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

the talking with Nancy and Ronnie and repeating the conversation in detail.” Patti, though estranged from her parents, visited Loyal several times during this period, and noticed a change in her stern and judgmental grandfather. “As he approached the end of his life, he softened, became more gentle and philosophical,” she recalled.

After all the years in which Loyal had provided Nancy with guidance and emotional support, he had become the one who needed those things from her now. A typewritten letter he sent Nancy and Ronnie, dated July 20, 1982, is in a box of Nancy’s personal belongings held in the nonpublic collection at the Reagan Library. In it, Loyal confided: “It was such a pleasant surprise to talk with Ronnie. I’m afraid I’ve complained too much about Edith’s symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. It seems I was able to deal with patients’ symptoms, but when it comes to those of my very own, I’m totally at a loss to realize what is developing in their thinking process.” He wrote of how Edith had recently “becme [sic] very angry and struck me several times in the face. Her anger was gone as fast at [sic] it had come.” Loyal concluded his forlorn letter with an expression of gratitude for some unspecified piece of advice he had gotten from his son-in-law, which Nancy’s father wrote was “so sound and correct that I was ashamed I had not practiced it before.”

Within three weeks of writing that letter, eighty-six-year-old Loyal himself took a sharply downward turn. It was clear he had not much longer to live. Ronnie wrote in his diary on Sunday, August 8: “Again at the W.H. More of Saturdays work plus a long letter I feel I have to write to Loyal. I’m afraid for him. His health is failing badly.” What worried Ronnie more than the prospect of Loyal’s death itself was the fact that his father-in-law was, by most definitions of the word, an atheist. Loyal had, from his youth, rejected any belief that Jesus Christ was a divinity or that there was any reward after death beyond being “remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness.” And according to Nancy’s stepbrother, Dick, who had become a neurosurgeon like his father, Loyal had made his wishes crystal clear about how things were to be handled when he died: “He wanted no funeral arrangements. He didn’t want the press. He wanted no one. He simply wanted to be cremated and placed in a very nice area in Phoenix. He wrote Mrs. Reagan a letter, and he wrote me the same letter, and he wrote his lawyer the same letter, and it was also in his will. He was simply to ‘vanish.’ ”

Loyal’s religious views—or rather, his lack of them—had long been a source of frustration and tension with Ronnie, who believed that a Judgment Day awaited everyone. Ronnie was convinced that moment for Nancy’s beloved father was near. So, the most powerful man in the world put aside everything else on the weekend of August 8, took pen in hand, and set out to save one soul. What Ronnie wrote on four pieces of White House stationery had never become public until I discovered it among Nancy’s personal belongings at the Reagan Library. The library gave me permission to use it for a column I wrote for the Washington Post, which was published in September 2018.

“Dear Loyal,” Ronnie began. “I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but I’ve been wanting to write you ever since we talked on the phone. I’m aware of the strain you are under and believe with all my heart there is help for that…”

What followed in the next pages was an intimate and humble profession of Ronnie’s own faith. “We have been promised that all we have to do is ask God in Jesus name to help when we have done all we can—when we’ve come to the end of our strength and abilities and we’ll have that help,” he wrote. “We only have to trust and have faith in his infinite goodness and mercy.” Not a word of the president’s small, rounded script was crossed out, which was perhaps evidence of how carefully he had thought this out, or perhaps a sign that he might have rewritten and revised several versions until he felt he had gotten it perfect. Near the end of the letter that I saw thirty-six years later were three watery smudges—maybe spilled from a cup of tea; maybe someone’s later tears.

It was striking to see what Ronnie envisioned as an eternal reward. In his eyes, heaven was, among other things, a chance to spend forever with the woman he loved the most on earth. “Loyal, you and Edith have known a great love—more than many have been permitted to know. That love will not end with the end of this life,” he wrote. “We’ve been promised this is only a part of life and that a greater life, a greater glory awaits us. It awaits you together one day, and all that is required is that you believe and tell God you put yourself in his hands.”

The following evening, Ronnie found Nancy crying. Her father was back in the hospital. This looked like the end. She prepared to fly to Arizona to be with him one last time. “I wish I could bear her pain myself,” Ronnie wrote in his diary. A week later, he noted: “Last night or the night before, Nancy says Loyal asked for the chaplain at the hospital in the middle of the night.” And the following day: “Dr. Loyal died this morning.”

Nancy was at Loyal’s bedside when he passed away of congestive heart failure at 8:40 a.m. on August 19, 1982, at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital. Afterward, she held his hand for nearly an hour, unable to let go. In a speech six years later to a Youth for Christ conference in Washington, the first lady recounted her father’s final days. “He was terribly frightened. He was even