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

Say No” as a mixed blessing. While it was memorable and catchy, she knew that it was also easy to dismiss as facile—and an unfairly glib summation of an effort that had many facets. “I never thought that the ‘Just Say No’ slogan would solve the drug problem. How silly!” she told syndicated columnist Liz Smith in 1990. “It was simply a phrase that caught on, but certainly there is much more to do about drugs. Public education and treatment centers are the answer.”

Decades later, there remains a lot of doubt as to whether the “Just Say No” message really had an impact. Was social pressure an adequate substitute for putting more government resources into the fight to get children off drugs and keep them there? Did it portray drug use as a moral failure and personal choice rather than a mental-health concern? Was it family-friendly camouflage for the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” that incarcerated disproportionately large numbers of men of color?

While the question of how effective her campaign was will never really be settled, there is significant evidence that drug use among the young dropped sharply during the 1980s. The Monitoring the Future project, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has been conducting surveys of the problem since 1975. In 1979 more than 54 percent of high school seniors said they had used an illicit drug within the past twelve months; by 1992, that number had fallen by nearly half. Young people’s attitudes about drug use shifted just as dramatically over that same period. Where only about a third of high school seniors in the late 1970s said they would disapprove of a friend trying marijuana, the percentage had more than doubled by the early 1990s.

Among the admirers of Nancy’s efforts was Joseph A. Califano Jr., a prominent Democrat who served as top domestic policy adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson and health education and welfare secretary under Jimmy Carter. He is also the founder of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. “Just Say No” was more than empty words, Califano insisted. “It was a great message. It was simple, and it was clear, and it was what you wanted kids to do. It also sent a message to parents: ‘This is what you should be telling your kids.’ ” In 1995 Califano asked Nancy to join his board of directors, where she served for five years. Betty Ford was also a member. Califano always sensed a tension between the two former first ladies, rooted no doubt in their personal history but also in how they viewed the drug problem. Nancy wanted to see more emphasis on preventing drug abuse; Betty Ford, on treating it.

Nancy also continued her involvement with the Foster Grandparents program, which she had promoted when she was California first lady. In late 1982 she and coauthor Jane Wilkie published a book, To Love a Child, to benefit the program. She also got Frank Sinatra to record a song with the same title. Her Hollywood connections—an asset that her predecessors did not have—were an important element in Nancy’s efforts to bring visibility to the projects that she cared about and that were helping to repair her image. Most prominent among those friends in the entertainment industry was Sinatra, who became a fixture at the Reagan White House, planning the entertainment and adding wattage to presidential events. Ronnie had less use for him, though, and the White House aides who had to deal with Sinatra found having him around to be more trouble than it was worth. He was there largely because of Nancy, who had been enamored with him since the days when they were both working on the MGM lot. “She twinkles when he arrives,” one friend told the Washington Post.

This created no small amount of tension with Sinatra’s wife, Barbara, who was annoyed at all the things her husband was being called upon to do at Nancy’s behest or on her behalf. “Nancy Reagan was never a close friend, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she seemed to have a crush on my husband. After all, I was quite used to that, and if I’d wanted to, I could have flirted right back with hers,” Barbara Sinatra wrote in her memoir. “What I wasn’t so accustomed to was the time and commitment she expected of Frank for the causes that she and Ronnie espoused. I felt that she took a little too much advantage of Frank’s huge heart. As well as making him director of entertainment at the White House, Nancy appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and she got him involved in her Just Say No antidrug campaign, as well as her charitable organizations for children and foster grandparents. Frank was completely unfazed, of course. During their long-distance telephone calls and their lunches together whenever they were in the same town, I think he became Nancy’s therapist more than her friend.”

Author Kitty Kelley would later intimate in her book that there was more going on during those long lunches than dining and conversation. No one I spoke to seemed to give the likelihood of a sexual liaison much credence. But there was an emotional dependence between Sinatra and Nancy that seems to have gone both ways. The entertainer was one of the first people she summoned after the assassination attempt. Nancy was someone Sinatra turned to as well during difficult times. His daughter Tina—not a fan of her father’s fourth wife—described Nancy as her father’s “close confidante,” and someone he leaned on for emotional support during the rough patches of his marriage to Barbara. In one particularly difficult stretch when the Sinatras were separated, Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra “were speaking every night, at an appointed time, and my father was pouring his heart out,” Tina Sinatra wrote. (When Sinatra died in 1998, his widow tried to exclude Nancy from his funeral in Beverly Hills. Tina