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

Nancy hugged him and stroked his back, just as she had done on those long rides to the ranch when he was a small boy. For the next hour, Michael poured out the terrible secret that he had been holding inside for more than thirty years. About the camp counselor who had molested him when he was eight years old. About the shameful pictures of him that he was afraid were out there somewhere. About the anguish that had never lifted.

As Michael began to talk, shaking and stammering, Ronnie couldn’t comprehend what his son was telling him.

“What?” he asked.

“He was molested, honey,” Nancy explained.

“By who?” Ronnie asked.

“By a counselor at day camp,” she replied.

“Who was the guy?” Ronnie demanded. “I’ll find him and kick his butt.”

“Let Mike get it out of his system, honey,” Nancy said to him, more firmly.

Then she began to question her stepson, drawing out more and more information: How old was he when it happened? What was the name of the camp? How many days a week was he there? How long did this go on? As Michael answered, he couldn’t look at his father’s face. He stared at Ronnie’s belt buckle, feeling as though he would vomit.

Finally, Ronnie moved toward Michael, and their eyes met. “Dad, he orally copulated me. He took me in his mouth,” Michael told him.

Ronnie put his arms around his son. “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?” he asked.

Michael replied: “Because I was afraid you would stop liking me.”

And then, it was Michael’s turn to say something he never had before. He turned to his stepmother. “I love you,” he told Nancy.

When Michael learned that a thirty-two-page outline of his book had leaked to Penthouse magazine, Nancy assured him that she and Ronnie would publicly support his decision to go public with the sexual abuse he had suffered. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters that while the president and first lady were “saddened by the fact that he had kept it from them all these years,” they hoped that Michael’s book might help prevent the same thing from happening to other children. Nancy’s press secretary, Elaine Crispen, made a similar comment. Michael wrote later: “It was the first time since Dad had become president that the White House had ever made a statement in support of anything I had done, and I was elated.”

Michael sent Nancy an advance copy of the book in March 1988. She read it with trepidation, staying up half the night. Sure enough, it had plenty of brutal things to say about his father, his mother, and his stepmother. But she saw that he had been just as hard on himself. “It was wonderful to see how Mike had grown and changed, and how he was now able to take more responsibility for his own life,” she wrote. “Ironically, this book, which started off as one more source of friction between us, actually helped us develop a better relationship.”

Nancy had good reason to be wary of a tell-all book. Her daughter, Patti, then thirty-three, had coauthored a supposed work of fiction called Home Front, which was published in 1986. Nancy learned of the project not from Patti, but by reading an item in Time. The plot centers on the free-spirited daughter of a former TV pitchman named Robert Canfield who becomes California governor and then president. The heroine’s mother, Harriet Canfield, is a fashion-obsessed airhead who, upon arriving at the White House, declares: “There’s just so much history here! Imagine all the people who have been within these walls. But, good grief, I just can’t wait to redecorate.” A People magazine cover story labeled Patti’s novel “a literary striptease that might never have been published but for its author’s obvious family connections. What the book lacks in literary merit, it makes up for in entertainment value as a First Family parlor game.”

To Nancy, seeing her daughter’s bitterness toward her laid out so publicly was not at all entertaining. It was excruciating. In 1989, after several years in which they barely spoke, Nancy wrote in her autobiography that her relationship with Patti was “one of the most painful and disappointing aspects of my life. I wish it weren’t true, and I still hope it will change, but so far, at least, it hasn’t been a happy story. Somehow, no matter what I do, we seem to square off.”

The rebellious daughter who had burst out sobbing when her father was elected governor was even unhappier to see him in the White House. Over the eight years of Ronnie’s presidency, Patti stayed there no more than four or five times, by her estimation. As she was trying to make it as an actress, Patti bristled at having security agents follow her every move. One day she interviewed hunky singer-actor Kris Kristofferson for the NBC popular-music television show The Midnight Special, and it ended with an overnight tryst. The next morning, Patti found that her Secret Service detail had been waiting all night outside Kristofferson’s New York hotel, unsure when the president’s daughter would reappear. The agents glared at her. “Tell you what,” she said. “On the occasions when I know my plans ahead of time, I’ll let you know. The times I don’t, you’ll have to wing it. I can’t always predict what will happen in my life.” Word of her sleepover with Kristofferson got back to Nancy via the agents’ logs. Her mother told Patti to behave with “a little more decency.”

In 1984 Patti “signed off” on having no Secret Service protection, as her brother Ron had done the year before. Security officials subsequently informed her they had picked up intelligence overseas that a terrorist act was possibly being plotted against one of the president’s daughters, though they didn’t know which one. “Patti screamed & complained so much we took the S.S. detail away at her