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

At a postinaugural lunch in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, the new first lady sat with larger-than-life House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. Edie was on O’Neill’s other side. Nancy later wrote: “My strongest memory of that lunch is of watching Mother and Tip swapping stories as if they had been friends all their lives.”

Before heading out that evening to the inaugural balls—Ronnie and Nancy went to ten of them over four hours—the extended Reagan family posed for an official portrait in the Red Room. Loyal and Edie are missing from the photo, but everyone else related by blood and marriage is there: Nancy’s stepbrother, Dick, and his wife, Patricia, with their children, Geoffrey and Anne. Maureen and her fiancé, Dennis Revell, who would soon become her third husband. Michael, standing behind his wife, Colleen, and holding his two-year-old son, Cameron, Ronnie’s only grandchild to date. The president’s brother, Neil, and his wife, Bess. Patti, managing a smile. Ron with Doria. As Edmund Morris wrote of the family tableau: “It glows with a common desire to restore harmony.”

In the photo, the relatives are crowded on and behind two sofas, forming a backdrop that is slightly removed from Ronnie and Nancy. The couple appears both central to and apart from the rest of them. Nancy is seated on a chair in front, radiant in her beautiful gown and upswept hair. Ronnie hovers behind her, splendid in white tie. His hands rest on the back of her chair; his fingers seem drawn toward her tiny, bare shoulders.

Ronnie’s first few days in office were a blur of daily Cabinet meetings, national security briefings, and sessions with congressional leaders eager to hash out details of his economic plan. Tuesday, January 27, saw a joyous ceremony on the White House lawn to welcome home the hostages. That same day, Ronnie set aside some time to pen a private letter to Jane Wyman. Ronnie’s ex-wife, who was in the process of moving, had come across his old varsity letter from Eureka College and had sent it to him. Ronnie did not want his thank-you note to go through the normal White House mail system, where it surely would have been seen and generated gossip. He had someone drop this letter in an ordinary postbox, with a fifteen-cent stamp attached. It said:

Dear Jane

Thank you very much for

my letter “E”. Of course a gold

football only goes with winning

a championship—but then I

guess maybe this job constitutes

something of a winning—at best

it was as hard to do. Already

I’ve found though there are

days when you wonder if you won.

All in all though it’s good to

be here and to think maybe I

can do something about the things

that are wrong.

Thanks again & thanks for

your good wishes & prayers.

Sincerely,

Ron

The new president had ample reason to be confident in what he could achieve. No one could read anything but a mandate for change in the fact that he had won forty-four states against a sitting president. And while the House of Representatives was still in Democratic hands, his victory across the map had swept in a dozen new Republican senators, marking the first time since 1955 that the party controlled either chamber in Congress.

But while Ronnie was riding high, his wife and her wealthy friends were becoming an increasing source of concern for the president’s team. For Ronnie’s seventieth birthday on February 6, Nancy threw a lavish celebration—supposedly a surprise, though advance word got out to the press—in the East Room. The Annenbergs, Wilsons, Jorgensens, and Deutsches footed the bill for the black-tie party, where a hundred guests were served lobster, roulade of veal farcie, and a dozen birthday cakes each topped with a rearing white horse. Everyone danced between courses. One notable image of the evening was a photo of Ronnie, with a look of annoyance on his face, cutting in to take Nancy from the arms of Sinatra. The celebration continued the next night over an eight-course meal that their friends Charles and Mary Jane Wick put on at the Watergate Hotel’s pricey Jean-Louis Restaurant. Pretty much everyone from their California circle had come in to be there. Nancy stood at Ronnie’s side as he toasted them: “If it weren’t for the efforts of this group, I’d be making this speech before the Chamber of Commerce.”

Lyn Nofziger, the Sacramento veteran who was running political affairs for the White House, recognized the warning signs. Four days before the birthday fete for Ronnie, Nofziger sent a memo to Deaver, with a copy to the first lady’s chief of staff, Peter McCoy. “It is generally agreed that Nancy, as First Lady, is going to be a target for some of the women who write about society and social figures in Washington, DC,” Nofziger wrote. “It seems to me that one way to minimize this is to begin to get her actively engaged in some charity-type activities. Thoughts include new activity in the Foster Grandparents organization, moving into the area of alcohol and drug abuse of [sic] whatever. But I do think that the quicker she is seen as a concerned and caring First Lady, the quicker we’ll be able to minimize the attacks on her that everybody is positive are coming.”

Nofziger was right. Nancy should have been better prepared for the onslaught. At a time when her husband’s critics were too intimidated by his popularity among ordinary Americans to attack him personally, she was a ripe proxy, and the first lady spent her first year giving them plenty to work with. What should have been her season of triumph was turning into an almost-daily ordeal of brutal headlines and sniping commentary. In her personal papers is a typewritten letter from her father, sent shortly after the inauguration. “Don’t let the press upset you, dear,” Loyal wrote. “You know what you do right and correctly, and that’s what counts and is important.”

Near the end of her husband’s presidency, Nancy reflected upon her difficult initiation. She acknowledged that she had brought