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

she named was the minister of our church—Reverend Donn Moomaw. He has written a denial for the church bulletin. Your letter will help me keep Nancy from worrying herself sick. She is Kelley’s main victim and is very upset.”

Reagan allies organized a pushback campaign. There is a file box among Nancy’s personal papers at the Reagan Library that comprises scores of letters that she received. Many were from people who were quoted in Kelley’s book, claiming either that their words were taken out of context or that they had never been interviewed by Kelley at all. Typical was one from actor Robert Stack, dated April 11, 1991, expressing his dismay at learning he was one of the hundreds of people cited in the book’s acknowledgments, which suggested he had been a source to Kelley. “Since I have never met or spoken to the woman, this would be impossible,” Stack wrote. In another, Broadway and film star Carol Channing fumed: “It has been called to my attention that I am quoted by Kitty Kelly [sic] in her book & I feel compelled to tell you that I have never spoken to her or any of her representatives. I was alarmed to see that she completely fabricated a malicious story.”

Still other letters in the file denounced Kelley herself. New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith, whom Kelley portrayed as a first-class suck-up to Nancy, wrote: “She is pathetic. She is also a shit. Forget her. The backlash in your favor has already begun. Love—Liz.” Letitia Baldrige, the etiquette expert who had been Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary and later assisted Nancy in the White House, wrote from Washington to assure her: “It will give you great satisfaction to know that she is finished. No one here will invite her anymore. No one will speak to her.”

Screen legend Marlene Dietrich advised Nancy to sue both the author and her publisher, Simon & Schuster (which is also the publisher of this book). “Please don’t give up!!!” the eighty-nine-year-old Dietrich wrote on April 21 from Paris. “Stop any further publication. Threaten lawsuits if sold outside USA. All the lawyers fees are worth it! That pig of a woman—and Simon & Schuster—should suffer.”

But the sensation around the book had one unexpected result: it created a wave of sympathy for Nancy. The New York Times, in an editorial denouncing the book, wrote: “Funny thing is, the more that Americans wanted to believe wonderful things about their 40th president and the more Teflon they conferred on him, the more they seemed willing to believe the worst of his wife. Lightning rods have had it better than Nancy Reagan. O.K., so she probably deserved more than a few of the jolts. But truly, nobody deserves this.” Kelley suspended her publicity tour and claimed to Newsweek that she had gotten a message on her answering machine from “a minor hood” of her acquaintance warning her: “Kitty, please be very careful. There is a hit on you.”

The furor over the book eventually settled down, and there were soon other events that put the Reagans in the news in a more favorable and dignified light. The library’s November 4, 1991, dedication was a triumph, bringing together five living presidents for the first time in US history. Also in attendance were the six living women who had served as First Lady. Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush were seated uncomfortably in the scorching sun, which they privately agreed must have been Nancy’s doing.

In the months before the library opening, there had been a power struggle over its direction that pitted Nancy against some of the more conservative figures who had been with Ronnie from the beginning. Ed Meese, Bill Clark, and Martin Anderson were quietly dropped from the Reagan Foundation’s twelve-member board. Economist W. Glenn Campbell, who had shaped the Hoover Institution at Stanford, had been nudged out earlier. The reason given for their departures was that they had come to the end of their six-year terms, but no one took that at face value. The moves were seen as a purge engineered by Nancy.

“Reagan never even knew about this until after it happened,” one longtime friend of the former president told the Washington Post’s Lou Cannon. “Unfortunately, this reinforces the view that Nancy’s in charge and that Reagan doesn’t really know what’s going on.” The bitterness broke into the open when Ronnie’s former spokesman Lyn Nofziger wrote an August 4 op-ed for the Post that was headlined: “A Reaganite’s Lament.”

“Ronald Reagan,” Nofziger began, “you have broken my heart. Finally.”

“Today the papers told us what I have been hearing for some time: that you have given up, which maybe at age 80 you have a right to do. But in doing so, you appear to have forgotten old loyalties and to have walked away from old friends,” Nofziger wrote in the open letter to his old boss. “You have let Nancy and the rich and beautiful people with whom she has surrounded herself and you force off the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library three of the most dedicated and selfless Reaganites there are—men who stayed with you through the good days and the bad, men who never had a bad word to say about you or your performances as governor or president, men who dedicated good parts of their lives to you and your success because they believed that if you succeeded the state and the nation would benefit and prosper.”

Nofziger recounted how the trio most recently ousted from the board had contributed to Ronnie’s rise: Meese and Clark, the loyalists who had served Ronnie from the dawn of his governorship; Anderson, the brainy academic and domestic policy adviser who had so often been called upon to defend Ronnie’s positions.

“So how have you rewarded them?” Nofziger wrote. “You have let Nancy, who, for reasons I don’t understand, has a vendetta against them, arrange to have them not reappointed to the board of your library. Indeed, if they had not protested, they would