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

Bush the next president of the United States.” Bush’s team had expected something more effusive, given the vice president’s steadfast service. In fact, Ronnie had written a rousing one in his own hand and shown it to Bush. “We later learned that Nancy took it out, as ‘this was Ron’s night,’ ” Barbara Bush fumed in her diary.

That summer, with his campaign struggling, Bush asked his old and close friend James Baker to leave his post as Treasury secretary and come run the operation, as he had in 1980. Baker was surprised when the president said he shouldn’t go.

“The vice president needs me,” Baker pleaded.

“No, Jim,” Ronnie replied. “You’d be much more valuable to him if you just stay here and run the economy of the country.”

Baker figured out quickly what was really happening. The problem was Nancy. “I saw the fine hand of the first lady in that,” he recalled. So Baker returned to Bush and told him he could not be the middle man in this particular transaction: “I hate to tell you, pal, but this ain’t going to work unless you talk to the president yourself.”

Nancy was there when Bush and Baker made their pitch to Ronnie, and she made it clear she wasn’t happy that the Treasury secretary wanted to step away from the job he had. But Ronnie finally relented: “Well, George, if that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.” Then, typically unperturbed at the comings and goings of people around him, Ronnie asked Baker to come up with some suggestions for a successor at Treasury.

Bush’s campaign strategy was to offer himself, essentially, as a third Reagan term. But Nancy resented the ways in which her husband’s vice president tried to reclaim his own identity by rejecting some of the harsher aspects of the previous eight years. At the Republican convention in New Orleans that year, Bush promised “a kinder, gentler nation.” Nancy was widely reported to have muttered, “Kinder and gentler than whom?”

The fall campaign saw a fresh round of stories about Nancy and Barbara feuding. In October Time noted Nancy’s absence from a “star-studded” rally for Bush and his running mate, Indiana senator Dan Quayle. According to the magazine, Nancy sat upstairs in her suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles while her husband made an appearance on the stage. “Barbara has remarked to friends that Nancy is strikingly ungrateful for all the loyalty and deference the Bushes have shown the Reagans for eight years,” the magazine reported. That same week, Knight Ridder newspapers published a story in which White House reporter Owen Ullmann wrote that while it was “final curtain time” for her husband’s presidency, Nancy “apparently does not want to get off the stage.”

The reports were denied, unconvincingly, on all sides. Nancy’s press secretary, Elaine Crispen, insisted the first lady was “totally supportive” of the Bush candidacy and that there was “no feud between them.” Vice President Bush himself, sensitive to the fact that the stories had obviously come from his own camp, sent Nancy a note in which he called them “outrageous.” Crispen quoted Bush as having written: “I’ll be damned if I let anything nasty come between us. You and the president deserve much better than two damn stories.” Bush’s campaign dispatched Stu Spencer to convince Nancy that the best way to preserve her husband’s legacy was to help elect his vice president.

On Election Day, Bush pulled off a solid victory over Democrat Michael S. Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts. For the Reagans, there would be one last presidential Thanksgiving at the ranch and one last pre-Christmas weekend at Camp David, where they were serenaded by the enlisted men who worked there. Everywhere Nancy turned, there were emotional good-byes. Her aides had to keep her steadily supplied with tissues. The Reagans spent Christmas in their new Bel Air home, where some of their furniture had already been moved, before heading to the Annenbergs’ estate near Palm Springs for their traditional New Year’s Eve celebration.

As Bush’s inauguration approached, the incoming first lady got in a few parting shots at the outgoing one. At one preinaugural event, Barbara pointed to her own new clothes and suggested to reporters that they should not get used to seeing her so dolled up: “Please notice—hairdo, makeup, designer dress. Look at me good this week, because it’s the only week.” No one could miss the dig at Nancy. But, in fact, Barbara’s tastes did not run toward J. C. Penney; she was a regular customer of couturiers Bill Blass and Arnold Scaasi.

January 20, 1989, finally arrived, dawning gray and mild. The Reagans ate breakfast early, then went downstairs to say one last farewell to the household staff in the State Dining Room. The commander in chief received a final briefing from National Security Adviser Colin L. Powell, who made it a short one: “The world is quiet today.”

Ronnie left a note in the desk of the Oval Office for Bush. Then it was time to greet the next president and vice president and their families and head to the Capitol. Ronnie and George Bush got into one car; Nancy and Barbara Bush, into another, for the ride up Pennsylvania Avenue.

From the platform on the West Front of the Capitol, Nancy looked across the sweep of the National Mall, with its monuments to great presidents and their ideas. She remembered how it felt to be in that same spot eight years before. How little she had known back then of the triumphs that lay ahead and the price that would be demanded to achieve them. “The whole day was like a dream,” she wrote later, “and suddenly this part, too, was over.”

Barbara Bush did not disguise how happy she was to see the indignities and humiliations that she and her husband had suffered at Nancy’s hand finally come to an end. At one point, Barbara spotted Ronnie’s ever-present executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, standing in the backstage holding area of the Capitol. She