First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (36 page)

Before these attempts, Betty Ford used to stand on the Truman Balcony to wave goodbye to her husband, watching happily as he walked out on the South Lawn to board Marine One for a trip. After the first attempt on his life, she said, “I couldn’t watch him leave without thinking,
What’s going to happen this time?
The worry was always there.” She told their four children, “Your dad has a really important job and we can’t concern him with our fears about his security and his life.” Steve Ford says, “We all tried to put on smiley faces.” But it weighed heavily on Betty every day. As one White House aide said, “All first ladies live in fear.”

The Secret Service insisted that President Ford wear a bulletproof vest, and several were made to match some of his suits. Betty and her children never wanted to know which suits had accompanying vests—they did not want to think about the daily
threats that he was facing. President Ford had a wonderful sense of humor, and right after the attempted assassinations he walked into the room where his family was gathered and told his wife, “Betty, those women are lousy shots.” It was the perfect thing to say and everyone laughed and was smiling again, at least for that moment.

Gerald Behn was the head of the Secret Service White House detail from 1961 to 1965 and served during Kennedy’s assassination. He said that the only way to truly protect the president and his family would be in a dictatorship, where everyone could be kept off the streets when the first family leaves the White House. “But here in this country, well, the president wants to go out; he wants to see the people; the people want to see him.”

Even after the first families leave the White House they have threats hanging over them like an endless cloud. Before they left office the Johnsons went to visit the Eisenhowers and Mamie told Lady Bird how upset she was by all the tourists who came to the Eisenhowers’ Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, farm. Someone stole a sign, and even though their fence was wired someone—“apparently a psycho case,” Mamie said—had walked into their yard. “You’ll have all this, too,” Mamie told her—hardly a reassuring thought for someone who was leaving the relative comfort and safety of the White House in less than six months.

N
ANCY
R
EAGAN HAD
a hard exterior. Residence staffers said that when they were serving the Reagans it felt like serving the king and queen, not the President and the First Lady. When Nancy wanted something she spoke almost exclusively to Chief Usher Rex Scouten, who was the general manager of the residence and after whom she named her Cavalier King Charles spaniel. George
Hannie was one of a half-dozen butlers who worked in the family’s private living quarters, and he remembers how nerve-racking it could be serving Nancy Reagan. When she was eating alone, Nancy still wanted a cloth napkin instead of a paper napkin, which would have been fine for some of the other first ladies. “If you had a silver tray, I don’t care if you shined it yesterday or an hour before, when you go out there make sure you do it again for Nancy Reagan. She don’t miss nothing. Nothing,” Hannie said with a laugh. When he first started working on the second floor the other butlers told him, “George, that lady is hard. You won’t be able to break her.” He replied, “It won’t be no problem, give me a couple of months, we’ll take care of it.” He said he was able to earn her respect just by doing what she asked. “Next thing I know she comes through the White House second floor calling my name. ‘I told you, I got her,’” he joked with his colleagues.

Each first lady has had to deal with a tremendous amount of pressure in the White House, and in 1987 Nancy had a succession of events play out in public that would have brought most people to their knees. During a routine mammogram on October 5 a suspicious lesion was discovered, and on October 17 she had her left breast removed. Just ten days later, her beloved mother, Edith Luckett Davis, died. But she could not wallow in her own physical pain from the surgery and emotional pain from her mother’s death, because she had to organize a state dinner for the historic visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev less than two months later. The visit resulted in the signing of one of the most significant arms control agreements of the Cold War. Through it all Nancy remained composed.

President Reagan’s assistant Kathleen Osborne was the first to learn of Nancy’s mother’s death, and she had all calls to Nancy blocked until she could tell the President, who was in the middle
of a television interview in the Oval Office. “I was afraid somebody else would tell her, and knowing him the way I thought I did, I thought he’d want to tell her.” Osborne had the President’s doctor accompany him upstairs when he went to tell his wife the news. The next day Nancy flew to Arizona, where her mother had lived, with her assistant Jane Erkenbeck and a few aides to sort through her mother’s things. She had not yet recovered from her mastectomy. Osborne remembers being on the plane with her and asking what urn she wanted to buy and thinking,
My God, she just had a mastectomy ten days ago and here she is on an airplane, going to Arizona to bury her mother
.

Nancy had been through even worse times. At 2:25 p.m. on March 30, 1981, sixty-nine days into her husband’s presidency, John Hinckley Jr. fired a revolver six times at President Reagan after he delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton hotel (which has become so closely identified with the shooting that Washingtonians call it the “Hinckley Hilton”). Nancy learned about the shooting as she was looking at paint colors in the Solarium with Chief Usher Scouten and her interior decorator, Ted Graber. Painter Cletus Clark remembered the moment when the head of the First Lady’s Secret Service detail, George Opfer, walked in and motioned Nancy toward him. “The next thing you know, they left. I was still up there trying to mix some paint to match some fabric.” The First Lady was told that several people were wounded but that her husband had not been shot, and that there was no need for her to go to the hospital. “George,” she said, “I’m going to that hospital. If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk.” A White House limo picked her up at the South Portico and brought her to the hospital, where there was absolute mayhem with reporters and curious onlookers flooding the street. The First Lady threatened to jump out of the car and run to the
emergency entrance of the gray cinder-block building, but Opfer pleaded with her to wait. Finally, the traffic eased and she ran in. Mike Deaver, the President’s deputy chief of staff, met her at the door and said, “He’s been hit.”

“They told me he wasn’t hit,” she said, stunned.

“Well, he was. But they say it’s not serious.”

“Where? Where was he hit?” She demanded answers but Deaver didn’t have any. She wanted to see her husband but Deaver said that she couldn’t.

“They don’t know how it is with us. He has to know I’m here!” she begged. He told her that Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, had been shot in the head and that a Secret Service agent and a Washington, D.C., police officer had also been hit. Deaver led her into an office where she repeated over and over to herself,
They’re doing what they can. Stay out of their way. Let the doctors do their work.
Her surgeon stepfather had drilled this into her head. She tried to suppress flashes of herself driving down a Los Angeles highway when she heard that Kennedy had been shot less than twenty years earlier. She would think of Dallas again and again as her husband was in the hospital.

Nurses gave her updates, each more disturbing than the last. She was told twice that they could not find a pulse, and then that the President’s left lung had collapsed. Finally, she was allowed to see him and what she saw broke her heart: her husband’s new blue pinstripe suit lay in the corner of the room and bandages and blood surrounded his pale body. In an interview for a 2011 PBS documentary thirty years later, Nancy teared up recalling that day. “I’ve never seen anybody so white. . . . I almost lost him.” The President was breathing through an oxygen mask, but when he saw her he took off the mask, his lips caked in dried blood, and whispered, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

When the Reagans’ son Ron got to George Washington University Hospital and saw his mother, this political powerhouse, he immediately thought that she seemed so small, and so alone. There were so many advisers, doctors, and police officers wandering around, but she was by herself in those frightening hours following the shooting. “In a moment like that, as the wife of a husband whose life is hanging in the balance, you are very alone,” he said. He remembers looking at his father after his mother’s mastectomy and thinking the same thing. “You’re not a public figure at that point, you’re not the President or the First Lady, you’re a spouse.” Nancy told Ron how frightened she was. “I know, Mom, but hold on.” She sat in the waiting room after she escorted her husband in for surgery, and watched as incorrect reports flashed across the TV screen, including a bulletin that Press Secretary Brady had died. But watching television, and even seeing headlines she knew were untrue, provided her some sense of comfort and normalcy. She went to the hospital’s chapel, where she met Brady’s wife, Sarah, for the first time. “They’re strong men,” Sarah said. “They’ll get through this.” The two women, whose husbands were so close to death, held hands and prayed together.

When the Reagans’ daughter Patti found her mother in bed the next morning, she was picking at her breakfast and clearly hadn’t slept much. Nancy had wanted to stay overnight at the hospital, but her son convinced her not to—it would send the wrong message and would alert the public to just how dire the situation had actually been. Patti kissed her mother on the cheek and sat on the edge of the bed. “He almost died—several times,” Nancy said, her voice raspy. “They gave him so much blood. An inch from his heart—that’s how close the bullet was. And then when they put the tube down his throat—so scared—he was so scared.” But
it was Nancy who was the most afraid; she was so deeply in love with this man, she couldn’t imagine life without him. When she got back to the White House she went into his closet and got one of his shirts to sleep with. “I just needed to have something of his next to me,” she told her daughter, with whom she had fought so fiercely but who now shared her fear and pain. “The bed seemed so empty.”

Nancy visited the President at the hospital every day. She brought pictures made by schoolchildren and hung them up on the walls to try to cheer him up. The room was bleak, and even the curtains were nailed shut because of an increasing number of threats on the President’s life.

At sixty-nine, Reagan was the oldest man ever to be sworn in as president, and Nancy had always worried about his health, but after the assassination attempt her concerns became all-consuming and she became increasingly involved in the level of protection surrounding her husband. In a CBS interview she told Mike Wallace how worried she was every time he went out in public. “I don’t think my heart started again until he came back.” She was paralyzed by her fear and referred to the year after the assassination attempt as “the lost year.” She became so overprotective that she insisted that her husband come home in the afternoons to the residence and take a nap. If she found him at his desk working, she would tell him, “Horizontal. I want you horizontal.” (It became an inside joke around the West Wing, with presidential aides mimicking the First Lady: “
I want you horizontal
.”) She even brought up Lyndon Johnson to make her point because she knew that he took afternoon naps when he was president.

Nancy began consulting astrologist Joan Quigley as a way of coping, and it helped. She used Quigley’s advice to plan her husband’s schedule, including the safest times for Air Force One
to take off and land. She directed Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver to adjust the President’s schedule according to advice from Quigley. She never referred to Quigley by name and called her “my friend.” Quigley’s recommendations became so important that there was a color-coded calendar (green for good days, red for bad days, yellow for “iffy” days) that the staff could refer to for the best times for the President to travel. (During Barack Obama’s first press conference after his election, he was asked if he sought advice from former presidents and said, “I’ve spoken to all of them that are living. . . . I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances.” Obama called Nancy later that day to apologize for his off-the-cuff remark, and she teased him and referred to Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt: “You’ve gotten me mixed up with Hillary.”)

President Reagan’s brush with death seems to have affected his wife far more than it affected him. Richard Allen was Reagan’s national security adviser at the time and he had to give Reagan his first national security briefing after the shooting. Allen told his five-year-old daughter, Kimberly, that he would be briefing the President on his first day back in the White House. “Is that right?” she asked. She went off to kindergarten and when she came back she had handmade “get well” cards from everyone in her class. Allen stuck them in his briefing folder, thinking that the President might want to see a couple of them.