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

afraid to go to sleep for fear he wouldn’t wake up. He’d move from chair to chair trying to keep awake and, I guess, alive,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it hurt to see him this way—this man who had always been so supremely confident and strong in my eyes.” In that address, Nancy also mentioned Ronnie’s letters. (She said there were two, though I found only one among her belongings at the library.) They may have had an effect, she said. From her father’s doctors, she learned that Loyal in his final hours had requested to see a clergyman. “I don’t know what the chaplain did or what he said, but whatever it was, it was the right thing, and it gave my father comfort,” she said. “I noticed he was calmer and not as frightened. When he died the next day, he was at peace, finally. And I was so happy for him. My prayers were answered.”

Her brother, Dick, got word at three o’clock that morning that Loyal was about to die. He rearranged his surgical schedule and scrambled to get a plane ticket from Philadelphia, but by the time he arrived in Phoenix, his father was already gone. He also discovered that Nancy was planning a small memorial service for family and close friends—something his father had expressly forbidden. Nancy and Dick got into a furious argument, which White House staff members overheard, though they did not know the source of it. Dick spent the night with friends and caught the first plane he could back to Philadelphia, missing the service. “This was the only time I could remember, in the long friendship that the two of us had, that she was very, very nasty,” he told me. “I didn’t want any part of this funeral because, as my father’s neurosurgical resident and fellow, I obeyed, and I did what his wishes were. And so, I went home.”

I asked Dick: Was it possible his father had had a change of heart? Had he become a believer on his deathbed?

“I doubt it,” Dick said. “Seriously.”

Nancy and her stepbrother did not speak for a year and a half. In the fall of 1983, Ronnie was beginning to campaign for reelection and had a speaking engagement in the Philadelphia suburbs. He sought out Dick and implored him to make peace with Nancy. “It took almost, maybe, six months before we did get together. It was in the spring of 1984, in Phoenix, [that] we finally had gotten our differences straightened out,” Dick said. “But what I felt that she should know is that her father should be obeyed. He was a rock-hard disciplinarian, and this was a very strong belief of his. So I, as his son, I stood beside him.” Nancy was just as certain that what she did was the right thing. The religious service was her final act of love and tribute for the man who had rescued her childhood. Afterward, there was a small reception. That night, once the guests had left, the family gathered in the living room of Loyal and Edie’s house. A nurse put Edie in bed, and Nancy and Patti went into her room to say good night.

“Do you think he’s dancing tonight?” Edie asked, fixing her eyes somewhere in the distance.

Nancy replied: “I’m sure he is.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In a White House where processes ran smoothly in most respects, getting final decisions on the president’s schedule was an exception. Sometimes it seemed that it could take forever, which was confusing and frustrating to the dozens of people who had to know Ronnie’s plans on a given day before making any of their own. Most blamed the dithering on Michael Deaver. He was hard to pin down and would occasionally come back with unusual demands, such as stipulating that Air Force One take off at a peculiar predawn hour. “I found this odd because Deaver was remarkably punctual and efficient in everything else he did,” recalled Don Regan, who replaced Baker as White House chief of staff in 1985.

At one point shortly after Regan took over at the White House, the chief of staff asked Deaver to explain why uncertainty and delay always seemed to bollix the scheduling operation. Deaver glanced around, clearly uncomfortable. Then he threw up his hands and told Regan: “Don’t bring that up. Leave it be.” Deaver was guarding a secret known only to a few. On Nancy’s insistence, decisions regarding the calendar of the most powerful man in the world were often put in the hands of a San Francisco astrologer named Joan Quigley. Nancy consulted her by phone nearly every weekend for advice on which days the stars aligned favorably for Ronnie, and which posed a danger for him to do anything outside the confines of the White House. The reassurance she received from Quigley became an emotional lifeline for Nancy after the 1981 attempt on Ronnie’s life. Without it, she felt she could not have faced sending her husband out into a world where treachery and danger might wait around any turn.

When it all came out in 1988, the furor over the astrologer would become the most mortifying chapter of Nancy’s years as first lady. The whole thing sounded almost too wacky to be possible. Johnny Carson joked that Nancy’s sign was “the house of Adolfo.” House Speaker Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat, jumped in with a shot at Ronnie: “It’s all right with me. I’m glad he consults somebody. I thought he was making his decisions based on absolutely nothing at all.” Even the staid Wall Street Journal couldn’t resist: “We were going to print this story yesterday, but our astrologer—we can’t say who she is—advised against it.”

Nancy’s interest in astrology had begun as an innocent enough pastime. Going back to their days in Hollywood, both she and Ronnie regularly had their zodiac signs read. They also made a practice of scanning their horoscopes each morning