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

This is why Nancy devoted so much of her energy to the Reagan Library. “I go to the library or work for the library all the time, because it’s Ronnie,” she said in 2009. “I’m working for Ronnie.” Both she and he had wanted it to become a place that not only sanctified the past but pointed the way to the future. Republicans who aspired to the Oval Office came there to give major policy addresses. The library hosted two GOP presidential candidate debates during the 2008 election cycle, and one each in 2012 and 2016.

Nancy was also relentless in making sure the library and foundation that carried Ronnie’s name would have the money to sustain itself indefinitely. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens donated $10 million in 2005 to help build the massive pavilion in which the museum housed a Boeing 707 that had been used as Air Force One by Ronnie and six other presidents. Nancy put Pickens in charge of raising another $100 million in honor of the February 2011 centennial of Ronnie’s birth. Shortly before the deadline, she checked in with him to see how things were going. “I think we can claim victory, Mrs. Reagan,” Pickens told her triumphantly.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “How much do you have?” Nancy asked.

“Ninety-five million,” Pickens replied.

“Victory is a hundred million,” she said icily. “I want a hundred by Ronnie’s birthday.”

Pickens scrambled to round up a few other big donors and threw in an additional $1 million himself. Then he called Nancy to tell her he had reached the goal. “Boone, I knew you could do it,” she said.

Recounting the story five years later, Pickens—a legendarily ruthless corporate raider—told me with a laugh how intimidated he was by the eighty-nine-year-old former first lady. “Well, hell yes, I did it. I did it within twenty-four hours,” he recalled in his big West Texas drawl. “Yeah, I could do it when she screwed down on me like that. I saw her as I think a lot of people did during their administration. She could get tough. She wanted something, and she was going to get it.”

Around the country, Ronnie’s admirers looked for other lasting ways to honor him. Some of it began while Ronnie was still alive. The 1998 dedication of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington was a gesture rich in irony. It is a sprawling $818 million federal building, a limestone behemoth second only to the Pentagon in size, that carries the name of a president who portrayed big government as the enemy. Congress also voted that same year to rechristen the airport closest to the capital Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. There are dozens of schools and stretches of highway named for him.

Nancy was uncomfortable about some of the more excessive things that her husband’s devotees wanted to do in—and with—his name. She was not a fan of antitax activist Grover Norquist’s Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which had a goal of christening something in every one of the nation’s 3,140 counties after the fortieth president. Nancy believed, as she was sure her husband would have, that any such movement should come from local communities themselves. “If he were able to, he’d quietly thank them but say, ‘Please don’t,’ ” she said.

In 2003 Nancy put a stop to a plan by some Republicans in Congress to put her husband’s profile on the dime. Nancy thought Ronnie would not have wanted to supplant his idol FDR on the coin. She was also keenly aware of the poignant story behind Roosevelt’s placement there. It had been done as a tribute to the leadership that a president disabled by polio had shown in founding the March of Dimes, an organization dedicated to scientific advances and education that improved the health of mothers and their babies. Since the 1970s, some in the anti-abortion movement have boycotted the March of Dimes, because, among other things, it encourages prenatal testing. “I do not support this proposal, and I’m certain Ronnie would not,” Nancy said of the idea of putting her husband on the coin. “When our country chooses to honor a great president such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him and replace him with another.”

Long after Ronnie was out of office, Nancy kept watch for references to him in the news media. In 1998 she sent a note to the Wall Street Journal’s Albert R. Hunt about a not entirely flattering column he had written about the debate over renaming Washington’s airport after Ronnie. Rather than focusing on Hunt’s criticisms of her husband, Nancy zeroed in on a passing reference he had made to Ronnie’s firing of more than eleven thousand air traffic controllers during a 1981 strike. “I had to write and thank you for the column you did on Ronnie and the airport. I’ve been reading all the comments about the air controllers’ strike and waiting for someone to point out that it was an illegal strike,” Nancy wrote. “They broke the law, so Ronnie fired them. But no one said it—until you. I’m very grateful to you for at last setting the record straight, and I hope that’s the last we hear of it.

“Also thanks for your comments on Ronnie’s practicing a policy of civility—which he did,” she added. “Very important, and I think we all miss it when it isn’t there. Hope you can read my handwriting (my husband never could!) and thanks again.”

But Nancy wanted to do more than protect Ronnie’s reputation. She wanted to elevate and enlarge it, to make history fully recognize her husband’s intellect and his vision. She wanted generations to come to understand that he was not, as Democratic power broker Clark Clifford famously described him, an “amiable dunce.” Ronnie’s own written words, she believed, were the best testament to the thinker that he