The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  After Ronnie’s death came an even more ambitious project: the publication of the diaries he kept during his eight years in the White House. The existence of the diaries was well known. Edmund Morris had been allowed to see them when he was writing his massive biography of Ronnie, and there had been much wrangling over them during the Iran-contra scandal and its legal aftermath. In 1989, lawyers for former national security adviser John M. Poindexter subpoenaed excerpts to use in his defense during his trial on charges of lying to Congress. Both Ronnie and the Bush administration invoked executive privilege and refused to turn them over.

  In 2006 historian Douglas Brinkley was teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans and finishing up a book about Hurricane Katrina when he got a call from former California governor Pete Wilson, a member of the Reagan Foundation board. Wilson told him that the foundation was looking for someone to edit the diaries. Brinkley knew that Ronnie was one of only four presidents who had written a journal of his thoughts on a consistent basis. The historian was, in his words, “beyond intrigued” about the possibility of being the one who would be given the opportunity to see and analyze them.

  “Well, look, while you’ve risen to the top of our list, you still have tests to pass,” Wilson said.

  “What do you mean, ‘tests’?” Brinkley asked.

  “You’re going to have to win Mrs. Reagan’s approval,” Wilson said. “While she’d like to see the diaries published, she felt very burned by Edmund Morris. His very name makes her apoplectic. So, you’re going to have to convince her you’re not anything at all like Edmund Morris. And number two, she is just going to have to have a good feel for you as a person who she could collaborate with, because she owns these diaries.”

  Brinkley flew to California and met Nancy at the Hotel Bel-Air, where they both ordered the most popular item on the menu, the “Nancy Reagan Cobb Salad.” He had been given two pieces of advice by Wilson: First, don’t, under any circumstances, mention Morris. And second, if the conversation drags, talk to her about the movie business—not the old stuff from back in her days in Hollywood but contemporary films and current stars such as Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt. Brinkley was a contributor to Vanity Fair, so he figured he had that covered.

  They were getting along well, when Brinkley realized he had a confession to make. “Mrs. Reagan, I need to tell you something,” he said. “I’m not a conservative. If anything, people see me as somebody center left, or just plain old liberal. And you need to be aware that by giving me all of Reagan’s diaries, no strings attached, you might get some criticism from the Right.”

  Nancy, who was well into her mideighties, fixed a glare on Brinkley that he could still feel more than a decade later. “My son is more liberal than you will ever be,” she said. “What’s your point?”

  “Well, I don’t have a point, I guess,” Brinkley stammered. “I just thought I should put that on the table, just so you know.”

  “I don’t think like that,” Nancy said. “I’m not that way.”

  She went on to tell him how the liberal lion Edward M. Kennedy called her on every birthday and sang to her, a thoughtful gesture that not many of her Republican friends would bother to make. While she and Kennedy agreed on few issues, Nancy felt closer to him than almost anyone else who was still in Washington politics.

  Brinkley and his pregnant wife, Anne, moved to Simi Valley, and he got to work. He was awestruck when he got his first glimpse of the diaries: five volumes, bound in maroon leather, each embossed with the presidential seal and the name Ronald Wilson Reagan stamped in gold on the bottom right. As he read the neat, rounded handwriting, Brinkley felt he could almost hear Ronnie’s voice. But before any of it could be published, it had to get past a government national security clearance review. Censors in Washington wanted references to such sensitive things as arms deals with Saudi Arabia and other matters redacted. Nancy and Joanne Drake, who ran the foundation, fought these battles one by one, often winning them when they could show that a piece of information in question had already appeared in a newspaper story or in someone else’s book. George Shultz was helpful in hunting down these previously reported snippets. With few exceptions, everything in Ronnie’s diary was allowed to be published. Nancy’s determination to see his diaries made public was ironic, given that she ordered her own journals to be destroyed upon her death.

  Nancy’s larger purpose was clear to Brinkley. “She thought that Ronnie was more of an intellectual than the public had understood. That he was not a just an aw-shucks guy who read cowboy novels and painted fences. That he really had a deep sense of Cold War literature and could be very pragmatic and reflective,” the historian said. Nancy had one further stipulation she gave Brinkley: he had to promise that he would never, ever claim that because he had read the diaries, he had any special insight into what Ronnie might think about or do on any current issue if he were alive today. No one could know that, she said. Her stepson Michael made such assertions all the time on conservative talk shows, and it annoyed her to no end.

  Over the course of the project, Brinkley and Nancy became friends and had frequent lunches. As the birth of his baby approached, Nancy offered him motherly advice about raising children. She was frank about the mistakes she herself had made. When the diaries were published by HarperCollins in 2007, Nancy and Brinkley signed copies together and donated them to places such as Ronnie’s alma mater Eureka College and the museum that now stands at the spot where he was born. The Reagan Diaries reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. It gave a revealing look at the matters, both public and personal, that consumed the 2,922 days of Ronnie’s presidency. Suffusing the entire book is his love and longing for Nancy, which he wrote about in nearly every entry.

  For a few years after Ronnie was gone, Nancy fought her loneliness by getting out of the house. She even made some new and improbable friends. Among them was her husband’s old nemesis, the legendarily aggressive television newsman Sam Donaldson. They hadn’t known each other well back when Ronnie was president. Donaldson had once described Nancy on a Sunday-morning talk show as a “smiling mamba,” which was a reference to a large poisonous snake. He apologized, but that one had left a mark.

  So, Donaldson was a little surprised after Ronnie’s death when someone—he can’t remember who—mentioned that the former first lady might like to hear from him. The next time he was in Los Angeles, he got in touch. Thus began a semiregular routine in which the two of them got together for lunch at an oceanside restaurant. Donaldson would bring his laptop computer, and they would laugh over old images from the White House years. Not the big, historic, tear-down-this-wall stuff, but sentimental scenes, like when Nancy surprised Ronnie with a birthday cake on national television. The last time they met, one of the other patrons at the restaurant recognized Donaldson and approached him afterward. “Who was that elderly woman?” the man wanted to know. “She looks familiar.”

  As she approached her ninetieth birthday, Nancy’s health went into a sharp decline. In 2008 she was hospitalized twice after serious falls. She broke her pelvis in the second, which occurred when she got up in the middle of the night. She began wearing oversized glasses to deal with her glaucoma. When she showed up for events at the library, it was in a wheelchair. Her fragility made it harder and harder for Nancy to get out for the gossipy lunches that she had loved, and there were fewer of her friends still alive with which to share them. “There’s just nobody left,” Nancy lamented. Michael Deaver succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2007. Ursula Taylor, with whom she was close when they were newlyweds, young mothers, and neighbors, died in 2010. Nancy’s great pal Betsy Bloomingdale was also failing, and the only way they could stay in touch was by phone. Indeed, the telephone was pretty much Nancy’s only lifeline to the world. Friends and acquaintances often asked Joanne Drake if there was anything they could do for the former first lady. Drake’s advice was always the same: “Call her.”

  There was also more heartbreak within the Reagan
family. In 2014 Ron’s wife, Doria, died at the age of sixty-two. Seven years before, she had begun showing the symptoms of a serious neuromuscular disease similar to ALS. Doctors never quite settled on a precise diagnosis. She and Ron lived in a bungalow in Seattle, and he had taken care of Doria through her lengthy illness, during which he was unemployed part of the time.

  In Nancy’s final years, Ronnie would sometimes come to her at night. It seemed to her too real to be a dream. She would see him next to her, sitting on the side of the bed that she still left empty, and they would talk. Once, she spotted him in a chair and told him she thought he looked cold. She got up and retrieved a blanket from the closet. The next morning, she found the covering in a slightly different spot, as if it had been pushed aside when someone left. “She could not, she said, explain this,” recalled Peggy Noonan, to whom Nancy recounted the story. “Whatever it was, love, she felt, did not just disappear.” Nancy also started wondering more about the afterlife, and whether she and Ronnie would once again be together there. Evangelist Billy Graham assured her they would.

  Finally, there came a time when it was clear that this reunion would not be far away. She had planned nearly every detail of her funeral but for one: a minister to deliver her eulogy. Nancy hadn’t particularly liked the job done by the clergyman who handled Ronnie’s service at the Reagan Library, and the others to whom she felt closer were infirm or already dead themselves. Her friend Robert Higdon approached Episcopal priest Stuart Kenworthy, who had recently retired as rector of Christ Church in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. This was the most personal of assignments, and Kenworthy had never met Nancy. So, some time around early 2015, he flew to Los Angeles for what amounted to a highly unconventional audition. When Kenworthy arrived at the house in Bel Air, Higdon and Peggy Noonan took him back to Nancy’s tidy, light-filled bedroom. She was dressed in casual clothes and was lying on top of her bed. Kenworthy spotted a walker in the corner and a large amount of medication, signs of her precarious health. But mostly, he noticed that even as Nancy was reaching the end of her life, “she had a quiet elegance about her. Hair was done. All those things.”

  Kenworthy didn’t say much, as the three others shared old yarns from their years in the White House. The next day, Kenworthy and Higdon returned to see Nancy again. The clergyman, feeling a little more at ease, picked up some of the photographs that jammed the top of Nancy’s nightstand and asked her to tell him the stories behind them. One was worn and creased and a little too big for its weathered Plexiglas holder. It was a snapshot of Ronnie, taken in profile, when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s. He was lying down, just as Nancy was then. In the photo, she was hovering above him, their two faces nose to nose. The intimacy was still there, even through the fog of his illness.

  Nancy held it for a few moments and then told Kenworthy: “This one is my favorite.”

  “Mrs. Reagan, when I see this, I see someone living out their marriage vows,” he said.

  “Yes,” Nancy agreed, “it is.”

  She put it back on its spot, closest to her on the table. Kenworthy then asked Higdon if he might be left alone with Nancy. He sat in a chair at her bedside, and the two of them talked. She spoke of Ronnie, how much she loved him and how badly she wanted to be with him again. Kenworthy told her that with death, our existence is changed, not ended. Then Kenworthy asked Nancy if they might pray together. They offered thanksgiving—for life, and for love. They prayed that God would be with her in all that lay ahead. As Kenworthy left, he told her: “Mrs. Reagan, I’d like to come back and see you again some time.” That would be nice, she said. Both of them knew it was not likely to happen.

  The end for Nancy came on March 6, 2016, a Sunday. She was ninety-four. In her final week, the doctors could see it coming, though they weren’t sure exactly how long she had. Nancy was lucid until the very last. Patti and Ron came to visit several times. Three days before she died, Doug Wick and his wife, Lucy Fisher, spent time at her bedside. She seemed “a little at sea,” he said, so he picked up a nearby book. It was a volume of Ronnie’s letters to her, which Nancy had published more than a dozen years earlier. Wick asked if he could read a few of them to her. She perked up and told him playfully: “Well, I may have four or five minutes.” Wick read to her until he began to worry that he was tiring her out. But every time he got ready to close the book, she would ask to hear just one more: “I could just feel how it comforted her. It grounded her, anchored her.”

  One of her final visitors was Dennis Revell, Maureen’s widower. He and his fiancée, Cyndi Klement, made the seven-hour drive from Sacramento on Saturday. Nancy was fond of Cyndi’s cookies. They brought her a batch of her favorite kind, and Nancy shared it with her nurses. Dennis’s thirteen-year-old Ford Expedition had started blowing steam and smoke as he had turned onto Nancy’s driveway. She nagged him to take care of his radiator before he and Cyndi headed back. “It’s Saturday,” she worried. “How are you going to get your car repaired?”

  Early the next morning, her nurses discovered that Nancy had died in her sleep. The cause was congestive heart failure. Kenworthy got word of her death from Higdon. By then, the Episcopal priest had been named interim vicar at the National Cathedral in Washington. Though it had been nearly a year and a half since his meeting with Nancy, he had nothing prepared for a eulogy. He couldn’t find the right words.

  “I had all these books. I had about three or four books on the Reagans and Mrs. Reagan, the Reagan years. In the final analysis, they weren’t what I was looking for. I sat at my desk and pulled out the Scriptures, and I just sat there and prayed: ‘Lord, give me some light here,’ ” he said. Kenworthy worked for two hours, but it still didn’t feel quite right. Then he remembered the photo that Nancy kept by her bed, and realized that was it. That is what he would talk about. That was the image that brought love and faith together. “I’ve made a life and a vocation out of reading hearts, the human heart,” Kenworthy told me. “She was at peace. There are those people that, when the end is near, they in a sense, turn toward death and say, ‘Here I am. Here are you.’ It’s a part of life.”

  The following Friday, a motorcade carried her coffin forty miles from a mortuary in Santa Monica to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where Ronnie had been laid to rest nearly a dozen years before. Nancy was to finally join him, dressed for eternity in a red Adolfo suit. The procession route took the mourners on a long stretch of road that had been named the Ronald Reagan Freeway.

  Her service was more religious than some who knew her expected it to be. That was partly Kenworthy’s doing. “This is going to be a proclamation of resurrection, of faith,” he insisted. Ron and Patti sat in the front row with their uncle Dick, Nancy’s stepbrother. Her stepson, Michael, was not there. He claimed that he had been unable to rearrange an overseas trip and tweeted: “Colleen and I are traveling in Asia on business and will be honoring Nancy next Tuesday on the USS Ronald Reagan in Tokyo, Japan.” Betsy Bloomingdale, as frail as she was, managed to make it and was also seated up front. In attendance were members of every presidential family of the previous half century: George W. and Laura Bush; Michelle Obama; Hillary Clinton; Rosalynn Carter; Tricia Nixon Cox; Steven Ford; Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and Lucy Baines Johnson; Caroline Kennedy.

  The tributes to Nancy were lovely and funny, each looking at a different facet of her remarkable life. James Baker noted that Nancy was the one who said: “You need to do this, Ronnie. You need to find a way to negotiate with Gorbachev.” Brian Mulroney, Canada’s former prime minister, read aloud one of Ronnie’s sentimental letters to her. Tom Brokaw described her as a woman who was not just the wife of a president “but his best political adviser.”

  The rawest words, and perhaps the truest, were from her two children. “My parents were two halves of a circle, closed tight around a world in which their love for each other was the only sustenance they needed. While they might venture out and include others in their orbit, no one truly crossed the boundary into
the space they held as theirs,” Patti said as she stood in front of Nancy’s rose-covered casket.

  Ron spoke after his sister. “If my mother had one great talent, I think it was that she knew how to love, and she loved one man more than the world,” he said. “We should all be so lucky as to end up where we’ve always wanted to be. Today my mother comes to rest on this lovely hilltop, with its far-reaching views, next to her beloved Ronald Reagan Library. And by the way, from here, she will be able to keep an eye on things. Just saying. No slacking. How long will it be before tales begin to emerge of a petite, Chanel-clad spirit roaming the galleries and halls, just checking to make sure things are running smoothly?” That image of a ghostly Nancy keeping watch over the place in perpetuity brought some knowing laughter.

  But then Ron’s voice began to crack. “Most importantly, she will once again lay down beside the man who was the love of her life. The one she loved until the end of her days,” he said. “They will watch the sun drop over the hills in the west toward the sea as night falls. They will look out across the valley. My father will tell her that the lights below are her jewels. The moon and stars will endlessly turn overhead. And here they’ll stay, as they always wished it to be. Resting in each other’s arms, only each other’s arms.

  “Until the end of time.”

  Anne Frances Robbins, known as Nancy, 1927. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

  The marriage of Edith Luckett and Kenneth Robbins was all but over by the time their daughter arrived on July 6, 1921. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

  Nancy Robbins, living with relatives in Maryland, holds a tea party for her doll, 1920s. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)