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

Santa Barbara looted a Bank of America building and set it on fire to protest the financial institution’s loans to South Africa, which had a racist apartheid government. At least once, Ronnie’s car was surrounded and rocked by demonstrators. When he visited Chico State College, a clean-shaven young man thrust his face into the governor’s and shouted: “You rotten son of a bitch!” Some of the staffers who traveled with Ronnie and his family began carrying concealed handguns.

Nancy’s fears for her husband’s safety created problems for those who were trying to steer a political course for Ronnie through the rough waters of the era. In later years, she would learn to use her power more shrewdly, employing allies to fight her battles for her and to act as the agents of an agenda she preferred to keep unseen. But during Ronnie’s early days in the governor’s office, she was a constant source of disruption. The first lady’s input—or interference, as it was viewed by those on the receiving end—was no more welcome by the governor’s staff than it had been by the men who ran his campaign.

Ronnie even interrupted Cabinet meetings to take Nancy’s calls. One time, the others in the room overheard her on the line venting about vulgar comments that radical black activist Eldridge Cleaver had made about Ronnie. “But, honey, I can’t have him arrested just because he says those things,” the governor told her. (Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther movement, would have a change of heart. In 1984 he endorsed Ronnie for reelection as president.)

Among those with whom she clashed was Tom Ellick, a media operations assistant in the governor’s office who produced a televised series called Report to the People. These were twenty-eight-minute segments that ran on major stations in the state’s largest cities. For an episode about the campus violence, Ellick had the governor engage in a friendly question-and-answer session with students. The imagery was exactly what the producer wanted. It showed Ronnie at his resolute best, interspersed with scenes of rioting and property destruction by protesters. “I had about 99.9 percent of the footage that I needed, but I needed to get him on a college campus,” Ellick recalled. He arranged for film of the governor to be shot on a quiet corner of the UCLA campus on a weekend afternoon. Reagan was to stroll contemplatively for about forty-five seconds, with off-duty Los Angeles police officers posing in the background as students. Ellick thought everything was set, when he unexpectedly got a call summoning him to a meeting with Ronnie and his top advisers. He was told: “We need to roundtable this.” Those were dreaded words to anyone on the governor’s staff. It meant something had gone off track.

Ellick flew to Southern California for a meeting at the Reagans’ home in Pacific Palisades and discovered the problem: Nancy. Everyone else sat silently as the panic-stricken first lady declared, “No, Daddy, we can’t do it. It’s too dangerous.”

“We’ve got the LAPD lined up,” Ellick pleaded. “They will have excellent security, and it’s within minutes of your house, and it’s not going to be a problem, but I really do need this particular bit of footage.”

Again, no one else said a word.

So Ellick put the question directly to the governor, telling Ronnie: “It’s your call.” The others in the room looked shocked. Defying the first lady was a reckless move for someone so junior on the staff.

“Tom’s right,” Ronnie said. “We’re going to do it.”

The film shoot went off without incident, but Ellick knew he would never make his way back into the first lady’s good graces. “I could see check mark number one against Tom Ellick,” he recalled. Ellick began having a recurring nightmare in which he was wading into a deep river with Nancy Reagan on his shoulders. By the time the 1970 election rolled around, he got word that he was among the “less desirable” aides whose services would not be needed in the governor’s second term.

“She really, truly devoted her life to this man, and I respect and admire her for that, but as far as wanting to be around her in a working environment, that’s probably the last thing in the world that I wanted to do, and, frankly, one of the last things anybody on the staff wanted to do. They just didn’t want to deal with her,” Ellick said. Ronnie’s secretary Helene von Damm put it this way: “Everyone tensed when she came into the office.”

Behind her back, her husband’s aides called her Governor Nancy. No detail, it seemed, was too small to escape her eye. The appearance of the suite of offices where Ronnie spent his days was of particular concern to her. She scolded the staff if she saw a chair askew, or a stack of papers on a desk, or a dirty ashtray. Nancy, who would sometimes joke that she was “a frustrated interior decorator,” also oversaw a major renovation of the governor’s drab suite. The only decoration its previous occupant Pat Brown had left behind was a tomahawk hanging on the wall. Nancy replaced the carpet that was full of holes, had the orange paneling stained a darker, richer color, and installed cream-colored draperies. She was particularly proud of a set of gold-rush-era prints she had excavated from a state storage facility at historic Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento. When she saw how the governor’s assistant Curtis Patrick was hanging them in the hallway, she went into a rage. The first lady’s shouting could be heard from Ronnie’s inner office.

Aides learned early not to take any complaints about Nancy to the governor. “We all thought of her as a demanding and somewhat aloof person. But in his adoring eyes, she was the sweetest, gentlest, most wonderful person in the world,” von Damm wrote. “Ronald Reagan didn’t even seem to see the same person the rest of us saw. When an aggrieved staffer once approached the governor about something Mrs. R had done, Governor