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

wrenching decision to quietly put Rancho del Cielo up for sale. She listed it with Sotheby’s International Realty, with an asking price of $5.95 million. Patti protested, saying no one else should ever have a place so suffused with her father. “I’ll do what I have to do,” Nancy replied, ending the discussion.

“I know that her answer went beyond finances. It had to do with memories—of days that are painful to revisit because they rolled by so smoothly, with a peaceful laziness that awaits anyone lucky enough to escape the city and retreat into the hills,” Patti wrote. “The ranch was where my father went to restore himself, and my mother settled into the long stretch of days, content to simply be with him and let the hours float by. Now those days are far behind her, out of reach. I watched her when we went to the ranch together recently. I saw how her eyes rested on the lake, the hills, but only for a moment. Then something in her races away from her recollections. At the end of the day, she couldn’t wait to leave, as if the land itself were haunted.”

Patti finally realized the source of her own feelings about selling the ranch: “Losing my father and losing the ranch have become part of the same sorrow; it’s as if I will be losing him twice. And understanding my mother’s motives makes it more difficult, because no one’s right, and no one’s wrong. It’s as if something inside me is crying out, You can’t sell the ranch—he’s everywhere on it. And she is responding by crying out, That’s why I have to.” Later, after it was sold, Nancy told her daughter that memories of the ranch kept coming back to her in her dreams at night: “The weekends we used to spend there—riding, sitting by the fireplace—the way it was before, when we were normal.”

The ranch languished on the market. An effort to turn it into a national park went nowhere, as did one to make it a state historical site. In 1998 Nancy accepted an offer far below her asking price from the Young America’s Foundation, previously known as Young Americans for Freedom, a group promoting conservative values on college campuses. That was a decision Nancy came to regret, according to family members and several confidants I spoke to. “She was, to my mind, in a bit too much of a hurry and could have gotten a lot more money than she did for the ranch, particularly given its provenance. But she kind of snapped up the first offer,” Ron said. More worrisome, it turned out, was how the organization exploited its ownership of Ronnie’s favorite place in the world to market itself. “She was very, very concerned about them,” said Fred Ryan.

One of Nancy’s advisers claimed the Young America’s Foundation “manipulated her” by telling her it would be careful and tasteful in how it managed the site. “They started using it—and Reagan’s name—as a fund-raising vehicle. She was furious about how they were using it,” the adviser said. The Reagan Foundation, to which both Ronnie and Nancy had given the legal rights to their names and likenesses, suddenly found itself facing competition with the Young America’s Foundation as the group raised money for its own programs. “We came very, very close to a lawsuit and were sending a lot of these cease-and-desist letters,” the source close to Nancy added. It further annoyed her that some of the conservatives who had been kicked off the library board had begun making the ranch, under its new ownership, a sort of ideological base camp.

Nancy’s concerns about personal finances deepened. Given her own history of breast cancer, she knew there was a very real possibility that her husband would outlive her. Though her lawyers and other advisers told her over and over that she and Ronnie had plenty of money to see them through, Nancy worried that there might not be the resources to ensure that he could be properly taken care of if she were not around. She wanted to be certain not only that his physical needs were met but also that his dignity and privacy were respected. She knew that would be expensive.

“My mother would be anxious about their financial situation on a more or less constant basis,” Ron said. “She was in a state of kind of controlled panic for quite some time when he really, really became ill. And the idea of money going out the door for nurses and all the rest was pretty frightening to her.” This led to tension—and worse—with the Reagan children. As bills for Ronnie’s care mounted, Nancy backed out of an arrangement under which she had promised to give them and their spouses each $20,000 a year, as a sort of advance on their inheritances. Ron, living in Seattle and facing financial pressures of his own, became so angry with his mother that one year he returned his Christmas presents from her unopened.

Ronnie and Nancy had revised their wills several times after he left office. Most of what they left behind was to go to the Reagan library and foundation, Eureka College, and other causes that were important to them. Each of the children would receive a relatively modest bequest—$100,000, according to several sources I talked to who were familiar with the terms. Each grandchild would receive a smaller amount.

Nancy tried to assist her children in other ways—for instance, by prodding her powerful friends to help them find work that offered steady pay and benefits. “She would, in fact, make calls and things. She was not a big one for filling up your refrigerator or buying you furniture or something like that. But she’d pick up the phone and try and get somebody else to do it,” Ron recalled.

“She was great friends with Merv Griffin. He produced a lot of game shows and things. And he, at one point, offered me—I was working in television, and he offered