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

“embezzling $1,000,000 tax funds to build this extravagant whimsey.” The first lady responded that the money would come from a California government fund maintained for capital construction and added: “I’m sure it must be obvious… that I am trying to do this for the state and future governors, since I’ll never be living in it.”

As it turned out, no one ever lived in the twenty-thousand-square-foot modern monstrosity that eventually went up on the site. Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, a thirtysomething bachelor who succeeded Ronnie as governor, called it a “Taj Mahal” and refused to move in, preferring instead to sleep on a mattress on the floor of his $250-a-month studio apartment. Joan Didion wrote that the soulless palace that Nancy insisted upon building was “evocative of the unspeakable.” It was also too far from the capitol to be practical. The state, which was spending $85,000 a year to guard the unoccupied property, auctioned it off in 1982. When Jerry Brown returned for a second tour as governor nearly three decades later, he had the old mansion renovated and moved back in, becoming the first governor to reside there since the Reagans had vacated it.

Nancy’s files show that she frequently exchanged correspondence with constituents, even those who criticized her. She was curious to learn what individual Californians were thinking and insisted on reading nearly all of her own mail. She wrote her replies by hand, to be typewritten by a secretary, sparing the recipient the ordeal of struggling to decipher her loopy handwriting, which made the letter N look like a U, and M like a W.

Her letters offered blunt views on a wide range of subjects, particularly the changing social mores of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was contemptuous of that era’s giddy fashion trends, such as gaucho pants. (“I personally like a feminine, soft, elegant look and for a woman to look like a woman!”) Nor did she like the R- and X-rated movies that Hollywood was churning out. (“Having been in the business, I do know that the only thing they understand is how much money they can take in at the box office. If people would stop going to see—out of curiosity or whatever other excuse they use—the pictures that we don’t agree with, the producers would very quickly stop making them.”)

A girl reached out to her in 1972 as part of a civics assignment in which students were given a choice of writing to the California first lady, feminist Gloria Steinem, or political activist Angela Davis. The question she posed to Nancy: What is your role in life? And can a woman combine a career with her home life?

“I assume you’re talking about the woman who is able to choose between the two—not the one who must work to supplement the family income. In the latter case, there is no choice—of course—one does what one must,” Nancy replied. “However, for the woman who can choose, this is a very individual decision. I had a career when I got married and very gladly gave it up. I think in most cases when you try to combine the two, one suffers, and it’s usually the marriage. That was a gamble I wasn’t willing to take.

“Marriage is a full-time job, and I think a woman’s real happiness and fulfillment is found in her home. You can have outside interests—and should have, I think—but within the framework of the marriage.”

After Ronnie signed the abortion law, Nancy wrote back and forth with people on both sides of the increasingly explosive subject. “I personally believe that a woman should have the right to decide whether or not she will have a child, but this decision should be made before a child is created. Frankly, I approve of birth control methods,” she wrote to a woman who wanted to see abortion become more liberalized. To a man who opposed it, she responded: “I supported my husband’s abortion law, but both he and I are very distressed at the way it has been abused. The original bill he signed was to permit abortions when there was clear evidence that the birth would harm the mother—in other words, based on the moral principle of self-defense. However, many doctors have been using the mental health provision to perform abortions on anyone who asks. This clearly was not the original intention of the law.” (In fact, Ronnie had known that this would likely happen when he signed the law and had said so.)

In addition to engaging in these correspondences with individual constituents, Nancy also spoke up more in public. In a 1970 interview, Associated Press reporter Edith M. Lederer asked Nancy whether a woman should have a choice on whether to become a mother. “But she does have a choice,” Nancy retorted. “It starts with a movement of the head either yes or no.” As for the youth of America, who were protesting on campuses across the country: “If they are concerned about things that need to be corrected, how can they correct them if they’re so doped up they don’t know what they’re doing?”

Nancy also found her own causes to pursue, which among other things offered her outlets from constantly fretting over Ronnie. The doctor’s daughter made frequent trips to hospitals, usually with no publicity. It would have surprised her critics to see how at ease she was around the sick, the disabled, the disfigured, and how comfortable she made them feel.

One day in 1967, while touring the Pacific State Hospital, a facility for people who were then known as the “mentally retarded” or “feebleminded,” Nancy learned of a new, federally funded program called Foster Grandparents. It was started under Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty by Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who directed LBJ’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Foster Grandparents paired senior citizens with needy children and paid them a small stipend for serving as friends and mentors. Nancy loved the concept. “What excited me most about this program was that both sides