The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

Her quirks and demands added to the stress of those around her husband. On overseas trips, a seat in the motorcade had to be saved for her hairdresser, which sometimes meant someone on the official staff had to find another means of transportation. Her forays into the West Wing, though relatively rare, were greeted with terror. But as difficult as she could be when she was worried or mad, Nancy was also the most valuable of partners for the top officials who recognized her power. She was indispensable when it came to convincing Ronnie to do something—or not to—if she could be persuaded that was in his best interest.

In the internecine battles that were constantly going on within the tense and divided West Wing, Nancy usually sided with Baker and Deaver, who often infuriated conservatives by pushing Ronnie in a more moderate direction. “Whenever we had something we wanted to convince the Gipper of, we would try to enlist her support. When we’d get her support, we had a good shot at it,” Baker told me. “She didn’t want his goals subverted by ideology. She was a pragmatist, and she understood that we judge our presidents on the basis of what they can get accomplished, and so she was for those of us who wanted to get things done.” Their united front often isolated Ed Meese, the third member of the White House troika and the most ideological.

None of which meant that she always won. Nor did she expect to. “Nancy Reagan had a better understanding than the entourage, a better understanding even than Deaver or [political strategist] Spencer, of how difficult it was to persuade her husband to oppose his instincts or his ideology,” Lou Cannon wrote. “Reagan often did not ask the right questions, or any questions at all, which made it possible to manipulate him or lead him down paths where he did not wish to go. But he did not like to be pushed by anyone, not even Nancy Reagan.”

Still, Nancy had a keen sense of where the defenses were weak. She knew when to plant an idea herself, and when it was more effective to recruit others to do it for her. She knew when to pressure her husband, and when to withdraw and regroup. What she rarely did was give up. In 1982, the year after he won his huge tax cut, Ronnie was under pressure to reverse himself and strike a budget deal with Congress that included what was one of the largest tax hikes in US history. The legislation would restore one-third of the reductions signed into law the year before. Baker and Deaver decided that the president should sign it; that it was needed as a corrective to having gone too far in 1981. As Baker recalled, they feared that leaving the tax reductions in place would worsen and prolong the recession: “We cut taxes way beyond where we said we were going to do in the campaign because we got into a bidding war with the Democrats, and then we had to come back and recoup some of them. The Gipper didn’t want to do it. We all thought we needed to because we were afraid the markets were going to punish us.”

Baker and Deaver convinced Nancy that it was crucial to change Ronnie’s mind on this, so she too started pressuring her husband to sign the legislation. “We finally got him to do it because she joined with us. We were united,” Baker said. But Ronnie wasn’t happy. He took his glasses off and threw them across the top of his desk. “All right. Goddamn it. I’m going to do it,” the president said. “But it’s wrong.” The tax hike was sold as “tax reform” rather than what it really was, which was an about-face on a signature issue of his presidency. Under fire from conservatives, Ronnie defended his decision to sign the bill as “the price we had to pay” to get Congress to go along with further spending cuts. But lawmakers reneged on their promise to trim spending by $3 for every $1 they raised taxes, and signing the bill turned out to be one of Ronnie’s greatest regrets. It became one of Baker’s, too: “He was right, and we were wrong.”

Nancy would weigh in frequently when she was concerned that Ronnie was becoming too closely associated with highly ideological or unpopular causes. Baker noted: “She was with us on actions that tended to dull the hard edge that some [urged] on him—hard-core right-wingers particularly. Abortion was a tough issue for us. He was a strong right-to-lifer, but you didn’t see him going down and marching with Nellie Gray,” the antiabortion activist who founded the annual “March for Life.” The demonstration took place each year around the January 22 anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the country. Tens of thousands of antiabortion activists from across the United States would show up for it, braving frigid winter temperatures on the National Mall just south of the White House. Gray’s organizers were eager to have Ronnie speak to the crowd in person, which would have provided a powerful and indelible image in the media. Nancy preferred for him to keep his distance.

There is no evidence that Nancy tried to change her husband’s mind on the abortion issue itself—nor could she have, given his deep convictions on it. But he already had the Christian Right firmly in his corner; to emphasize his opposition to abortion would only serve to alienate the majority of voters who had more conflicted feelings about it or who supported keeping it legal. So, she helped Baker and Deaver persuade Ronnie to address the March for Life by telephone from inside the White House, with his remarks broadcast over a loudspeaker. It set a precedent for Republican presidents. Not until Donald Trump in 2020 would