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

days ago. As she checks herself in her hand mirror, I contemplate, close up, the delayed ruin which is the lot of all face-lifters; crushed nose, parchment pouches, staring eyes. She sits back in despair, puts a heavy jeweled pillbox on the tablecloth, and extracts a blue pill the size of a wren’s egg. ‘Halcyon,’ [sic] she says, gulping it down.”

Halcion, as it is properly spelled, was the brand name for triazolam, a powerful prescription sedative used to treat anxiety and insomnia. It was already becoming notorious at that time for allegedly causing irrational and violent behavior. In 1991 it was banned in Britain. Morris wrote that a while after Nancy took the pill, her mood changed suddenly. She told him: “They’re talking about me over there.”

“Who? Where?” Morris asked.

Nancy only grew more agitated, he wrote: “She arches her eyebrows across the room to where two young women are having an animated conversation, paying not the least attention to us. ‘I heard them say White House.’ ‘Well, so what? It’s natural they would have recognized you and said something. They’re obviously onto another subject now.’ But she cannot take her eyes off them, and strains to hear some more of their chat, ignoring me. After awhile, I become irritated. ‘Look, Nancy, I’ve got a book in my briefcase; why don’t I just do some reading while you listen in?’ She laughs mirthlessly, a little stitch-scar showing on her upper lip.”

As they were preparing to leave the restaurant, Nancy demanded that the maitre d’ and receptionist tell her the identity of the two women and grew furious when she was told the restaurant had not gotten their names. Morris’s journal indicates he tried to defuse the situation with a joke: “Face it, Nancy, they’re KGB—we’ll never find out their true identity.”

From the concerned but unsurprised demeanor of her Secret Service agents, the biographer surmised that this was not the first time something like that had happened. “We all began to realize she was going into some kind of paranoid frenzy,” he said. “The Secret Service and I literally escorted her out.” In his diary, Morris wrote: “My hearing is pretty acute, but hers would appear to be preternatural. That is, if what she heard was real and not delusory. The imagined sound of distant voices, the paranoia, the big pill, the blue fingers, the expressionless face—she’s off on a solo cruise.”

All of this happened less than six months after Ronnie’s diagnosis was announced to the country. It is easy to imagine how helpless and adrift Nancy must have felt. She had to let go of her own wishful thinking that there might be some answer—some treatment, some way to keep Ronnie engaged. Early on, she told Robert Higdon: “This isn’t going to take my husband.” But as his deterioration accelerated on a series of downward plateaus, she could no longer hang on to her denial. Once, when Ronnie and Nancy were watching a football game on television, he got up and started rummaging around the room. “I’m trying to find my football gear,” he told her. “The coach is waiting for me.” Nancy decided he would watch no more games.

In the beginning, the family hoped—and wanted to believe—that his ranch could be a respite where he might spend many of his remaining days. Then John Barletta, a loyal Secret Service agent who was his longtime riding companion, began to notice that even the most familiar activities were becoming difficult for the former president—things as simple as cinching the girth strap on his saddle. “From the time that started happening, I would have my horse already saddled when he came up, so I could watch him tack up his horse,” Barletta wrote later. “Often he would put something in his hand and then hesitate. That would tell me he was having trouble. I would just take his hand and move it to the right position. A big smile would come over his face. ‘That’s what I was trying to do.’ ”

But Barletta became alarmed one morning when Ronnie was unable to control his favorite horse, a headstrong Arabian stallion named El Alamein, which had been a gift from Mexican president José López Portillo for Ronnie’s inauguration in 1981. Barletta went to Nancy and said, “Mrs. Reagan, he’s making too many mistakes up there. I can’t protect him from himself. He’s making rookie mistakes, and he’s been riding fifty-five years. A new rider wouldn’t make these mistakes. I don’t think he should ride anymore. It’s getting that dangerous.”

“Then you have to tell him, John,” she said.

“I don’t want to tell him that, Mrs. Reagan,” Barletta pleaded. “You need to tell him that.”

“No,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “I can’t.”

After lunch that day, Nancy summoned Barletta and told him it was time to break the news to Ronnie. Barletta found him sitting by the fireplace, reading a book. “This riding isn’t working out. Sir, I don’t think you should ride anymore,” Barletta said. The agent felt crushed by sadness. It was like telling someone they couldn’t breathe anymore. Ronnie got up and put his hands on Barletta’s shoulders. “It’s okay, John,” he said. “I know.” And that was it. Ronnie later gave Barletta a pair of his three-buckle brown field boots and his saddle.

Not long after came the point where Ronnie no longer recognized the mountaintop spread he had loved for so long. Open spaces made him terrified and disoriented. On one midweek visit to the ranch, when Nancy had stayed back in Los Angeles, his Secret Service agents called her to say that Ronnie had gone into such a panic that they were bringing him home early. “And so, the lure of that being his place to go and live out the rest of his life evaporated,” his son-in-law Dennis Revell said. “It was never Nancy’s place of choice. She went there and enjoyed it because of him.”

Ronnie’s last visit to the ranch was in August 1995. The following summer, Nancy made the