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

Florida, Ronnie made the claim that marijuana was a greater cancer and heart disease hazard than tobacco. When a journalist noted that people didn’t smoke as much of it, Nancy nudged her husband and murmured, “You wouldn’t know.” After which he dutifully piped up: “I wouldn’t know.” The Associated Press noted: “Rosalynn Carter would never put words in her husband’s mouth in public.”

Nancy tried to reboot perceptions of her with the publication of Nancy, a syrupy-sweet memoir written with coauthor Bill Libby. This was something no candidate’s wife had ever done before, and it backfired. Reviews were withering. “Perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ lives in California,” began one in the Los Angeles Times. The book included a false birth date (Nancy’s actual one would be unearthed by the Washington Post’s Maxine Cheshire shortly after the election), did not name her husband’s first wife, and made only passing reference to her children. In Nancy, she pronounced the movies of the day “trash” and suggested that censorship was a good thing. Nancy also decried “premarital or casual sex, live-in relationships, early marriage and easy divorce, abortions and permissive child rearing.” San Francisco Examiner columnist Herb Caen noted: “The type is large, for the benefit of the senior citizens who will read it with approving clucks and nods.”

Nancy made an effort to court the journalists who traveled with the campaign. Every time the Boeing 727 dubbed LeaderShip ’80 took off, the PA system played country singer Willie Nelson’s current hit “On the Road Again,” and Nancy playfully “bowled” oranges down the aisle past the rows in the back where the campaign reporters were sitting. She also passed out chocolates on each leg of every trip. But even those small gestures fit into a story line that had already been set. “When one of the reporters wrote a column saying that unless you ate your candy, you wouldn’t get an interview with Ronnie, I was so hurt and embarrassed that I never wanted to go down that aisle again,” Nancy recalled later. “But with Stu Spencer’s encouragement, I did—with a sign around my neck that said: Take One or Else!”

Noteworthy among the stories written about Nancy was a profile by the Washington Post’s legendary Sally Quinn: “She can sit perfectly still, her ankles neatly crossed, her hands resting calmly in her lap, her chin uplifted, her eyes glistening, her lips smiling… for what seems like hours… and hang raptly on his every word no matter what he is saying, no matter how many times she has heard it before in their twenty-eight-year marriage. She never seems to get an itch, her lips never stick to her teeth, she hardly blinks. Don’t her legs ever go to sleep? Haven’t they ever had a terrible fight just before the speech? Isn’t she ever bored hearing the whole thing over and over and over?”

Quinn quoted an unnamed “very close former Reagan staffer” as saying that the real reason Ronnie was running was because “Nancy wants to be queen.” Her story cautioned: “Do not underestimate Nancy. She knows what she wants. She has made up her mind where she was going to go, and she would get Ronnie to take her. He is her vehicle.”

And then there was this supposedly feminist take from New York magazine’s Julie Baumgold, which recycled some of the hoariest of sexist tropes: “It’s an old secret that if a woman will speak low and smile, defer and not compete, if she can believe that her husband’s triumphs are hers, achieve through his achievements, then she will have power over him. She does not provoke; she flatters and always suppresses the little touch of the bitch inside.”

Carol McCain said Nancy had grown to expect harsh coverage, but she never got used to it. Nor could she figure out what she was doing wrong. “She’s very complicated, and she didn’t want to make it easy for people to understand her,” McCain said. Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the newspaper that published Quinn’s blistering critique, once pointed out to Nancy that many of the most scorching articles about her had been written by younger women who were “caught up” in the feminist movement. “They just couldn’t identify with you,” Graham told Nancy. “You represented everything they were rebelling against.”

But in front of audiences of her husband’s conservative supporters, Nancy’s traditionalist image—which disguised her actual power—was an asset. Carol McCain recalled one union hall in New Jersey where “those men, their tongues were hanging out. They were drooling over this petite woman, soft-spoken, infectious laugh, terribly attractive. They just loved her. Of course she’s going to respond to that, so she just poured it on, and they just ate it up.”

As the campaign headed into its final weeks, Ronnie’s momentum seemed to stall, and his team faced what would be its last big decision: Should he debate Carter? The president had refused to attend a September 21 debate in Baltimore because John B. Anderson, who after falling short in the Republican primary was running as an independent, had also been invited. At that point, Anderson was polling just above 15 percent, which was the threshold set by the League of Women Voters, the organization that sponsored the debate. With Carter boycotting, Ronnie debated Anderson alone and put in a strong enough performance that the third-party contender’s poll numbers began to drop. (In the end, Anderson won 7 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes.)

A one-on-one Carter-Reagan matchup was a far different proposition. Nancy was among those who had the deepest reservations about a high-risk move so close to the election, but Ronnie was convinced he could best the incumbent. Handling the negotiations with the Carter campaign was a newcomer to the Reagan team, James A. Baker III, a Texas lawyer who was George H. W. Bush’s closest friend and adviser. In his talks with the Carter campaign and the League of Women Voters, Baker pressed to have the