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

he might live with his father’s family full-time. Instead, he found himself in yet another boarding school. He visited the GE dream house in Pacific Palisades only on weekends and had to sleep on a couch in the living room. There was no bed for him. At one point, he learned that Ronnie and Nancy were adding a room to their house. He was thrilled, until he discovered the new bedroom was for Ron’s nurse. Michael begged to be allowed to stay with them all the time. “Why can’t Nancy drive me to school every morning and pick me up in the afternoon just like the other kids?” Michael asked his father. “It’s only half an hour from home.”

“She’s too busy with Ron and Patti,” Ronnie told him. “Don’t you think it’s enough that she has opened up her house to you and invited you in?”

There was one moment that, in Michael’s telling, suggests a shocking vindictiveness on his stepmother’s part. In 1961 the two of them were having yet another argument, this one over his latest miserable report card. Nancy told the sixteen-year-old: “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image, and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.”

“Fine,” Michael retorted. “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with, so at least when I walk out the door, I’ll know what name to use?”

It is not hard to imagine the storm of feelings this must have stirred up in Nancy, who herself had once wanted so badly to earn the name of the man she thought of as her father. But her reaction was harsh. “Okay, Mr. Reagan,” Nancy snapped. “I’ll do just that.”

She got the name of Michael’s birth mother from the business manager Ronnie still shared with Jane. A week later, Nancy informed Michael that he had been born John Flaugher and was the product of a fling between an unmarried woman and an army sergeant. Michael was mortified to discover he was, in his words, “an illegitimate bastard who would never amount to anything. Without being aware of it, Nancy had rubber-stamped all the fears I’d had for years.”

In explaining why she had disclosed to Michael information that his adoptive parents had withheld from him, Nancy offered a version that was only slightly more benign—and not exactly persuasive of her good intentions: “I was told that Jane was not pleased that I had answered Michael’s question. But he was obviously troubled by having been adopted, and I thought he had the right to know the truth about his own background. It seemed like a natural thing to want to know, and I hoped this would give him some peace of mind.”

From there, Michael and Nancy rarely spoke. Which meant his father became even more remote. At Michael’s 1964 graduation from the exclusive Judson prep school in Arizona, Ronnie gave the commencement speech. Before he spoke, the famous television star posed for pictures with some of the graduates. Ronnie said the same thing to each in turn, including Michael: “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”

Michael whipped off his mortar board. “Remember me?” he said. “I’m your son Mike.”

“Oh,” Ronnie replied. “I didn’t recognize you.”

Nancy, looking for guidance on how to handle her rebellious children, turned to the parent that she herself had idolized. “She probably talked to my father every day and got his input,” her brother, Richard, told me. “I don’t think he always gave her the best advice. It was always very strict, which is good for some children and not for others.”

Loyal “felt that the children were dragging her down, were depressing her,” Richard added. Their father frequently reminded Nancy to remember that “your husband comes first.”

Michael found support from a different source: Nancy’s mother. Michael’s Arizona boarding school was not far from where the Davises had retired. He was delighted when his step-grandmother showed up in the stands at his baseball games. Once, when Michael was up to bat with two runners on base, he heard Edie shout: “You better hit a home run, you little sonofabitch!”

And he did, for the first and only time ever.

Edie “was a warm-hearted, generous woman who, I think, knew I was having problems and was always sympathetic to me,” Michael recalled. When he graduated, Edie gave him a signet ring, which he cherished. Michael regretted that he never told Nancy’s mother how much that meant to him. When Edie died in 1987, he cried. It was the first time, Michael realized, that he had ever wept over someone in the family who was not himself.

Ronnie, meanwhile, was explicit in his priorities. He had only one: Nancy. In a letter dated May 24, 1963, after they had apparently been discussing their difficulties with Michael over the phone, Ronnie wrote this:

Whether Mike helps buy his first car or spends the money on sports coats isn’t really important. We both want for get him started on a road that will lead to his being able to provide for himself. In x number of years, we’ll face the same problem with The Skipper and somehow we’ll probably find the right answers. (Patti is another kind of problem, and we’ll do all we can to make that one right, too.) But

what is really important is that having fulfilled our responsibilities to our offspring we haven’t been careless with the treasure that is ours—namely what we are to each other.

Do you know that when you sleep you curl your fists up under your chin and many mornings when it is barely dawn I lie facing you and looking at you until finally I have to touch you ever so lightly so you won’t wake up—but touch you I must or I will burst?

… Probably this letter will reach you only a few hours before I arrive myself, but not really because right now as I try to say what is in my heart I