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

added that she herself owned a “tiny little gun” that Ronnie had given her for protection at home while he was traveling. Nancy also claimed—was she in denial or simply lying?—that her children had not used marijuana or other illegal substances “that I know of.” She insisted that Ron and Patti had never been part of the “drug culture.” Practically simultaneously, in another interview with the same news organization, Patti confessed that not only had she tried marijuana but also “I don’t know anyone who hasn’t smoked dope. I don’t anymore. I can’t afford to be that spacey anymore.

“I don’t think pot is such a terrible drug,” Patti added. “It just makes you forget things—like your name.”

Amid all this came reports that Nancy had been rude and presumptuous toward Rosalynn Carter during the traditional tour of the White House that outgoing first ladies offer their successors. The press had already christened Rosalynn the “Steel Magnolia” and Nancy the “Iron Butterfly.” According to sources on her side, Rosalynn bristled at Nancy’s desire to poke into closets and bedrooms that she had wanted to remain shut because they were messy. Nancy, meanwhile, found Rosalynn’s manner to be as chilly as the room temperature in a White House where all the thermostats had been set to sixty-five degrees as a conservation measure during the energy crisis.

Nor was Nancy impressed by the executive mansion itself. It struck her as overdue for renovation. “My overall feeling was of surprise that the residence looked so dreary and uninviting. It just didn’t look the way the president’s house should look,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a place we’d be proud to bring people—our personal friends or our country’s friends. When my son, Ron, arrived for the inauguration, he said, ‘Mom, this place is a mess. It looks low rent.’ ”

Nancy would deny a subsequent scoop by UPI’s Thomas claiming that she had actually proposed that the Carters move out early so that her decorator could get a head start fixing up the place. However, Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, Paul Costello, told me that he overheard the conversation in which Nancy made the insensitive suggestion to Rex Scouten, the White House’s famously discreet chief usher. “Mrs. Reagan, we can’t do it,” Scouten told her over the phone, according to Costello’s version of events.

Blame runs downhill in Washington. In this case, it landed on Nancy’s newly hired press secretary, Robin Orr, the former society editor of the Oakland Tribune. The day after Thomas broke the story that Nancy had tried to nudge the First Family into a premature departure from the White House, the Reagan transition office announced that Orr would be returning to California to be closer to her children and to take an unspecified “high-level” position with the International Communications Agency in San Francisco. Her tenure lasted all of twenty-eight days, not even long enough to make it to the inauguration. She was replaced a month later by Sheila Patton, a vice president with the high-powered public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Patton soon married and changed her name to Sheila Tate. (For clarity, I will refer to her from here on by her married name.) Tate was a better fit for the job, savvier and more attuned to Washington ways. Letitia Baldrige, who had been Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, also came in to help Nancy assemble a staff.

But Nancy continued to create a new and embarrassing story line at every turn. The Washington Post reported she had decreed that whoever got hired to be the president’s spokesman should be “reasonably” good-looking. So, when Ronnie announced his selection of James Brady as his press secretary on January 6, a reporter teasingly asked the balding, bearlike Brady whether his looks had passed muster with the first lady-to-be. Ronnie retorted: “That question leads to a story that has been written concerning Nancy which was a total invention out of whole cloth, and there have been several more of those, and I am getting to be an irate husband at some of the things that I am reading, none of which are true.” The president elect then added with a smile that Nancy thought Brady was “absolutely handsome.”

More significant was her perceived influence on some of Ronnie’s other picks for key posts. According to notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn, she nixed William Simon, whom conservatives wanted for Treasury secretary. When Simon met with Ronnie at the ranch during the transition to discuss the job, he laid down a list of demands, including that he be allowed to pick his own staff and make decisions without clearing them with the White House.

“Mrs. Reagan was sitting there reading a magazine while Bill Simon was listing his requirements,” Cohn recounted. “Sure she was—you can imagine how she was reading that magazine. She was drinking it all in, was what she was doing. And let me tell you, Bill Simon walked out of the president’s life that day. I mean, he couldn’t get a phone call through after that. Nancy put her foot down. She pointed out to the president that you don’t hire people who make demands before they have the job.”

Six days before the inauguration, Nancy and Ronnie left their home in Pacific Palisades for the last time. Neighbors gathered at the bottom of their driveway, and well-wishers lined the streets all the way to Sunset Boulevard. When their motorcade arrived at the airport, Nancy got her first glimpse of Air Force One. The reality of what was happening hit her once again when she saw the words “United States of America” emblazoned on its blue-and-white fuselage. A pilot welcomed them aboard, and stewards gave them a tour. Nancy was delighted to learn that it had a private two-room suite for the first couple, and that its airborne kitchen could cook up just about any food she liked. She was less impressed with the official guest quarters that awaited them on their arrival in Washington. “Blair House really needs fixing up,” she wrote