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

in public was no longer possible, in part because of the interest his condition drew. That became clear soon after his letter was published. “The next time he had a public appearance, the press was all over him,” Ryan said. “He realized that from then on, the story was going to be him and not whatever group he was out there for. So he began to pull back.” When Ronnie did go out, his aides made sure there was no announcement in advance, so that the media and its cameras would not be waiting for him.

In 1995 Ryan moved back to Washington to become a top executive of the television and cable company Albritton Communications. He was also named chairman of the board of the Reagan Foundation, which kept him close at hand for Nancy. The fiercely loyal Joanne Drake, whom Nancy grew to trust as she did few others, took over as chief of staff.

Nancy made some appearances in Ronnie’s stead. She was invited to speak at the 1996 Republican convention and accepted reluctantly. The former first lady was unhappy with the dark turn the party had taken in the mid-1990s and worried its San Diego convention would be a reprise of the venomous one that had taken place four years earlier in Houston. “Maybe if Colin Powell runs…” she told Patti.

Her speech turned out to be the emotional high point of the convention, which nominated Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator, as the party standard-bearer. Delegates roared as she appeared on the stage, a tiny figure dressed in white, tears glistening in her eyes. Nancy did not mention Dole or the incumbent president, Bill Clinton. She did not make any reference to the roiling politics of the day. “I am not the speech maker in the family, so let me close with Ronnie’s words and not mine,” Nancy said. “In that last speech four years ago, he said: ‘Whatever else history may say about me, when I am gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts. And may all of you, as Americans, never forget your heroic origins.’ ”

She was still allowing a few people outside the family and their closest circle to see Ronnie. Ken Khachigian brought GOP nominee Dole by. Ronnie looked good, but “he just wasn’t there,” Khachigian recalled. Nancy carried the conversation, as her husband sat silently. When news stories began appearing in which visitors described the president’s state, she grew more protective. In the late 1990s, Tennessee senator Bill Frist, a rising star in GOP politics who would later become Senate majority leader, happened to be in Los Angeles and asked Ronnie’s former aide Jim Kuhn to arrange an introduction to the president who had done so much to shape the modern Republican Party. Five minutes would be enough, he told Kuhn: “I just want to shake his hand.” Kuhn thought that Nancy might be willing to allow Frist to see Ronnie, given that he had a medical background as a surgeon. She refused.

A few rays of solace penetrated the darkness of her grief. One was that Patti, who had been estranged from the rest of the family for nine years and was living in New York, reappeared. A couple of weeks after Ronnie’s announcement of his diagnosis, Patti had taken the first steps on a road to reconciliation with her mother by apologizing for “the pain that I have caused.” Though their relationship would still have its ups and downs, shared pain broke down some of the barriers that had stood between them for so long. There were moments when Nancy leaned on her daughter for comfort. “I don’t know how to be alone,” Nancy told Patti. “I’ve never been alone.” Within two years, Patti would move back to Los Angeles, to be closer to her parents, to be there for her mother when her father no longer was.

Another blessing amid the grief was Diane Capps, a loyal and discreet retired military officer who had been a nurse in the White House. After Ronnie was diagnosed, Nancy contacted Capps in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had moved, and asked her to come out to California. Capps became not only a caregiver to Ronnie in the early years of his illness but also a source of support for Nancy, helping her to accept the inevitable. “Diane helped her understand that there would be good days and bad days, and, with time, there would be fewer good days and more bad days, and eventually all bad days,” Ryan said.

Capps also counseled Nancy to accept Ronnie’s version of reality, whatever it happened to be at the moment. Nancy’s friend Robert Higdon recalled the nurse telling the former first lady: “If he says he wants to go out and play baseball, you say, ‘Have a nice game.’ ” As Nancy would describe it later, living with someone who has Alzheimer’s was “a crash course in patience.”

While she offered a face of stoicism to the world, sadness and stress were taking a toll on Nancy. On April 7, 1995, she met Ronnie’s biographer Edmund Morris for a two-and-a-half-hour lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air. Things were tense between the two of them. Nancy was frustrated that, after nearly a decade, Morris had yet to produce his much-anticipated masterwork on Ronnie. The biographer, meanwhile, found Nancy a difficult subject to interview; evasive when he tried to pin her down on such basic details as when she and Ronnie first discussed the possibility that he might be president one day. That afternoon, Morris claims, Nancy’s behavior took a bizarre turn. The biographer, who died in 2019, described what happened in an interview I did with him in August 2017. He also provided an entry that he made in his diary about that day.

It began: “I had lunch with Nancy Reagan at the Bel-Air. She is feeling very sorry for herself, having undergone surgery for sunspots two