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

me a game show,” Ron added. “It didn’t take me two minutes to say, ‘No. Thank you very much, but I’m not a game-show host. I just don’t see myself that way.’ ” Ron assumed that Griffin had made the offer at his mother’s behest. James Baker also recalled getting an appeal from Nancy, who was worried that her son might not have health insurance. “I said, ‘Well, Nancy, he needs to get a job,’ ” Baker told me. Ron denied that he ever went without medical coverage, which he said he received through his membership in the screen actors union, but acknowledged he did get career advice from Baker.

Nancy also became fearful that one or more of the surviving children might sue the estate—or one another—after she and Ronnie were dead. So, she offered them a financial incentive: she would double their inheritance to $200,000 if they all signed a pledge not to contest the terms of their parents’ wills. Ron told me that he was offended his mother would even ask such a thing. It implied she didn’t trust him or that she believed he was after her money. “I don’t even remember the details of it, but I reacted badly to that,” he recalled. He refused to sign, as did Michael.

According to Ron’s version of events, Nancy told her son that “really it had more to do with Mike than anybody else. They were worried that Mike was going to sue the estate, which indeed turned out to be a well-founded concern.” Ron declined to provide further details, saying he was bound by a nondisclosure agreement. However, several other sources familiar with the Reagans’ estate said that Michael did threaten legal action at least twice, after his father’s death in 2004 and Nancy’s in 2016. The terms of the will were renegotiated, giving him a greater share than he would have received otherwise.

Toward the end of Ronnie’s life, Nancy’s relationship with Michael, always fraught, deteriorated to its lowest point. A confidant confirmed: “Michael was, at least in her eyes, getting really out of hand and a bit of a wild card. They didn’t know what he would do.” Nancy believed Ronnie’s older son was exploiting the reverence that conservatives felt for his father in order to burnish his own image and career as a radio talk-show host and commentator. Michael visited Ronnie infrequently, usually appearing right before he was scheduled to do an interview with a radio or television outlet. One of Nancy’s close associates recalls that in the versions Michael would recount of those meetings, he would claim that Ronnie had walked him to the door and waved until he was out of sight. In fact, by that point, the former president was not able to leave his bed.

Things between Michael and Nancy eventually became so bitter that she feared being alone with him. The Secret Service stationed an agent nearby when he visited to keep an eye on how he behaved, according to more than a half dozen people that I talked to on and off the record. One of those who confirmed this was his half brother, Ron: “The Secret Service were concerned enough about Mike that after an incident where he sort of loomed over my mother, who was frail at the time, and screamed at her that we’d all be better off if she just died, or was dead—something to that effect—the Secret Service would no longer leave him alone in the house with her. They would always put somebody outside the door on the rare occasions when he visited.” Robert Higdon told me the episode happened a few years before Ronnie died. “It was so bad that the Secret Service came into the house,” he said.

Nancy appeared less and less often in public. In March 2001 she traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, to christen the USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. But otherwise, she got out only occasionally and briefly, usually to meet friends for lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air. Two of her favorite companions were network anchorman Tom Brokaw and actor Warren Beatty, who would take her out together. “Warren and I treasured those lunches because she always arrived with astute political observations and the best gossip from both coasts,” Brokaw said.

What Nancy never offered were any details about what was going on at home. When asked, she would simply say that there were good days and bad days. Eventually her closest pals learned not to inquire. The truth was, even the best days were getting pretty bad. Ronnie was heading farther and farther down a road where she could not follow. Sometimes, she still caught herself asking him: “Honey, you remember when—”

Doctor Hutton recalled one particularly poignant moment when he was visiting. Nancy turned the old romantic song “Unforgettable” on the stereo system that played on speakers throughout the house, and held her arms up to her husband, beckoning him to dance. It was a scene that Hutton had witnessed many times in the past. In the old days, the Reagans would fall together and cling to each other as they moved as one to the music. But this time, Ronnie brushed her away. There were other ordinary pleasures that Nancy could no longer share with him. When the two of them used to watch the game show Wheel of Fortune after dinner in the library of their home, Nancy would cuddle with Ronnie, and they would kiss. The last time Hutton had seen her try to do that, “he obviously didn’t understand at all what she was doing. It was kind of sad. She would tear [up] and just get up and go off to her room.”

In 1999 she shared a bit of what her life was like as she gave a televised tour of the Reagan Library to Brian Lamb, the founder of the cable network C-Span. Lamb, a gentle but persistent questioner, asked Nancy what she had learned about Alzheimer’s over the past five years.

“It is probably the