Kati Marton (44 page)

THE PRESIDENCY TIGHTENED
the Reagans’ bond. Living and working in the same house enabled Nancy to exercise unprecedented control over Ronnie’s staff and schedule. Her vehemence was a counterweight to his nonchalance. While with others Nancy could be brutally direct, with Ronnie she had to be indirect, subtle. “Ronnie can’t be pushed,” she said. “He can be coaxed.” She ordered others to do her bidding, even prepping her guests before dinner to raise certain delicate issues that she knew her husband was not eager to confront. She would feed guests their lines, and at a given moment during what seemed to be a casual gathering, she would cue them. “Ronnie, so and so has something he wants to raise with you ….” When the news was bad, she absorbed it and acted on it, while he deflected it. “Nancy will be livid,” Ronnie would say when presented with a negative article.

At various times she identified deputy secretary of state/then national security adviser William Clark, Attorney General Ed Meese, CIA director William Casey, Secretary of State Al Haig and—most famously—chief of staff Don Regan as not serving Ronnie’s interest, being guilty of too much ideology or demonstrating insufficient loyalty. Nancy succeeded in getting rid of them all, one way or another. But she would never say to her husband, Fire that man. Instead, she would plant the seed and nourish it to life. Once she made up her mind, she was relentless, while the president barely seemed to notice the carnage. To Reagan, a new chief of staff or a new national security adviser seemed of no greater moment than a new producer. It was the leading man who filled the theater.

Whatever tension there was in the Reagan White House came not from the genial host of the nation but from his wife. “She can smell fear on you,” Spencer once said to political consultant Ed Rollins. Presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan ducked behind a pillar when she heard the tap-tap of the first lady’s high heels around the corner. Nancy never
attended Cabinet meetings and rarely showed up in the West Wing. Her weapon of choice in asserting her influence and in staying on top of all aspects of life in the White House was the telephone. “If I did not hear from her for twenty-four hours,” deputy chief of staff Mike Deaver noted, “I would call her and ask, ‘Nancy, do we have a problem?’” Gahl Burt recalled, “Mrs. Reagan liked to joke that she will be buried with a telephone. And I knew when there was a problem to call her and tell her first because I knew she would find out anyway, one way or the other. It was fatal if you didn’t keep Nancy in the loop. Because she wanted to know
everything.
” Burt recalled the frustration of dealing with violinist Isaac Stern, who was to perform at a state dinner. “Suddenly Stern wanted to invite twenty-two people of his choosing. And he wanted another friend to give a lecture on Mozart. You would not think that the first lady would want to get involved with that level of detail. But I knew Nancy would find out about it, so I kept her informed of all his demands.”

Even the normally composed Jim Baker, when chief of staff, broke out in a sweat at the thought of the first lady’s ire. Baker had come into the Reagan administration as a Bush loyalist, not an original Reaganite. But the canny Texan soon discerned that the way to become an insider was to connect with the first lady. Reporter Lesley Stahl described sitting in Baker’s office late one afternoon. Suddenly the president’s helicopter hovered into view over the South Lawn. “Oh, my God,” Baker exclaimed, looking at his watch and springing to his feet. “I think I may have missed the helicopter. The president is leaving for Camp David any minute. Maybe I can still make it.” With that, Baker sprinted toward the helipad. Returning minutes later, breathless, he announced, “I made it!” When the reporter asked what was so urgent, Baker replied, “I didn’t have anything special to tell
them.
I just wanted them to see me standing there as they left for the weekend.” Later, hearing the story, a White House official wryly noted, “It wasn’t Reagan Jim was afraid of. It was Nancy. Reagan wouldn’t have noticed whether Jim was there or not.”

The White House was a perfect theater to display Ronald Reagan’s talents. It was a highly controlled environment for a man who thrived in
controlled situations. A disciplined man of remarkably low intellectual curiosity, he seldom strayed from the schedule his staff prepared for him. His aides knew how to get his attention first thing in the morning. Vice President Bush kept a file of jokes, replenished by his sons, to start the president’s day. “Bush and I would get into the White House at 6:15 every morning,” Deaver remembered, “and we’d call each other and trade two or three stories that we’d heard the day before and decide which one was the best one to tell Reagan at quarter to nine when we’d see him. Then it would start. We’d tell the president a story and then the president would tell a couple. He loved stories. That was Hollywood. He and his old friends Pat O’Brien or Fredric March would sit around telling Irish or Jewish stories on and on.”

In coordination with Nancy, Deaver, Baker and Meese formed the troika that ran the Reagan White House during the first term. “Nancy and I were a team,” Deaver recalled, “united by our shared belief that her husband needed to be protected.” Deaver’s day began with a call to Nancy. What’s his mood? he would ask. The Reagans’ always close partnership was tightened by the president’s slipping memory, impaired hearing and the total invasive scrutiny of the post-Watergate White House media. With the Reagans’ accurate sense for what played in the heartland, they even turned his dependency on his wife into an asset, a great American love story played out on the world’s biggest stage. No other presidential couple was ever seen kissing, holding hands, dancing and romancing with as much ardor as this pair of septuagenarians.

The country was the better for the Reagans’ closeness, according to Nancy. “It would be far better and more realistic,” Nancy argued in her memoir,
My Turn,
“if the president’s men included the first lady as part of their team. After all, nobody knows the president better than his wife. The president has a host of advisers to give him counsel on foreign affairs, the economy, politics and everything else. But not one of these people is there to look after him as an individual with human needs, a man of flesh and blood who must deal with the pressures of holding the most powerful position on earth.”

Of course Nancy did much more than take care of her husband’s “human needs.” Those closest to Reagan were grateful for Nancy’s vigilant
involvement. “Ronald Reagan was the most trusting human being I’ve ever known,” Deaver asserted. “If you were walking down the street and a guy came up and started talking to him, Reagan would believe him. Now, he wouldn’t believe a Russian commissar or maybe a Democratic chairman of a congressional committee. But everybody else he trusted. Nancy was much more cynical and also had better antennae. Particularly about the moment. Reagan always thought in terms of years, whereas Nancy would think about polls that were published in the
Washington Post
today.”

Two months into his presidency, on March 30, 1981, America witnessed Reagan’s familiar, lopsided smile turn to bewilderment, and then twist into pain, as he was shot. John Hinckley, Jr.’s, bullet missed Reagan’s heart by one inch and permanently shattered his wife’s always fragile emotional balance. Reagan now revealed his bravest, most appealing side. His now famous quips, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” and “On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” were old Hollywood chestnuts whose very corniness in the face of crisis calmed the country. He said God had spared him for a special purpose; he would make the most of his time. During his first hospital meeting with his national security team, still in his pajamas and robe, he pulled out a yellow pad and said, “You know, I wrote this four-page, handwritten letter to Brezhnev. ‘Do you remember, I met you at Nixon’s house in California and we talked about peace? Well, I have just been shot and I’m thinking about our grandchildren ….’”

The assassination attempt exposed something elemental in Nancy, too. All of her insecurities found a rational focus now. After the gunshots, no one could dismiss her paranoia as excessive. Her seventy-year-old husband had suffered a near fatal attack, leaving physical and mental scars. “Nancy called me ten days after the president was shot,” Deaver remembered, “and she said, ‘Joan [Quigley, the astrologer] told me that she had wished that I had called so she could have told me that was going to be a bad day.’ What do you mean? I asked. She said, ‘Well, she knows bad days and good days and days not to be in public and that sort of thing. Not to be around crowds. I want you to send me Ronnie’s block schedule for three months. I want Joan to take a look at it. To give us the bad days.’ It made sense to me, if that’s what she wanted to do. If it
would help her get through, it was easy. I’d send Nancy his schedule, and she’d call me and say, ‘April 9 we ought not to do anything in public.’ My personal reaction was that I would do anything to help her peace of mind. I gotta tell you something, there were four of us who walked out of the [Hilton] door, and I was the only one who didn’t get shot. That has an effect on you. I was indelibly altered from having Mr. Hinckley put his .22 on my shoulder and shoot those people.”

Reports of Reagan’s memory lapses and verbal slips started early in his presidency. Princeton historian Arthur Link related having dinner at the White House in 1983 when conversation turned to the TV miniseries
Winds of War.
“What would the world be like,” the president mused out loud, “if the Second World War had actually taken place?” There was a notable deterioration in both Reagan’s memory and his hearing. “How are you, Mr. Mayor,” the president greeted his own housing secretary at a reception for big-city mayors. Three months later, Reagan met for the first time with the leaders of the industrial nations in Ottawa. Afterward, Reagan “could not remember the substance of any subject that had been discussed, apart from Mitterand’s anticommunism,” according to writer Lou Cannon. Television correspondent Barrie Dunsmore attended a small Christmas party in the upstairs residence later that year. “The contrast between the first lady and the president was so stark,” said Dunsmore. “Nancy was conscious of everything that was going on. The president was charming, but he seemed out of touch, in his own little world. He didn’t seem to know who Sam Donaldson was. Nancy was clearly in charge and the president was pretty much out of it.”

Nancy moved closer, doubled her vigilance. She had to protect him not only from any further violence but from close public scrutiny. She had to control his movements, set his schedule, watch him as she had never done before. She had always played a big part in picking the right people to serve him, but now she assumed a behind-the-scenes role in pushing the policies that would assure his legacy.

At the same time, Nancy was fighting her own battles. Part of the Washington media’s unwritten code is not to attack both presidential partners with equal force simultaneously. In the first few years of the Reagan presidency, Nancy took most of the hits. It seemed as if everything she did aroused the media’s ire. Taking a page out of Jacqueline
Kennedy’s book, she tried to restore Camelot’s glitter to the White House. But the eighties, a time of unemployment and recession, were not the sixties, and Nancy was not Jackie. When Nancy raised $700,000 in private donations to restore the private quarters and another $200,000 for new china, the public was offended, not beguiled. Her expensive designer frocks and perfect lacquered hairdos were mocked, not imitated. Her husband was shocked by the vehemence of the criticism. “Why wasn’t the same thing said about another first lady some years ago,” a bewildered Reagan asked a reporter, “who set out to contribute to the beauty of the White House and there was nothing but praise?”

At a time when 70 percent of twenty-five- to forty-four-year-old women were in the workforce, Nancy seemed out of step, an embarrassment to women struggling to reach still uncharted male territory. Her assertively traditional marriage and her adoring gaze made many women squirm. The business suit, not the couture gown, was the preferred image for women of the eighties. The beaming face of astronaut Sally Ride was tacked to thousands of dormitory doors. Nancy, and not her husband, became the symbol of compassion-free conservatism. She was deemed too brittle, too artificial, too cold and much too much the material woman of the new gilded age. Polls showed that 68 percent of the people felt the first lady was too concerned with style and fashion, at the expense of other concerns. Her husband did his best to defend her as a warm and caring soul, without whom his life was unimaginable. “How do you describe someone that makes your life like coming into a warm room?” he asked. The contrast between her Marie Antoinette hauteur and his down-to-earth innocence seemed to burnish his image while damaging hers.

The Reagans during a barbecue for members of Congress on the South Lawn of the White House, September 30, 1982.

By the second year of the Reagan presidency, Deaver, the public relations genius of the administration, decided it was time for a Nancy makeover. Almost overnight, a new Nancy—funny, self-deprecating and, best of all, shabby—sprang to life. The venue for the metamorphosis was carefully chosen: that sacred spring ritual of the Washington media and political establishment, the Gridiron Dinner. Nancy astonished and disarmed the luminaries with a surprise appearance as a bag lady and her deliberately off-key rendition of “Secondhand Rose.” “I wore white pantaloons, with blue butterflies, yellow rubber rain boots, a blue blouse with white dots, and over that a really ugly sleeveless red cotton print house dress,” she wrote later with obvious relish. “Over that I wore a blue print skirt pinned up on the side with a sequined butterfly, a long strand of fake pearls, a mangy boa, and a red straw hat with feathers and flowers. I was gorgeous!” Never mind that Nancy would rather be incarcerated than ever appear in such a costume in real life; she had surprised and entertained the media. She was game. Suddenly, they loved her.