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

Reagan was so utterly incredulous and completely unbelieving (‘You must be wrong. My Nancy wouldn’t do that.’) that no one ever tried to talk to him about her again.”

When Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver told Ronnie that his wife, Carolyn, was pregnant, the governor told him to pray that it was a girl.

“What about Ron?” Deaver asked him, knowing the governor’s affection for his youngest child.

“Oh, I wouldn’t trade Ron for anything,” Ronnie replied. “But when you have a daughter, you get to see your wife grow up all over again.”

Ronnie was indulgent of—and even somewhat amused by—Nancy’s inability to shrug off his critics. “She bleeds pretty good,” he said affectionately. The first lady canceled their subscription to the SacramentoBee, which had been relentlessly critical of him; Ronnie didn’t tell her he was still reading the capital’s leading newspaper at the office. Once, on a commercial flight from Sacramento to San Diego, she overheard three men in the row behind her criticizing the governor’s spending cuts. Nancy leaned her seat back until she was practically in their laps and told her astonished fellow passengers: “That’s my husband you’re talking about! You don’t know what you’re saying. He’s going on television tonight, and if you watch him, you’ll learn the real story of the budget.”

When she or Ronnie came under fire, Nancy retreated to her bathtub, where she soaked and fantasized about the arguments she wished she could have with the offending reporter or political adversary. “I was sensational during these encounters—I could always think of just the right thing to say. And, of course, with nobody to answer back, I always came out the winner,” she recalled later. “I finished those baths feeling great. I stopped holding those imaginary conversations before we moved to Washington, and it’s a good thing, too. Otherwise, I would have spent eight solid years in the tub.”

Though Nancy did not weigh in often on policy, she wielded a heavy hand as the chief guardian of her husband’s well-being. On her orders, he left the office nearly every day at five o’clock. As he headed home, Ronnie would tell everyone else to do so as well. She made sure Ronnie had his raincoat when it was wet outside and ordered him to turn off his favorite show, Mission: Impossible, when it was time for bed. “She would call in and ask what the schedule was like for the governor, and did he bring his cough syrup, or can we get him some soup for lunch, or something like that. I would think, ‘Why is she calling so much? We’re busy here,’ ” Ronnie’s secretary, Kathy Osborne, recounted.

But once, Osborne had to run something to the executive residence and found Ronnie walking around with a box of Kleenex in his hands, red nosed and obviously running a fever. Nancy followed her husband, pleading for him to stay home and warning that it would take him longer to get better if he didn’t. Ronnie told Nancy that there was a busload of kids coming in from Bakersfield, and he wouldn’t disappoint them by not showing up. So, he ended up going to work. That glimpse of their home life gave Osborne a new appreciation of why Ronnie needed a protector. “I thought, ‘You know, he’s so lucky that he has somebody who’s so devoted to him, who’s worried about him. The state will get along just fine without him for a day if he has to stay home and take care of his cold.’ That was my first clue that she is a very strong woman, she’s very devoted, and she’s looking out for her husband. And he was an extremely happy man because of that,” Osborne said.

As attuned as she was to Ronnie’s image, it was perhaps inevitable that Nancy would clash with her husband’s wisecracking communications director, Lyn Nofziger. Friction between the two of them went back to the gubernatorial campaign, when Nofziger told Nancy that her gardenia scent smelled like “dime-store perfume.” She didn’t speak to him for days. He soon became familiar with the fire-and-ice quality of her fury: “One thing about Nancy, you can tell when she’s angry with you. You either get hollered at or get the silent treatment.”

Nancy mistrusted Nofziger’s closeness with reporters (he had been one himself), and thought he was failing at his duty when one of them wrote a story she didn’t like. She frowned upon the communications director’s rumpled suits, untucked shirts, and uncombed hair, as well as his habit of padding around the office in his socks. “He wasn’t suave, he wasn’t sophisticated, and he didn’t really look the part that she wanted those around her husband to look,” recalled Nofziger’s research assistant, Karen Hanson, who later married Tom Ellick. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris wrote that Nofziger “looked like a used sleeping bag.” But Nofziger joked that his dishevelment actually provided a strategic benefit: the contrast made the governor look good.

Tension between the first lady and her husband’s chief spokesman came to a head in a crisis that occurred early in Ronnie’s tenure as governor. Rumors began circulating in the summer of 1967 about a “homosexual ring”—or as Nofziger put it, a “daisy chain”—in the governor’s office. The stories centered around the activities of Ronnie’s first chief of staff (the job title then was “executive secretary”), a man named Phil Battaglia, who was in his early thirties, married, and a father of two. Battaglia was said to have a penchant for hiring attractive young men and having them accompany him whenever business took him away from Sacramento. Where talk of someone’s sexual orientation might have raised few eyebrows in Hollywood—and, indeed, the Reagans had moved comfortably in circles where people made no secret of their homosexuality—attitudes were far different in politics.

A potential for scandal was not the only reason people around Ronnie were gunning for Battaglia. The pudgy lawyer was brilliant and had done a good job running the 1966 campaign as its state chairman; Ronnie