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

and his pregnant wife, Anne, moved to Simi Valley, and he got to work. He was awestruck when he got his first glimpse of the diaries: five volumes, bound in maroon leather, each embossed with the presidential seal and the name Ronald Wilson Reagan stamped in gold on the bottom right. As he read the neat, rounded handwriting, Brinkley felt he could almost hear Ronnie’s voice. But before any of it could be published, it had to get past a government national security clearance review. Censors in Washington wanted references to such sensitive things as arms deals with Saudi Arabia and other matters redacted. Nancy and Joanne Drake, who ran the foundation, fought these battles one by one, often winning them when they could show that a piece of information in question had already appeared in a newspaper story or in someone else’s book. George Shultz was helpful in hunting down these previously reported snippets. With few exceptions, everything in Ronnie’s diary was allowed to be published. Nancy’s determination to see his diaries made public was ironic, given that she ordered her own journals to be destroyed upon her death.

Nancy’s larger purpose was clear to Brinkley. “She thought that Ronnie was more of an intellectual than the public had understood. That he was not a just an aw-shucks guy who read cowboy novels and painted fences. That he really had a deep sense of Cold War literature and could be very pragmatic and reflective,” the historian said. Nancy had one further stipulation she gave Brinkley: he had to promise that he would never, ever claim that because he had read the diaries, he had any special insight into what Ronnie might think about or do on any current issue if he were alive today. No one could know that, she said. Her stepson Michael made such assertions all the time on conservative talk shows, and it annoyed her to no end.

Over the course of the project, Brinkley and Nancy became friends and had frequent lunches. As the birth of his baby approached, Nancy offered him motherly advice about raising children. She was frank about the mistakes she herself had made. When the diaries were published by HarperCollins in 2007, Nancy and Brinkley signed copies together and donated them to places such as Ronnie’s alma mater Eureka College and the museum that now stands at the spot where he was born. The Reagan Diaries reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. It gave a revealing look at the matters, both public and personal, that consumed the 2,922 days of Ronnie’s presidency. Suffusing the entire book is his love and longing for Nancy, which he wrote about in nearly every entry.

For a few years after Ronnie was gone, Nancy fought her loneliness by getting out of the house. She even made some new and improbable friends. Among them was her husband’s old nemesis, the legendarily aggressive television newsman Sam Donaldson. They hadn’t known each other well back when Ronnie was president. Donaldson had once described Nancy on a Sunday-morning talk show as a “smiling mamba,” which was a reference to a large poisonous snake. He apologized, but that one had left a mark.

So, Donaldson was a little surprised after Ronnie’s death when someone—he can’t remember who—mentioned that the former first lady might like to hear from him. The next time he was in Los Angeles, he got in touch. Thus began a semiregular routine in which the two of them got together for lunch at an oceanside restaurant. Donaldson would bring his laptop computer, and they would laugh over old images from the White House years. Not the big, historic, tear-down-this-wall stuff, but sentimental scenes, like when Nancy surprised Ronnie with a birthday cake on national television. The last time they met, one of the other patrons at the restaurant recognized Donaldson and approached him afterward. “Who was that elderly woman?” the man wanted to know. “She looks familiar.”

As she approached her ninetieth birthday, Nancy’s health went into a sharp decline. In 2008 she was hospitalized twice after serious falls. She broke her pelvis in the second, which occurred when she got up in the middle of the night. She began wearing oversized glasses to deal with her glaucoma. When she showed up for events at the library, it was in a wheelchair. Her fragility made it harder and harder for Nancy to get out for the gossipy lunches that she had loved, and there were fewer of her friends still alive with which to share them. “There’s just nobody left,” Nancy lamented. Michael Deaver succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2007. Ursula Taylor, with whom she was close when they were newlyweds, young mothers, and neighbors, died in 2010. Nancy’s great pal Betsy Bloomingdale was also failing, and the only way they could stay in touch was by phone. Indeed, the telephone was pretty much Nancy’s only lifeline to the world. Friends and acquaintances often asked Joanne Drake if there was anything they could do for the former first lady. Drake’s advice was always the same: “Call her.”

There was also more heartbreak within the Reagan family. In 2014 Ron’s wife, Doria, died at the age of sixty-two. Seven years before, she had begun showing the symptoms of a serious neuromuscular disease similar to ALS. Doctors never quite settled on a precise diagnosis. She and Ron lived in a bungalow in Seattle, and he had taken care of Doria through her lengthy illness, during which he was unemployed part of the time.

In Nancy’s final years, Ronnie would sometimes come to her at night. It seemed to her too real to be a dream. She would see him next to her, sitting on the side of the bed that she still left empty, and they would talk. Once, she spotted him in a chair and told him she thought he looked cold. She got up and retrieved a blanket from the closet. The next morning, she found the covering in a