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

was. As Ronnie himself had explained to Esquire magazine in 1976, it was through writing that he converted from a New Dealer to a conservative: “I always did my own speeches and did the research for them. I just woke up to the realization one day that I had been going out and helping to elect the people who had been causing the things I had been criticizing. So it wasn’t any case of some mentor coming in and talking me out of it. I did it in my own speeches.”

The Reagan Library turned out to hold a gold mine of unexamined evidence in that regard. Scholar Kiron K. Skinner discovered some of it in the late 1990s as she was looking through cardboard boxes there. Tucked into one she found scripts of the radio addresses that Ronnie had given between the time he was governor and his election as president. On pages upon pages of legal pads, he had sketched out a blueprint for what would become his governing philosophy. Skinner worked with Martin Anderson, who served as Ronnie’s first domestic-policy adviser, and Anderson’s wife, Annelise, who had been an aide in the Office of Management and Budget, to edit a collection of them. Reagan, in His Own Hand was published in 2001.

Nancy “was very supportive of that project,” said former secretary of state George Shultz, who wrote the book’s introduction. “Obviously it was a project of huge importance, because it showed that when ideas are written out in the president’s own handwriting, they’re his. It was not some staff person’s. You could see a display of the man’s thinking.”

The book was followed in 2003 by Reagan: A Life in Letters, which collected more than five thousand thoughtful, poignant, and witty pieces of correspondence. They spanned nearly his entire lifetime, from a note to some older girls when he was eleven years old, to the final missives he wrote after announcing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994. Included were everything from Ronnie’s letters to world leaders, to his half-century-long pen-pal relationship with the woman who had been the president of the Philadelphia chapter of his fan club back when he was a movie actor. As Time magazine put it in a cover story: “The letters suggest a man for whom writing was less a habit than a need, like food and water, as though the very act shaped his thoughts as much as the thoughts shaped the writing.”

After Ronnie’s death came an even more ambitious project: the publication of the diaries he kept during his eight years in the White House. The existence of the diaries was well known. Edmund Morris had been allowed to see them when he was writing his massive biography of Ronnie, and there had been much wrangling over them during the Iran-contra scandal and its legal aftermath. In 1989, lawyers for former national security adviser John M. Poindexter subpoenaed excerpts to use in his defense during his trial on charges of lying to Congress. Both Ronnie and the Bush administration invoked executive privilege and refused to turn them over.

In 2006 historian Douglas Brinkley was teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans and finishing up a book about Hurricane Katrina when he got a call from former California governor Pete Wilson, a member of the Reagan Foundation board. Wilson told him that the foundation was looking for someone to edit the diaries. Brinkley knew that Ronnie was one of only four presidents who had written a journal of his thoughts on a consistent basis. The historian was, in his words, “beyond intrigued” about the possibility of being the one who would be given the opportunity to see and analyze them.

“Well, look, while you’ve risen to the top of our list, you still have tests to pass,” Wilson said.

“What do you mean, ‘tests’?” Brinkley asked.

“You’re going to have to win Mrs. Reagan’s approval,” Wilson said. “While she’d like to see the diaries published, she felt very burned by Edmund Morris. His very name makes her apoplectic. So, you’re going to have to convince her you’re not anything at all like Edmund Morris. And number two, she is just going to have to have a good feel for you as a person who she could collaborate with, because she owns these diaries.”

Brinkley flew to California and met Nancy at the Hotel Bel-Air, where they both ordered the most popular item on the menu, the “Nancy Reagan Cobb Salad.” He had been given two pieces of advice by Wilson: First, don’t, under any circumstances, mention Morris. And second, if the conversation drags, talk to her about the movie business—not the old stuff from back in her days in Hollywood but contemporary films and current stars such as Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt. Brinkley was a contributor to Vanity Fair, so he figured he had that covered.

They were getting along well, when Brinkley realized he had a confession to make. “Mrs. Reagan, I need to tell you something,” he said. “I’m not a conservative. If anything, people see me as somebody center left, or just plain old liberal. And you need to be aware that by giving me all of Reagan’s diaries, no strings attached, you might get some criticism from the Right.”

Nancy, who was well into her mideighties, fixed a glare on Brinkley that he could still feel more than a decade later. “My son is more liberal than you will ever be,” she said. “What’s your point?”

“Well, I don’t have a point, I guess,” Brinkley stammered. “I just thought I should put that on the table, just so you know.”

“I don’t think like that,” Nancy said. “I’m not that way.”

She went on to tell him how the liberal lion Edward M. Kennedy called her on every birthday and sang to her, a thoughtful gesture that not many of her Republican friends would bother to make. While she and Kennedy agreed on few issues, Nancy felt closer to him than almost anyone else who was still in Washington politics.

Brinkley