close to the Reagans. There were other adjustments that had to be made. Margaret Thatcher traveled for years with a black suit in her luggage, so she could be at the ready to come to Washington and offer her last tribute to Ronnie at his funeral. But Thatcher’s own health had deteriorated from a set of strokes, and she worried that she would no longer be up to it. So, while Thatcher planned to be present for the service, she had videotaped her eulogy the previous March. Cathedral officials initially objected to including Thatcher’s videotape as part of the service. “You tell them this is how I want it done,” Nancy said. They relented after Ryan threatened to take the whole thing to nearby National Presbyterian Church.

  Ronnie’s was the nation’s first state funeral in more than thirty years, and as David Von Drehle wrote in the Washington Post: “The pomp was nearly unprecedented in American annals, more than two extraordinary hours of thundering organ, swelling chorus, haunting silences, and eloquent prayers. Eulogies were spoken by two presidents and two prime ministers.” The younger Bush echoed words once spoken on the passing of Abraham Lincoln: “Ronald Reagan belongs to the ages now, but we preferred it when he belonged to us.”

  There had been a few glitches. The day before the service, Higdon realized suddenly that he hadn’t ordered flowers. He asked Nancy what she wanted to do, and she was momentarily flummoxed. “Jerry would say all white,” Higdon said, invoking the name of Nancy’s old chum Jerry Zipkin, who had died nearly a decade earlier. “Absolutely,” she said.

  Less than two hours before Ronnie’s body was to arrive, the Capitol was briefly evacuated, when a plane carrying the governor of Kentucky mistakenly flew into its secure airspace. VIPs rushed frantically from the building, worried that a replay of 9/11 was about to happen. At the National Cathedral, Higdon cringed when he saw members of Congress “acting like a bunch of hillbillies,” asking dignitaries such as Prince Charles and Mikhail Gorbachev to sign their funeral programs.

  But to the public—the thousands who lined the route of Ronnie’s casket to say good-bye and the millions who saw the proceedings on television—the five days of observances seemed to come off as flawlessly as Nancy had hoped. There were grace notes from beginning to end, from the F-15 fighter jets that sliced the Washington sky in a missing-man formation as his coffin arrived at the Capitol, to the bagpipes that played “Amazing Grace” at the burial service at the Reagan Library in California. As the government plane carrying his body for a final time across the country flew over Tampico, Illinois, it dipped a wing toward Ronnie’s birthplace.

  The final service in California was carefully timed to end exactly as the sun dropped into the Pacific Ocean, a sight that Ronnie loved. Against a red and amber sky, Nancy laid an American flag and then her cheek upon her husband’s mahogany casket. In her grief and exhaustion, the finality of it was more than she could bear. “I can’t leave him,” she said. Nancy stroked the wood and sobbed, until the three surviving Reagan children gathered to lift her and lead her away to a future where she would never again feel Ronnie’s touch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Great men have two lives,” the diplomat Adolf Berle once observed, “one which occurs while they work on this Earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and con
tinues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” Berle was speaking in 1945, shortly after the passing of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president that Ronnie had admired more than any other. But his words could just as easily have applied to Ronald Reagan himself.

  Ronnie redefined conservatism and became the North Star for generations of GOP leaders. But it was not just Republicans who recognized his enduring power. In January 2008 a young African American US senator from Illinois who was in the heat of a Democratic presidential primary startled many in his party by citing Ronnie as his own model for connecting with Americans across the political spectrum. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,” Barack Obama said. “He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

  While Nancy was no longer the caretaker of Ronnie’s physical well-being, she continued to be the chief guardian of his legacy. Most modern presidents have lived for decades after they leave office. They have used those years to shade and shape how the future will regard them. Ronnie, whose incapacitation began so soon after the end of his presidency, was denied that opportunity to write the first draft of his own legacy. So, it fell to Nancy to make sure that the story that history would tell about him would be true to his character and his ideals. She was wary of men who claimed his mantle as a means of furthering their own ambitions and goals that he would not necessarily have shared. She also was determined to refute the counternarrative of him. Even as Ronnie was beatified on the Right, there were still those in the elite circles of the Left who saw him less as a leader and a visionary than as an actor who read words that others had written for him. A 1996 survey of historians conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. infuriated conservatives when it ranked Ronnie “low average”—one spot below George H. W. Bush and just ahead of Chester Arthur.

  This is why Nancy devoted so much of her energy to the Reagan Library. “I go to the library or work for the library all the time, because it’s Ronnie,” she said in 2009. “I’m working for Ronnie.” Both she and he had wanted it to become a place that not only sanctified the past but pointed the way to the future. Republicans who aspired to the Oval Office came there to give major policy addresses. The library hosted two GOP presidential candidate debates during the 2008 election cycle, and one each in 2012 and 2016.

  Nancy was also relentless in making sure the library and foundation that carried Ronnie’s name would have the money to sustain itself indefinitely. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens donated $10 million in 2005 to help build the massive pavilion in which the museum housed a Boeing 707 that had been used as Air Force One by Ronnie and six other presidents. Nancy put Pickens in charge of raising another $100 million in honor of the February 2011 centennial of Ronnie’s birth. Shortly before the deadline, she checked in with him to see how things were going. “I think we can claim victory, Mrs. Reagan,” Pickens told her triumphantly.

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “How much do you have?” Nancy asked.

  “Ninety-five million,” Pickens replied.

  “Victory is a hundred million,” she said icily. “I want a hundred by Ronnie’s birthday.”

  Pickens scrambled to round up a few other big donors and threw in an additional $1 million himself. Then he called Nancy to tell her he had reached the goal. “Boone, I knew you could do it,” she said.

  Recounting the story five years later, Pickens—a legendarily ruthless corporate raider—told me with a laugh how intimidated he was by the eighty-nine-year-old former first lady. “Well, hell yes, I did it. I did it within twenty-four hours,” he recalled in his big West Texas drawl. “Yeah, I could do it when she screwed down on me like that. I saw her as I think a lot of people did during their administration. She could get tough. She wanted something, and she was going to get it.”

  Around the country, Ronnie’s admirers looked for other lasting ways to honor him. Some of it began while Ronnie was still alive. The 1998 dedication of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington was a gesture rich in irony. It is a sprawling $818 million federal building, a limestone behemoth second only to the Pentagon in size, that carries the name of a president who portrayed big government as the enemy. Congress also voted that same year to rechristen the airport closest to the capital Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. There are dozens of schools and stretches of highway named for him.

  Nancy was uncomfortable about some of the more excessive things that her husband’s devotees wanted to do in—and with—his name. She was not a fan of antitax activist Grover Norquist’s Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which had a goal of christening something in every one of the nation’s 3,140 counties after the fortieth president. Nancy believed, as she was sure her husband would have, that any such movement should come from local communities themselves. “If he were able to, he’d quietly thank them but say, ‘Please don’t,’ ” she said.

  In 2003 Nancy put a stop to a plan by some Republicans in Congress to put her husband’s profile on the dime. Nancy thought Ronnie would not have wanted to supplant his idol FDR on the coin. She was also keenly aware of the poignant story behind Roosevelt’s placement there. It had been done as a tribute to the leadership that a president disabled by polio had shown in founding the March of Dimes, an organization dedicated to scientific advances and education that improved the health of mothers and their babies. Since the 1970s, some in the anti-abortion movement have boycotted the March of Dimes, because, among other things, it encourages prenatal testing. “I do not support this proposal, and I’m certain Ronnie would not,” Nancy said of the idea of putting her husband on the coin. “When our country chooses to honor a great president such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him and replace him with another.”

  Long after Ronnie was out of office, Nancy kept watch for references to him in the news media. In 1998 she sent a note to the Wall Street Journal’s Albert R. Hunt about a not entirely flattering column he had written about the debate over renaming Washington’s airport after Ronnie. Rather than focusing on Hunt’s criticisms of her husband, Nancy zeroed in on a passing reference he had made to Ronnie’s firing of more than eleven thousand air traffic controllers during a 1981 strike. “I had to write and thank you for the column you did on Ronnie and the airport. I’ve been reading all the comments about the air controllers’ strike and waiting for someone to point out that it was an illegal strike,” Nancy wrote. “They broke the law, so Ronnie fired them. But no one said it—until you. I’m very grateful to you for at last setting the record straight, and I hope that’s the last we hear of it.

  “Also thanks for your comments on Ronnie’s practicing a policy of civility—which he did,” she added. “Very important, and I think we all miss it when it isn’t there. Hope you can read my handwriting (my husband never could!) and thanks again.”

  But Nancy wanted to do more than protect Ronnie’s reputation. She wanted to elevate and enlarge it, to make history fully recognize her husband’s intellect and his vision. She wanted generations to come to understand that he was not, as Democratic power broker Clark Clifford famously described him, an “amiable dunce.” Ronnie’s own written words, she believed, were the best testament to the thinker that he was. As Ronnie himself had explained to Esquire magazine in 1976, it was through writing that he converted from a New Dealer to a conservative: “I always did my own speeches and did the research for them. I just woke up to the realization one day that I had been going out and helping to elect the people who had been causing the things I had been criticizing. So it wasn’t any case of some mentor coming in and talking me out of it. I did it in my own speeches.”

  The Reagan Library turned out to hold a gold min
e of unexamined evidence in that regard. Scholar Kiron K. Skinner discovered some of it in the late 1990s as she was looking through cardboard boxes there. Tucked into one she found scripts of the radio addresses that Ronnie had given between the time he was governor and his election as president. On pages upon pages of legal pads, he had sketched out a blueprint for what would become his governing philosophy. Skinner worked with Martin Anderson, who served as Ronnie’s first domestic-policy adviser, and Anderson’s wife, Annelise, who had been an aide in the Office of Management and Budget, to edit a collection of them. Reagan, in His Own Hand was published in 2001.

  Nancy “was very supportive of that project,” said former secretary of state George Shultz, who wrote the book’s introduction. “Obviously it was a project of huge importance, because it showed that when ideas are written out in the president’s own handwriting, they’re his. It was not some staff person’s. You could see a display of the man’s thinking.”

  The book was followed in 2003 by Reagan: A Life in Letters, which collected more than five thousand thoughtful, poignant, and witty pieces of correspondence. They spanned nearly his entire lifetime, from a note to some older girls when he was eleven years old, to the final missives he wrote after announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994. Included were everything from Ronnie’s letters to world leaders, to his half-century-long pen-pal relationship with the woman who had been the president of the Philadelphia chapter of his fan club back when he was a movie actor. As Time magazine put it in a cover story: “The letters suggest a man for whom writing was less a habit than a need, like food and water, as though the very act shaped his thoughts as much as the thoughts shaped the writing.”