Kati Marton (46 page)

Now, as questions about her husband’s competence and integrity dominated the headlines, Nancy reasserted herself. She once again became a constant but invisible presence in the West Wing. Regan was helpless to stop her. “By now,” Regan wrote later, “in the middle of January [1986] the First Lady’s telephoning was so frequent that I was spending two or three times as much time talking to her as to the President.” Nor was Regan as tolerant of the first lady’s dependence on the occult as Deaver. “Apparently Deaver had ceased to think that there was anything remarkable about this long-established floating seance,” Regan wrote. “But the president’s schedule is the single most potent tool in the White House, because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he is going to do it. By humoring Mrs. Reagan we gave her this tool—or more accurately gave it to an unknown woman in San Francisco who believed that the zodiac controls events and human behavior and that she could read the secrets of the future in the movements of the planets.” Though the president’s job approval ratings were steadily dropping, Nancy, acting on her astrologer’s advice, still prevented Regan from scheduling a presidential news conference to explain the president’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Just as Reagan denied other unappealing truths, he now denied his administration’s sale of arms for hostages. We were merely making overtures to Iranian moderates, he explained, when Nancy finally permitted him to face the country on March 19, 1987. “We weren’t dealing with the kidnappers, and it was not ransom.” Shultz felt the president truly believed he had not traded arms for hostages. “I had to keep trying to make him realize that indeed we had. The president had completely buffaloed himself about this matter.” For a long time, Reagan refused to believe the mounting evidence against the marine who nearly brought down his presidency. “I kind of hope,” Reagan said to friends, “that maybe North isn’t as bad as some of the media people have suggested. Maybe he really is an American hero.”

He needed desperately to hold on to his positive view of the world. He now made himself believe that he hadn’t gone behind Congress’s
back, hadn’t broken the law of the land. “Sometimes,” Shultz noted dryly, “President Reagan simply did not seem to care that much about facts and details.”

For the first time, the country did not believe him. How could any president be so detached from his own administration that he would be oblivious to the movement of arms and men around the globe, all done in his name? When his reviews were consistently bad, Reagan fell into a despondent state. He was, after all, first and foremost a performer. His oxygen was public approval. Without it he seemed lost and bewildered. “It was the first time I’d seen him with the wind completely out of his sails,” his son Ron recalled. At some level surely he realized Iran-Contra was a direct result of his inattention to the office he had sworn to uphold. The instincts that had carried him so far in life had betrayed him.

Slowly and, as always, with Nancy’s help, he shook off his depression and inertia. Only she could prevail upon him to go before the country and admit he had made a mistake. It was a bitter pill for a man so unaccustomed to dealing with hard facts. He still could not face the truth head-on. “It was a mistake,” he finally told the nation, which more or less forgave him. With that semi-admission and the gradual regaining of public approval that followed, Reagan partly restored his emotional balance. But, at seventy-eight, he was not the same vigorous man who first bounded into the White House. The assassination attempt, cancer, prostate surgery, diminished hearing and memory—probably early signs of Alzheimer’s disease—compounded the emotional shock of Iran-Contra. He was even more the ceremonial president, less and less attentive to details, ticking off items on staff-prepared memoranda without comment. But he still had the old trouper’s ability to perform for the lights and cameras.

REGAN HAD THOUGHT
he and Reagan had a genuine bond: two men of similar working-class Irish backgrounds who loved to swap bawdy stories. But Reagan could not find a moment or a word for a man who had worked for him for six years, and whose career was now ending. It was not from the boss but from CNN that Regan learned that the president
was replacing him with Howard Baker. The two never saw each other again.

Deaver went much further back with Reagan, far enough so that on rare occasions he slipped and called him Ron. Yet during one Christmas dinner following Deaver’s departure from the White House, when he suggested possible candidates for the Medal of Freedom, the president cut him off. “Mike, I’ve got competent people at the White House who make those decisions.” Deaver, the president thus made clear, was no longer serving him. His opinions were no longer of great consequence.

In fact, Reagan had no real friends except Nancy. He preferred strangers or fans. For fifty-two years Reagan corresponded with Lorraine Wagner, from his fan club days. She saved 276 of his letters, some of them five or six handwritten pages long, on subjects that ranged from his first wife to Iran-Contra. None of Reagan’s four children can claim such communication. “We missed him while he was here,” his son Ron said when Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “We’re not missing something that we ever had.”

Nancy never cared passionately about anything besides Ronnie and their marriage. When she left the White House, she pretty much said no to the war on drugs that had been her cause as first lady. She had a chance to stay involved, to have a drug rehabilitation center named after her in Los Angeles. “I think she felt for the kids,” Phoenix House chairman Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal recalled. “Her tears were not artificial, her heart went out to people who are vulnerable. But those of us who were trying to get her to go to the next level, becoming a vigorous, informed public spokesperson, were disappointed in the end. Phoenix House lost $3-$5 million when Mrs. Reagan abandoned the L.A. project. But that’s small potatoes compared to the legacy she would have left had she sustained this work. But that did not seem to be a strong enough motivation for her.”

Her lifework was Ronnie. His legacy was the one she cared about. The depth of her commitment to him and to his presidency was made clear when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 1987. Forgoing the vastly less deforming option of a lumpectomy, Nancy opted for a radical mastectomy because, in her husband’s words, “She realized she
wouldn’t be able to perform her duties as first lady if she had to undergo the radiation that would be required after a lumpectomy ….”

Presidential couples are masters at presenting a certain image of themselves. Sometimes it is only later, when they are no longer so relentlessly scrutinized or so wary, that they reveal flashes of the real dynamic between them. On November 17, 1989, the Reagans were interviewed by Barbara Walters. “You are remote,” Walters said to the former president. “And even [Nancy] finds it hard to get through.” His wife answered for him: “I think … the way we were brought up … what our background was … that is what makes us the way we [are]. Ronnie’s father was an alcoholic. They moved from town to town to town to town. He never had a chance to put down any roots anywhere and establish friends ….”

“So do you get a shell?” Walters tried again, but again Nancy answered for her husband. “He doesn’t know that. But he is so gregarious and so loves people and they love him. But there’s a certain point … when it comes down on me.” Walters asked Reagan if he was aware of that. “Well, no, I’m not. I feel very much for people …” Walters interrupted. “I mean
individual
people … I’m talking about
one
and he doesn’t understand …” she said, turning to Nancy. “No,” Nancy agreed, “he doesn’t. He doesn’t understand because he doesn’t feel it and it’s something buried way, way, back ….” Then, as though addressing a child, she said soothingly to her husband, “We’ll have a long conversation, honey, tonight.”

Walters then broached another sensitive topic: how Nancy’s views on abortion differed from her husband’s. “There’s nobody,” Nancy answered, “that you’re going to agree with 100 percent all the time.” Again her husband tried vainly to interject. “Can I add one thing here to this whole thing that maybe you don’t know and a lot of people don’t know?” Nancy cut him off again. “No,” she said, “I think you should just let it go.” But this time he would not “let it go.” “I want to add one thing,” Reagan insisted. “One thing about this, that we’re not dealing with a fetus, we’re dealing with a living human being.” In a few, painful moments, the Reagans had revealed their interaction.

No president since Wilson had a more fiercely devoted partner. This most powerful modern first lady was in some ways also the most traditional.
She had no substantive agenda of her own, she craved no limelight or credit. Her only ambition was for him, and she fulfilled that beyond imagining. A Reagan presidency without Nancy’s constant presence—her all-seeing gaze, her whispered cues, above all her unfailing radar registering every current for or against her husband—would not have been possible. Presidents don’t benefit just from good marriages, but also from partners who understand the demands of political life and are willing to assist in meeting those demands. In Nancy, Ronald Reagan had both. Nancy not only helped elect her husband president but helped to keep him on course in the White House. In the end, the Reagan presidency is as much her legacy as his.

M
OTHER
K
NOWS
B
EST

AT FIRST, IT WAS ENOUGH THAT SHE WAS NOT NANCY. “I WANT YOU ALL TO
take a look at me,” Barbara Bush said three times during the inaugural festivities. “Please notice—hairdo, makeup, designer dress. Look at me
good this week, because it’s the only week.” It was a brilliant, if not too subtle, put-down, a demonstration that she grasped the country’s need for a new beginning after eight Reagan years. It was also a way of getting back, just a little, at Nancy. Like Ronald Reagan, and
unlike
her husband, Barbara knew the power of a well-aimed one-liner. She had an innate sense of what works in politics. She would be the un-Nancy: plain-spoken, authentic and unthreatening. In private, as well, Barbara was not Nancy, nor Rosalynn; she made no effort to project herself on foreign missions, or to shape history by whispering in a foreign minister’s ear. Unlike Nancy, she would not be continually involved in the politics and process of her husband’s career. Policy was for men; her role was to keep
her
man on a steady, focused path.