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

The next morning, the Secret Service fitted her and Ronnie with bulletproof coats to be worn whenever security was a concern. To Nancy, it was a reminder of a dark possibility that was always lurking at the back of her mind—one that would, all too soon, become a reality.

Washington had never seen a spectacle quite like the four-day celebration around the inauguration of Ronald Wilson Reagan. It was far more than just another quadrennial transfer of power. As biographer Edmund Morris wrote, the dawning of the Reagan era “realigned the American political landscape with a suddenness unmatched since Franklin Roosevelt’s accession to power in 1933.”

There were laser light shows, fireworks displays, and $500-a-plate dinners, along with a big Hollywood presence. Nearly twenty thousand people gathered in a suburban sports arena for the inauguration-eve gala, at which late-night television king Johnny Carson joked: “Well, this is the first administration to have a premiere.” Ronnie and Nancy, seated in velour-covered, thronelike wing chairs, looked on like a king with his queen. Frank Sinatra was the producer and director of the event, evoking memories of how he had put together a starry celebration the night before John F. Kennedy began his presidency in 1961. As he had at Ronnie’s second inauguration in Sacramento, Sinatra capped off his own performance with one of his standards, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” But this time, he had rewritten the lyrics:

I’ve known some Nancys,

No need to tell you

Therefore, I’m qualified to sell you

Someone with warmth, charm, and grace

Nancy with the Reagan face

You must have noticed

She’s always beaming

Semantically, that should be gleaming

That’s why they invented lace

For Nancy with that radiant face…

Nancy brushed aside a tear and blew Sinatra a kiss. Ronnie told the crowd, “You know, almost every day in the past few weeks, someone has asked Nancy and me, ‘Has it sunk in yet?’ Well, tonight there was a point in the program where I reached over and said to Nancy, ‘It sunk in.’ ”

Not everyone was so taken with the spectacle. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales pronounced the gala, which was broadcast on ABC, to be “a tacky combination of a Hollywood awards show, a Kiwanis club talent contest, and a telethon stocked with fewer greats than near-greats and even more pure mediocrities.” In the New York Daily News, Rex Reed called it “a grotesque burlesque show” and wrote that in Sinatra’s hands, “the inauguration has been turned into a show business abomination run by an entertainer whose alleged connections to the underworld are being investigated.”

The entire cost of the inauguration and events leading up to it, which were funded largely by private donations, reached a record $16 million. That was more than four times higher than the tab for the humble “People’s Inauguration” that Jimmy Carter had put on four years before, where there had been hundreds of free concerts, and no ticket cost more than $25. An eighteen-car train called the “Peanut Special” had carried the Carters and a contingent of hard-partying Georgians to the capital. Ronnie’s inauguration, in contrast, saw National Airport jammed with two hundred private jets. The press dubbed it “Lear Lock.” Limousines had to be brought in from as far away as New York to ferry revelers to the festivities.

For Carter’s inaugural balls in 1977, Rosalynn had donned a six-year-old, off-the-rack blue chiffon ball gown purchased when her husband became governor in Georgia. Nancy dazzled in a one-shouldered white beaded sheath donated by her favorite designer, James Galanos, whose creations went for upward of $10,000. It was accessorized with a diamond-necklace-and-earring set—given by or borrowed from jeweler Harry Winston, depending on who you talked to—with an estimated retail value of $480,000. Her handbag alone was reported to cost more than $1,600.

All of this opulence struck even some of Ronnie’s supporters as too much, given that the country’s unemployment rate was 7.5 percent and going up. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who had seen seven inaugurations, complained publicly: “When you’ve got to pay $2,000 for a limousine for four days, $7 to park, and $2.50 to check your coat, at a time when most people in the country just can’t hack it, that’s ostentatious.” Nancy Thompson, vice chairman of the Republican Women’s Task Force, an organization of GOP feminists, took aim at Nancy’s pricey wardrobe: “I think it’s outrageous. You don’t have to spend that kind of money on clothes to look wonderful, not when there are people out there who are being eaten up by inflation.”

But on Inauguration Day, what the country wanted more than anything else was a fresh start and a jolt of optimism. Jimmy Carter had spent a sleepless final night in the Oval Office working on the final deal for the release of the fifty-two Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days in Iran. Just minutes after Ronnie finished his inaugural address, the first of two 727s carrying them to freedom lifted off from Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport.

The swearing-in ceremony itself was conducted with impeccable stagecraft. Where Ronnie’s predecessors had taken the oath of office on the East Front of the Capitol, which overlooked a parking lot, Ronnie recited his on the opposite side of the building, which affords a view of the monument-studded National Mall and, beyond that, looks toward the rest of the country, spreading westward.

His left hand rested on Nelle’s crumbling, taped-together Bible. Ronnie’s late mother had written on the inside of the front cover: “A thought for today: You can be too big for God to use, but you cannot be too small.” Nancy held the book, which was open to 2 Chronicles 7:14, a passage in which the Lord offers an assurance to Solomon that “if my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” In the margin of that page was another squib of Nelle’s handwriting: “A