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

having to be updated. Ronnie outlived some of the clergymen who initially had been expected to lead his services. In the end, Nancy settled on former senator John C. Danforth, an Episcopal priest who was not particularly close to the Reagans. There were other adjustments that had to be made. Margaret Thatcher traveled for years with a black suit in her luggage, so she could be at the ready to come to Washington and offer her last tribute to Ronnie at his funeral. But Thatcher’s own health had deteriorated from a set of strokes, and she worried that she would no longer be up to it. So, while Thatcher planned to be present for the service, she had videotaped her eulogy the previous March. Cathedral officials initially objected to including Thatcher’s videotape as part of the service. “You tell them this is how I want it done,” Nancy said. They relented after Ryan threatened to take the whole thing to nearby National Presbyterian Church.

Ronnie’s was the nation’s first state funeral in more than thirty years, and as David Von Drehle wrote in the Washington Post: “The pomp was nearly unprecedented in American annals, more than two extraordinary hours of thundering organ, swelling chorus, haunting silences, and eloquent prayers. Eulogies were spoken by two presidents and two prime ministers.” The younger Bush echoed words once spoken on the passing of Abraham Lincoln: “Ronald Reagan belongs to the ages now, but we preferred it when he belonged to us.”

There had been a few glitches. The day before the service, Higdon realized suddenly that he hadn’t ordered flowers. He asked Nancy what she wanted to do, and she was momentarily flummoxed. “Jerry would say all white,” Higdon said, invoking the name of Nancy’s old chum Jerry Zipkin, who had died nearly a decade earlier. “Absolutely,” she said.

Less than two hours before Ronnie’s body was to arrive, the Capitol was briefly evacuated, when a plane carrying the governor of Kentucky mistakenly flew into its secure airspace. VIPs rushed frantically from the building, worried that a replay of 9/11 was about to happen. At the National Cathedral, Higdon cringed when he saw members of Congress “acting like a bunch of hillbillies,” asking dignitaries such as Prince Charles and Mikhail Gorbachev to sign their funeral programs.

But to the public—the thousands who lined the route of Ronnie’s casket to say good-bye and the millions who saw the proceedings on television—the five days of observances seemed to come off as flawlessly as Nancy had hoped. There were grace notes from beginning to end, from the F-15 fighter jets that sliced the Washington sky in a missing-man formation as his coffin arrived at the Capitol, to the bagpipes that played “Amazing Grace” at the burial service at the Reagan Library in California. As the government plane carrying his body for a final time across the country flew over Tampico, Illinois, it dipped a wing toward Ronnie’s birthplace.

The final service in California was carefully timed to end exactly as the sun dropped into the Pacific Ocean, a sight that Ronnie loved. Against a red and amber sky, Nancy laid an American flag and then her cheek upon her husband’s mahogany casket. In her grief and exhaustion, the finality of it was more than she could bear. “I can’t leave him,” she said. Nancy stroked the wood and sobbed, until the three surviving Reagan children gathered to lift her and lead her away to a future where she would never again feel Ronnie’s touch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Great men have two lives,” the diplomat Adolf Berle once observed, “one which occurs while they work on this Earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” Berle was speaking in 1945, shortly after the passing of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president that Ronnie had admired more than any other. But his words could just as easily have applied to Ronald Reagan himself.

Ronnie redefined conservatism and became the North Star for generations of GOP leaders. But it was not just Republicans who recognized his enduring power. In January 2008 a young African American US senator from Illinois who was in the heat of a Democratic presidential primary startled many in his party by citing Ronnie as his own model for connecting with Americans across the political spectrum. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,” Barack Obama said. “He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

While Nancy was no longer the caretaker of Ronnie’s physical well-being, she continued to be the chief guardian of his legacy. Most modern presidents have lived for decades after they leave office. They have used those years to shade and shape how the future will regard them. Ronnie, whose incapacitation began so soon after the end of his presidency, was denied that opportunity to write the first draft of his own legacy. So, it fell to Nancy to make sure that the story that history would tell about him would be true to his character and his ideals. She was wary of men who claimed his mantle as a means of furthering their own ambitions and goals that he would not necessarily have shared. She also was determined to refute the counternarrative of him. Even as Ronnie was beatified on the Right, there were still those in the elite circles of the Left who saw him less as a leader and a visionary than as an actor who read words that others had written for him. A 1996 survey of historians conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. infuriated conservatives when it ranked Ronnie “low