First Ladies (23 page)

The Reagan administration launched an all-out assault on drug use. Nancy’s program, Just Say No to Drugs, was the centerpiece of the effort. Athletes, movie stars, civic leaders, and numerous private groups pitched in. Nancy attended an endless parade of antidrug conferences and narrated a documentary,
The Chemical People
, for PBS. She convened a conference of First Ladies from other countries in Washington to discuss the drug problem from an international perspective. The bottom line showed significant results. During the years when Just Say No was going full blast, drug use among high school and college students dropped almost fifty percent.

Meanwhile, Nancy was taking a few lessons from that master of spin control, Ronald Reagan, on how to deal with other aspects of her image. At the 1981 Al Smith Dinner in New York, an annual gathering of politicians from all points of the ideological compass, she made an impromptu speech when she was introduced. She said she had
heard there was a cardboard cutout of her going around, in which she was wearing a crown. “Now that’s silly,” she said. “I’d never wear a crown. It musses up your hair.”

Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs campaign was one of the most successful causes ever embraced by a First Lady. It dramatically reduced drug use among Americans of all ages, particularly the young
.
(AP/Wide World Photos)

As a chuckle raced through the startled crowd, Nancy said she was taking this opportunity to announce her new charity project: “The Nancy Reagan Home for Wayward China.” This time the laugh was long and loud. Nancy was on her way back from the bottom of the polls.

A few months later, Nancy and her husband went to the Gridiron Club dinner, another annual affair in which the high-profile types in the current administration get roasted by the press. As everyone expected, Nancy got a going-over. A reporter dressed in fake high style impersonated her warbling “Second Hand Clothes” to the tune of the Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand showstopper, “Second Hand Rose.” It was a direct hit on the borrowed outfits from Adolfo et al.

When eyes traveled to the dais to see how Nancy was taking it, they found only an empty chair. Even the President looked puzzled. Many thought she had stalked out in a rage. Suddenly onto the stage
pranced Nancy as a bag lady, singing her own version of “Second Hand Clothes”:

The applause made the building totter. People got so carried away, one Washington pundit compared Nancy’s performance with William Jennings Bryan’s epochal speech “You Shall Not Crucify Mankind upon a Cross of Gold.” That is going a bit far, but you get the idea. Nancy had found her way back across that perilous gap between upper-class elegance and democratic humility.

Not everything went smoothly for Nancy Reagan or the Reagan administration thereafter. But among First Ladies, Nancy unquestionably rates the Comeback Queen award. By January 1985, just after Ronald Reagan had swamped the Democrats forty-nine states to one for reelection, Nancy was ahead of him in the popularity polls, seventy-one percent to sixty-two percent.
The New Republic
, bastion of oppositionists to almost every President, expressed bewilderment that the woman who had started out as the least popular President’s wife in decades could achieve poll numbers that topped Jackie Kennedy’s.

All it took was some showbiz smarts and a little Democratic advice. (I was not the only one to offer her my two cents, I hastily add.) But if Martha Washington is watching her successors (and I sometimes
think she is), I am sure she was proud of Nancy’s performance. It was a class act—in more ways than one.

Nancy also functioned as a political partner in her own way. The old spinmeister Ronald Reagan made this very clear in one of his 1985 weekly radio addresses. “Nancy is my everything,” he said. “When I look back on these days, I’ll remember your radiance and your strength, your support and for taking part in the business of the nation. Thank you, partner, thanks for everything.”

In Rosalynn Carter, the political partner and the wife were so intertwined the result was often a blur. Not so with Nancy Reagan. Out front, she was a wife. This goes back to the roots of her life, when she experienced the pain of her parents’ divorce and years of being parked with relatives until her actress mother married a wealthy Chicago doctor and was able to give Nancy a sense of belonging to a family again. Even when she went to Hollywood and launched her own screen career, Nancy made no secret of her desire to marry and have a family.

That probably explains the romantic intensity she brought to her marriage to Ronald Reagan. Ronnie’s considerable charm has something to do with it, of course. I was aware of the power of his personality long before he became President. My husband, Clifton Daniel, told me about the day he met Reagan in the early fifties, when Clifton was the
New York Times
correspondent in London. He went down to Southampton to meet his boss, Turner Catledge, the crusty managing editor of
The New York Times
. A chuckling Catledge came down the gangplank with Reagan and introduced him to Clifton. After Reagan said good-bye, Catledge told Clifton he had met Ronnie on shipboard and they had barely parted company during the voyage. “That fellow knows more good stories than I do,” Catledge said—a tremendous admission. Catledge prided himself on his prowess as a southern yarn spinner.

Maybe it was those funny stories, or Ronnie’s amazingly good-natured ways—but Nancy Reagan adored the man, and he reciprocated with almost gushing emotion. “I pray I’ll never face the day when she isn’t there,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “Of all the ways God
has blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest.” Unlike George Bush and other Presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson, who loved to organize dinners for twenty on two hours’ notice, panicking the White House staff, Ronald Reagan seemed happiest when he was alone with Nancy, watching the news or a favorite show on television, often eating dinner on TV trays. Larry Speakes, Reagan’s press secretary, says: “The Reagans have one of the greatest love affairs I have ever seen, in or out of politics. They are truly best friends, as well as husband and wife.”

When she became First Lady, Nancy made no attempt to conceal her love, saying things like “My life began when I met my husband.” That made her a target for some feminists. Gloria Steinem wrote a particularly nasty article in
Ms
. magazine, condemning Nancy’s supposed subservience to her husband. The First Lady compounded this problem with what the press corps dubbed “The Gaze.” When Reagan gave a speech, she sat in the first row, watching him with total rapture on her face. She was baffled and not a little hurt when she discovered the press was making fun of her. “It’s the way I really feel about Ronnie,” she said.

There was another reason for Nancy giving her husband The Gaze. Everyone agreed that her presence had an almost magical effect on his performance. To a degree that approaches mysticism, she and Ronald Reagan are attuned, even invisibly attached, to each other. “She charges his batteries,” declared one Reagan aide.

In the 1984 reelection campaign, Reagan did poorly in his first debate with his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale. Nancy and his campaign advisers decided the problem was the President’s attempt to jam too many facts and figures into his head from the massive briefing books that his staff had prepared. But when he started rehearsing for the second debate, they could not get him to relax and be himself. Reagan’s confidence seemed badly shaken. He messed up his best lines, forgot favorite jokes, and generally performed like an already beaten man.

When Nancy heard about this, she strode into the room wearing a raincoat, rushed up to her husband, and pulled open the coat as if she
had turned flasher. On her sweater were the words “4 MORE IN 84.” Reagan broke up, and so did everyone else. “Okay,” the President said in his best show-business style, “let’s take it from the top.” Everyone who was there swears an incredible transformation took place. The relaxed, confident Reagan returned. He beat Mondale in the second debate—and went on to one of the greatest reelection landslides in American history.

That was partnership, Nancy style. There were other small but touching ways in which the Reagans testified to the strength of their alliance. One was the loud plaid suit that the President often wore to press conferences. Aides called it his Mutt and Jeff outfit and began plotting ways to prevent its appearance until they found out that Nancy had selected the material. It was Ronnie’s way of taking her into the ring with him.

When the Reagans called on Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 1982, the President and the Queen left the ceremonial hall together. Ronnie turned and motioned Nancy to join them. “That’s a breach of protocol!” spluttered one stuffy British reporter. Larry Speakes lived up to his name and talked fast enough to convince him it was an ancient Reagan family custom for husbands and wives to walk side by side.

When it came to the big issues with which Reagan dealt as President, Nancy’s views got a respectful hearing, but they often failed to win her partner’s assent. As a politician, Nancy was much too nervous, too eager to adjust to passing public moods to protect Ronald Reagan’s popularity. When Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an evil empire, Nancy wanted him to tone down the rhetoric. The President refused because he thought it was time to let the Russians know he had no illusions about their totalitarian system.

During the 1984 campaign, Nancy organized a veritable cabal of friends who were invited to dinner to help her talk Reagan out of his stand on abortion. Five minutes into the meal, Reagan said: “Nancy, I know what you’re up to. I’m not going to change my mind and that’s all there is to it.” That was also the end of the argument. Unlike some other First Ladies, Nancy could lose gracefully.

One of their sharpest disagreements was over Reagan’s determination to lay a wreath at the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany to commemorate their World War II dead. Many Jewish and non-Jewish spokespeople protested this decision because some SS troops—Nazis—were buried there too. Few were more vehemently opposed than Nancy. “I had a close friend who had spent some time in the concentration camps,” Nancy explained to me. She urged the President to persuade Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to find another cemetery. When Kohl refused, Reagan decided to go ahead with the ceremony. He was convinced it was time to stop punishing every living German for World War II and testify to the forty years in which West Germany had been a strong and dependable ally.

“Ronnie was right,” Nancy says. “The ceremony did become a giant step toward reconciliation between Germany and America. But I still wish Chancellor Kohl had chosen another cemetery.”

Looking back on the incident, the President provided a glimpse of how the Reagan partnership operated: “[Nancy] is not one to shout or be [violently] critical when she disagrees with me. Most of the time, she’ll just say in her quiet voice something like: ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to do that?’”

Reagan went on to wonder if a man could be a good President without a wife who is willing to tell him the truth. “If you can’t trust your wife to be honest with you, whom can you trust?” he asked. “She’ll tell you things no one else will, sometimes things you don’t want to hear, but isn’t that how it should be?”

To an astonishing extent, Nancy knew Ronald Reagan’s strengths, and like every wife, his weaknesses. One of the latter was a dislike, almost an inability, to say no. Most politicians share this trait to some extent. Saying no can make enemies, the last thing a politician wants to do. That is why almost every presidential administration has an abominable no man—someone who takes the heat for making tough decisions about firings, promotions, and the like. In the Reagan White House, Nancy appointed herself to this job.

She frequently exercised near veto power over proposed appointments, when she thought the would-be appointee was trying to push
Reagan around. One story concerns William Simon, the money wizard who was being considered for the treasury. Talking over the job, he laid down a whole set of demands that had to be met before he accepted. Nancy made sure he was a dead duck before he got to the White House gate.

By now I think you can see the leading edge of Nancy’s role as partner. She was almost always playing protector. Ronald Reagan’s age undoubtedly had something do with it. When he left the White House in 1989, he was the oldest president in history, just shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. The protector tendency magnified as the White House years passed for another much more serious reason. Nancy Reagan is a First Lady whose husband survived an assassination attempt.