| Nancy Reagan |
|---|
Reagan in 1983
|
|
| First Lady of the United States |
In office
January 20, 1981 – January 20, 1989 |
| President |
Ronald Reagan |
| Preceded by |
Rosalynn Carter |
| Succeeded by |
Barbara Bush |
| First Lady of California |
In office
January 3, 1967 – January 6, 1975 |
| Governor |
Ronald Reagan |
|
|
|
|
| Personal details |
| Born |
Anne Frances Robbins
July 6, 1921
New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died |
March 6, 2016 (aged 94)
Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Political party |
Republican |
| Spouse(s) |
Ronald Reagan
(1952–2004; his death) |
| Children |
Patti
Ron |
| Parents |
|
| Alma mater |
Smith College |
| Religion |
Presbyterianism |
..
..
Anne
Frances Robbins Davis Reagan was born in New York City in 1921 to a car
salesman and an actress and spent her first six years with little idea
of what a normal family would feel like. Her father abandoned them when
she was a baby; her mother Edith went back to work with a traveling
theater company. She sent “Nancy” to live with an aunt and uncle in
Maryland and for the next few years acted the role of mother from a
distance; Nancy would see her when Edith had a role in New York and the
little girl got to ride the train up to watch her perform. “How I miss
my baby!” her mother wrote at the bottom of every page of her diary.
But that all changed when Nancy was 8: Edith married a prominent
neurosurgeon named Loyal Davis, who would eventually adopt Nancy as his
own — though she always called him Dr. Loyal. The family moved to
Chicago; suddenly hers was a life of field hockey and summer camp, nice
clothes and high expectations. Ever the appreciative audience, she would
sit in the operating room gallery and watch her stepfather perform
brain surgery. She watched her mother struggle to be accepted by other
fashionable wives, and learned: “Nancy’s social perfection is a constant
source of amazement,” read an entry in her high school yearbook. She
majored in English and drama at Smith, worked for a while as a sales’
clerk at Marshall Fields and a nurses’ aid before following her mother’s
lead. A big break on Broadway opposite Yul Brynner got her an MGM
screen test and a contract, and she was off to Hollywood in 1948.
Nancy Davis was not steamy or sultry enough to play the siren, though
she did date Clark Gable briefly. (He had a quality that good
courtesans also have,” she recalled. “When he was with you, he was
really with you.”) She was typically cast as the loyal wife, in movies
like
The Next Voice You Hear. Her “childhood ambition,” she
wrote on her MGM biographical questionnaire in 1949, was “to be an
actress.” But her “greatest ambition” was “to have a successful, happy
marriage.” She listed some of her phobias: “superficiality, vulgarity
especially in women, untidiness of mind and person, and cigars.” That
year she met Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors guild, who
was still recovering from his split with actress Jane Wyman; one
newspaper account called it “a romance of a couple who have no vices,”
with Nancy knitting Ronnie argyle socks.
“I don’t know if it was exactly love at first sight,” Nancy said,
“but it was pretty close.” The two were married in March of 1952 in a
secret ceremony at the Little Brown Church near Los Angeles; their
daughter Patti was born that October and son Ron in 1958. Nancy would
also be stepmother to Reagan’s children from his previous marriage, son
Michael and daughter Maureen. She retired from movies in 1962 to be a
full-time homemaker. When her husband was serving as a national
spokesman for General Electric, the couple lived in a modern house in
Pacific Palisades with every imaginable new technology.
“Our family is somewhat unusual,” Ron Reagan once observed. “We are
people with very different personalities. I imagine that is why
sometimes there is some friction.” By and large, these would not be easy
relationships; one common theory held that the Reagans’ own love affair
was so abiding, so intense that it didn’t leave much space for anyone
else. Nancy herself attributed her husband’s emotional inaccessibility,
that shell that was both so smooth and so impenetrable, to his alcoholic
father and itinerant childhood, where constant moves made deep
friendships impossible. He had room for only one — and she would be it.
“There’s a wall around him,” she said in her memoirs, which she
published in 1989 and dedicated: “To Ronnie, who always understood. And
to my children, who I hope will understand.” It can be a great burden,
to be the sole intimate of a solitary man — especially if he ends up
being the President. “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there
are times when even I feel that barrier.”
It took the jaded natives of Hollywood and Sacramento and Washington
some time to get used to a marriage so sentimental. They would always
hold hands; he called her “Nancy Pants” and “mommy.” There would be
notes scattered around the White House, especially on special occasions.
“Whatever I treasure and enjoy,” Ronnie wrote, “ this home, our ranch,
the sight of the sea — all would be without meaning if I didn’t have
you. I live in a permanent Christmas because God gave me you.” Every
marriage finds its own balance, she used to say. He was relentlessly
upbeat: she did the worrying for both of them. She was obsessive about
details where he seemed cavalier; he was all-forgiving, while she could
hold a grudge. But they were equally solicitous and protective of each
other. She recalls a dinner with presidential historians, where
Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin observed that “We have never had a
presidential couple like the two of you, and that alone is an important
historical fact. The love and devotion you show each other isn’t seen
much around here these days.”
It is hard for anyone married to a public figure to bear the attacks
aimed at the person they love. But Nancy Reagan had an even harder
challenge: her husband was so popular that attacks just skidded off his
shiny image; but she was a different story, inscrutable where he seemed
so transparent, cool and cautious where he was all warmth and tall tales
and high hopes. It started from her first days as First Lady of
California, after he won his race for governor in 1966. She discovered
that the 1877 mansion, which reminded her of a funeral home, was
officially a “firetrap,” as the local authorities put it. She said it
was concern for her family’s safety that inspired their move into a
fancy suburb; her critics called it snobbery, the hostility only partly
allayed in the years that followed by her efforts to help returning
Vietnam vets and promote the Foster Grandparents program. Her smile was
“the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class
American woman’s daydream circa 1948,” Joan Didion wrote a profile in
the
Saturday Evening Post in 1968, the smile “a study in frozen
insincerity.” When Michael Deaver went to work in the governor’s
office, his portfolio included the “Mommie watch”; Nancy was described
to him as implacable, demanding, the “dragon lady.”
Whatever scrutiny and skepticism she endured in California, however,
was nothing compared to what was waiting for her in Washington, when she
arrived in 1981 to begin what she’d come to describe as “the most
difficult years of my life.” Betty Ford had been about candor and
camaraderie; Rosalyn Carter was earnest, high protein. The Carters had
sold off the presidential yacht, turned down the thermostat, offered
inaugural ball tickets for $25. But what to make of Nancy, in the icy
Galanos inaugural gown, ($25,000), all the Hollywood friends. The
Reagans’ arrival signaled the Washington was about to enter a whole new
age. The trumpeters were back on the balcony to welcome foreign
visitors; the Chief would be Hailed when he entered the room. Johnny
Carson joked that her favorite junk food was caviar. When she arrived in
Washington her critics saw her as shallow and vain; by the last year
the caricature was almost the opposite, of the all powerful manipulator.
She recalls the Washington
Post’s Katherine Graham observing
that many of the stories were written by younger veterans of the
feminist movement: “They just couldn’t identify with you. You
represented everything they were rebelling against.”
Once again she found herself trying to make a home in the nation’s
most famous house, but one that had grown shabby and dull, with rooms
that hadn’t seen new paint in decades. Feeling she was a custodian of a
national treasure, she solicited $822,000 in private donations to
redecorate, fix the floors and hardware, as part of what would become a
$45 million renovation of the whole White House complex. Even though the
upgrade was long overdue, she paid a price for it — and especially for
her decision to replace the White House china, which by that time had
had so many pieces broken (or pinched) that at Reagan’s first state
dinner, for Margaret Thatcher, she used pieces chosen by both Presidents
Roosevelt, Wilson and Truman, since there wasn’t enough of any one
pattern to go around. It was her misfortune that at the same time word
broke that the Agriculture Department would count ketchup as a vegetable
in school lunches, came the news of the purchase of $200,000 for more
than 4,000 pieces of new china, thanks to the help of the private Knapp
foundation. She was accused of violating the new Ethics in Government
act by accepting free clothes from designers, or borrowing them but not
reporting it. Soon Queen Nancy was once more the easy target compared to
her amiable husband, at a time when the rest of the country was feeling
squeezed by recession. By the end of 1981 she had a higher disapproval
rating than any First Lady of modern times.
“The first year was a terrible year,” she said, made worse by the
loss of her step father, a cancer scare and most crushing, the
assassination attempt that left four men shot, Reagan and spokesman
James Brady badly wounded. Years later, she said, she still woke up at
night remembering the scene at the hospital; the blood and bandages and
tubes, a blue pinstripe suit shredded, a husband pale and grey, and
closer to dead than anyone knew at the time.
She had always been highly protective; but after the shooting, her
monitoring of her husband’s activities had a more desperate urgency, to
the point, famously, of consulting an astrologer Merv Griffin introduced
her to, about when it was too dangerous for him to be making public
appearances. “I cringe every time we step out of a car or leave a
building,” she told Joan Quigley, and she began running the President’s
schedule by her, a small balm on the general sense of helplessness she
felt when it came to his safety.
Aware of his metabolism and what he needed to perform at his best,
she made sure he got eight hours of sleep at night and had breaks during
the day. During the 1984 campaign she complained that speechwriters
were creating too many different versions of speeches, which was
draining the President’s energies; after a bad first debate against
Walter Mondale, she warned that his advisers had crammed his head with
too many facts and figures, and that they needed to back off.
She also protected him from threats closer at hand, particularly
aides whom she suspected were more focused on their own agendas than his
presidency. In his book about her years later, Deaver said that if the
President had a single great failing, it was that he had no good sixth
sense about people, or an ability to see their darker side; the
reluctance to discipline extended even to his children. “Nancy had to
fill that role as well,” Deaver argued.
“Even with her own family, she had to play the heavy, while Reagan
remained the man in the white hat.” Reagan’s political gift involved
being able to see the big picture and sell it, Nancy’s expertise was
more intimate, analytic, with a shrewd sense of how an organism like the
White House staff worked. She had studied both Nixon and Kissinger’s
memoirs before arriving in Washington, and she was alert to its ways. “I
think I’m aware of people who are trying to take advantage of my
husband — who are trying to end-run him lots of times — who are trying
to use him — I’m very aware of that,” she told reporter Chris Wallace in
1985. More aware, she added, than Reagan himself. “I try to stop them.”
He was, she said, “a soft touch,” especially when it came to cleaning
out dead wood: “I think it’s the eternal optimist in him,” she said,
“his attitude that if you let something go, it will eventually work
itself out. Well, that isn’t always so.” She was viewed as the power
behind the scenes in the placement and replacement of various top
advisers and Cabinet officers, often joining forces with the house
pragmatists, James Baker and Deaver. Her role in the ouster of Chief of
Staff Don Regan inspired New York
Times columnist William
Safire to liken her to Edith Wilson. “Increasingly she took on the tough
jobs that Reagan couldn’t or wouldn’t handle,” Deaver said.
“Particularly staff decisions that were sure to make enemies.”
And she would always earn the ire of hard-liners who saw her as a
strong voice in pressing Reagan to reach out to Mikhail Gorbachev and
push for disarmament treaties. “I knew that “warmonger” was never a fair
description of Ronnie’s position, but I also felt that his calling the
Soviet Union an evil empire was not particularly helpful,” she revealed
in her memoir. “The world had become too small for the two superpowers
not to be on speaking terms.” Even as Reagan was celebrating a
triumphant signing of the INF treaty, which eliminated
intermediate-range nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles, Nancy
was coping with the death of her own mother and a diagnosis of breast
cancer. Somehow even her decision to have a mastectomy rather than
lumpectory brought her under fire. But as time passed, economic
conditions improved and a concerted effort to adjust her image bore
fruit. She came to rank among the most country’s most admired women; she
relaxed a bit, stepped out on her own, won over even the well
shellacked press corps with a Gridiron dinner parody of herself as a bag
lady singing “Second Hand Clothes.” (“So what if Ronnie’s cutting back
on welfare,” she sang, “I’d still wear a tiara in my coiffed hair.”)
“Socko!” pronounced the New York
Times.
Her most famous moment as First Lady came almost by accident: the
Just Say No campaign against drug use at a time when abuse was running
out of control. “I was in California and I was talking to, I think,
fifth graders, and one little girl raised her hand and said, ‘Mrs.
Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well,
you just say no.’ And there it was born. I think people thought that we
had an advertising agency over who dreamed that up — not true.” Reagan
called her “my secret weapon” in his fight against drug use. Some
dismissed her effort as window dressing; residents of Lake View Terrace
north of Los Angeles blocked efforts to build an advanced treatment
center that would have been named for her. But in the face of criticism,
she would log more than a quarter million miles in the U.S. and abroad
to discuss prevention and visit rehab centers. She hosted a 1985 White
House conference on drug abuse, featuring wives of world leaders, and
three years later became the first First Lady to address the U.N.
General Assembly, speaking on drug-trafficking laws. Many aspects of the
war on drugs may have been ill-conceived or entangled in politics; but
the effort to change attitudes among kids was one aspect that showed
results. A study in 1988 found that only 39% of high school seniors
reported using illegal drugs in the last year, down from 53% when Reagan
took office.
But even those triumphs would not come unalloyed. During the White
House years, the Reagans were especially estranged from daughter Patti,
whose 1992 autobiography,
The Way I See It, revealed, among
other things, that she had had herself sterilized at age 24 (an
operation which was later reversed) because she feared becoming an
emotionally abusive mother like her own. She charged that Nancy’s
commitment to fighting drug abuse was born of the First Lady’s own
struggle with prescription tranquilizers and sleeping pills. “I agonized
over revealing this,” Davis told the Los Angeles
Times when
the book came out. “What I kept coming back to was that my mother has
gotten an indictment of hypocrisy in her choice of the antidrug issue.
‘What does she know about it?’ and ‘It’s a PR stunt.’ I never saw it as
hypocritical. I saw it as both an act of denial and a cry for help.”
In 1994, when President Reagan revealed in a letter to the American
people that he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, he observed that “I only
wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful
experience.” Thus began what Nancy would come to call the “long
goodbye,” a decade spent tending to the husband who in time could not
recognize her any more. Anyone who imagined her post–White House would
be one of glamour and travel and parties saw instead a kind of
cocooning, as she stayed close to home, seldom entertaining, excusing
herself even from luncheons to go and call and check on him.
Even her critics came to admire the grace and the steadfastness with
which she cared for her husband in twilight; onetime political
adversaries, meanwhile, were surprised to find themselves with a new and
potent ally. Having seen and suffered firsthand the effects of a
ravaging disease, Nancy Reagan became a powerful voice for embryonic
stem-cell research. She rejected the view of pro-lifers: ”I just don’t
think they understand that it’s not taking a life,” she told Katie
Couric. “It’s trying to save countless lives.” When Congress debated
federal research funding she was on the phone with lawmakers, especially
self described Reagan Republicans, trying to peel votes away from the
Bush White House. “There are a lot of my colleagues who got calls from
Nancy Reagan,” said California Republican David Dreier, who had known
the Reagans since college, “who say that was a very important part of
the decisionmaking process.”
In May 2004, a month before her husband died, Nancy appeared at a
fundraiser for stem-cell research. “Ronnie’s long journey has finally
taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him,” she said.
“Because of this, I’m determined to do whatever I can to save other
families from this pain.” A month later, she was the tiny, pale figure
bent over the dark casket as America mourned one of its giant
Presidents. She had worked over every detail of the 300-page blueprint
for the commemorations.
Sometimes, she told ABC’s Dianne Sawyer a year later, she still
talked to him, wandering around a house filled with pictures of him.
“He’s very much with me,” Nancy said. “Everything still is all about
him.”
..
Heartless Man.
