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

Ed Meese or his erstwhile policy director Martin Anderson, both of whom were with Allen. “We walked up to him at the Grove together. He was seated in the chair, and he was startled. I could see he had no idea who we were,” Allen said. “He looked up, and it was clear he was having trouble placing us.”

Landon Parvin wrote the address that Ronnie gave at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, where the party gathered to nominate George H. W. Bush to a second term. The speechwriter began to sense something off-kilter when he noticed the tension in the air around Ronnie. The ex-president’s staff hovered. “Everyone was so worried. They seemed more concerned about that speech and him. And around that time, he started relying more on the old stories than he had before,” Parvin observed.

The speech came off fine. In fact, Ronnie’s address was a grace note to a disaster of a convention remembered mostly for its bitterness. Other speakers such as Pat Buchanan; the vice president’s wife, Marilyn Quayle; and Republican Party chairman Rich Bond stoked the flames of generational and cultural divisions. The former president asked the delegates and the country to look back at a version of Republicanism that had aspired to bring Americans together. And in retrospect, it sounded like an elegy. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts,” Ronnie said. “My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. My fondest hope for each one of you—and especially for the young people here—is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism. May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will make the world a little better for your having been here.”

As he campaigned with Bush in North Carolina, New Mexico, California, and Georgia that fall, Ronnie seemed like his old self. Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, was pulling ahead of Bush in the polls. “You may have noticed that in presidential races, the Democrats prefer to nominate unknown Democratic governors,” Ronnie declared in Anaheim, making a sly reference to Carter, whom he had beaten twelve years before. “The reason for this is the Democrats who are known couldn’t possibly win.” But amid a recession, Ronnie’s help wasn’t enough to put his former vice president over the top. Bush lost to Clinton by more than 5 points, and leadership of the country was handed to a new generation.

Nancy’s own view of the Bushes had not grown any warmer in the first years after the Reagans left the White House and George and Barbara moved in. It didn’t help things when, in 1989, Smith College awarded an honorary degree to Barbara Bush, who had dropped out after her freshman year to get married. This was the honor that Smith had pointedly declined to bestow on Nancy, a graduate, when she was first lady. Nancy’s appetite for less flattering news about the Bushes is evident in a 1990 fax she received from her friend Leonore Annenberg. The note on the fax, which is in the files at the Reagan Library, said: “Thought you might be interested in reading this.” Attached was a clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer lamenting that social life in the nation’s capital had gone flat since the Reagans left town. It quoted “DC society watcher” Diana McLellan as saying: “It’s as though the Jacuzzi of Washington has been turned off and everyone is sitting around wet, waiting for towels.”

A final rupture in Nancy’s relationship with Barbara Bush came as the result of a weird episode that played out on live national television on Inauguration Day for Bill Clinton in January 1993. Normally, if former presidents are able, they attend the swearing-in of their successors. The Reagans’ absence from the inaugural platform was noted in the coverage on ABC. Barbara Walters, one of the anchors, mentioned there was some confusion as to why. Walters said that Nancy had told her they hadn’t been invited, but that a member of Ronnie’s staff said an invitation had, in fact, been received. Walters then got a message that Nancy, who was watching, was trying to reach her by phone. Coanchor Peter Jennings got on the line and handed it to Walters, creating a comic scene in which their fellow commentator David Brinkley briefly got tangled in the cord. Though Nancy’s voice was not heard on the line, what she said was relayed to viewers by Walters. The former first lady continued to insist that, to her knowledge, the Reagans had not gotten an invitation.

And that wasn’t all she wanted to get off her chest. Nancy denied a report that she had not given Barbara Bush a tour of the White House residence during the transition four years earlier—and, in fact, insisted that she had even shown her the laundry. She also complained that the Bushes had never brought her and Ronnie back to the White House for a state dinner. Finally, Brinkley counseled: “Let’s leave that where it lies.”

Nancy tried to smooth things over in a subsequent phone call to Barbara, but Barbara wasn’t having it. Near the end of her life, Barbara still bristled with fury as she related their exchange to biographer Susan Page: “I told her the press was outside my door yelling questions about her statements and that I was not answering, but that she had hurt me badly and I just could not understand it.” No reporters were actually there, but Barbara knew that fib would make Nancy nervous. “Don’t you ever call me again,” Barbara concluded and hung up.

Undeniably, Nancy had done a petty and insensitive thing at the very moment the Bushes were at their