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

secretary of labor, budget director, and Treasury secretary in the Nixon administration; followed by a stint as the president of the global engineering firm Bechtel Corporation. When Shultz replaced the hard-line Haig as the nation’s chief diplomat, he was shrewd enough to use his diplomatic skills on the influential first lady as well. He quickly became a personal favorite of Nancy’s and is one of the few top Reagan administration officials that she wrote about with unbridled admiration in her memoir My Turn: “I trusted George completely; if he said it was raining, I didn’t have to look out the window.”

Beyond her protectiveness and vigilance, there were other things people noticed about how Nancy dealt with those around her husband. “She was tougher on women that worked with him and for him than she was on men,” her son, Ron, told me. “Men she got along with pretty well, unless they did something that really crossed her or him. Women, she was much more wary of.” Ron suspected there might have been some “totally unfounded paranoia” on Nancy’s part, given that while his father did not disguise his appreciation of female beauty, he was “the last person on the face of the earth who would ever have cheated on his wife.” One of the women with whom she waged a long-running cold war was the comely Helene von Damm, who had been Ronnie’s secretary in Sacramento. Von Damm did that same job briefly after he became president and then moved to a loftier post running the Office of Presidential Personnel for the next two years. She was part of the dwindling old crowd from California, a hard-line conservative, and she considered Nancy “a schemer married to someone who was unable to conceive of a Machiavellian thought.”

Nancy was furious when Ronnie appointed his former secretary as ambassador to von Damm’s native Austria in 1983. To Ronnie, it was the culmination of an inspiring story about an immigrant who endured Soviet occupation and came to America with dreams of a better life. Von Damm was an early believer in Ronnie and moved across the country to volunteer for his first gubernatorial campaign. At the State Department, however, Austria experts were skeptical that von Damm was the right pick to represent the United States in a country known for its adherence to propriety. The first lady summoned von Damm to the residence for a “private talk” and told her to turn down the ambassadorship. Nancy said the president needed von Damm to stay in her current job and added that maybe there might be another assignment for her in the future.

“I could only conclude that for some reason this posting was something she simply didn’t want me to have. Apparently, in her eyes, my career had progressed far enough. I felt as if someone had slapped me in the face,” von Damm wrote later. Nancy never took another one of her calls. Nor did the first lady go with Ronnie to von Damm’s swearing-in in the State Dining Room.

Once in the job, von Damm did some impressive work, bringing Frank Sinatra to Vienna for a charity concert and building goodwill by helping with projects for schools and museums. She was regarded, as she once put it, like “a homecoming queen.” But she kept hearing from her sources back in Washington that Nancy was still working to undermine her. “Her position was hardening toward me: more and more with each new success I achieved,” von Damm recalled.

Then again, perhaps Nancy’s instincts were right once again. Von Damm got tongues wagging in Vienna when she left her third husband to marry young and wealthy Peter Gürtler, the owner of the city’s famous Hotel Sacher. The ambassador was also photographed wearing a shockingly low-cut gown to the Vienna Opera Ball. Her defense was that décolletage is an old tradition at the ball, and “anything less would have seemed underdressed.” Shultz finally told her that the president thought it would be a good idea for her to step down. When von Damm resigned in July 1985, Newsweek’s headline proclaimed “Die Playgirl Bows Out!” On top of everything, Gürtler left her not long after. He remarried, and shot himself to death in 1990.

Von Damm was not the only woman in the administration to feel a chilly vibe from Nancy. Chief of protocol Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, a daughter of Lebanese Druze immigrants who was married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, recalled Deaver telling her: “Lucky, there’s one thing you have to understand about Nancy. She doesn’t really like dealing with women—she prefers to deal with men. Don’t eat your heart out worrying about how Nancy feels about you or what you are doing. If you don’t get any complaints, you can assume you’re okay.” Perhaps as a result of that warning, Roosevelt felt too intimidated to follow another piece of advice that Deaver gave her. He told her to call Nancy regularly, just to talk, because the first lady would love hearing the latest that Roosevelt was picking up from the social circles of New York and Washington. On the few occasions she did, Roosevelt was surprised at how friendly Nancy was and how happy she seemed to hear from her.

In 1990 Roosevelt wrote a memoir that made headlines with its criticism of Nancy, whom she described as “on guard, suspicious of anyone she thought was trying to use or manipulate her.” But nearly three decades later, Roosevelt told me that she had grown to realize that she hadn’t really understood Nancy and regretted having written those passages. “She really would have warmed up to me if I had made the effort to warm up to her,” Roosevelt said. “I never had a chance to correct the misconceptions in my book.… The only part of that book I don’t feel good about is my estimation of her.”

For all her hostility toward the media, Nancy also selected a few favorites among journalists, for whom she became a source of