The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

He thought she needed a break, so when the invitation to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer arrived, he urged her to attend without him. “Saw ‘Mommie’ off for London & the Royal Wedding. I worry when she’s out of sight 6 minutes. How am I going to hold out for 6 days,” he wrote in his diary July 23. “The lights don’t seem as warm & bright without her.”

As the months and later the years went by, the memories of that horrible day in March stayed fresh in Nancy’s mind. In an interview with Parade magazine in late 1981, she struggled for words to describe how it haunted her: “I think, before it happened, it was something I knew was always out there, and it was constantly in the back of my mind. I had to keep it in the back of my mind, you see, or I couldn’t function. I knew measures were taken to protect us, and we had to depend on those. And now…

“I thought for a while it was something that in time would fade away,” she added. “It hasn’t. It’s a particular kind of trauma that never leaves you once you’ve known it.”

The news from around the world offered no reassurance. Weeks after Ronnie was shot, there was an attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. Anwar Sadat was assassinated at a parade in Cairo on October 6, just two months after Ronnie had toasted the Egyptian president as a peacemaker at a White House state dinner. Nancy said: “It’s not just America. No. No. It is all over the world. Violence everywhere. Yes, yes, it does something to you. Yes, it changes you.”

On Nancy’s insistence, Ronnie never made a trip to the Middle East while he was president, not even to Israel. “She thought he was going to get smoked if he went over there. She just said, ‘They can come here all they want. You’re not going over there,’ ” recalled Jim Kuhn, who was Ronnie’s executive assistant. “The thing that really got to her was when Anwar Sadat was blown away in that military parade. The Hinckley thing was just a stupid Secret Service mistake, but that thing with Sadat really hit her hard.” Nancy also vetoed the idea of Ronnie attending Sadat’s funeral. She was too afraid for her husband’s safety. The White House dispatched three of his predecessors—Nixon, Ford, and Carter—to represent the United States.

In early December of that first year of Ronnie’s presidency, there were reports that Libyan leader Mu‘ammar Gadhafi had dispatched a hit squad to the United States to assassinate him. The potential threat was taken seriously enough that Ronnie had to light the national Christmas tree from the White House, instead of doing it in the open on the Ellipse, a park just outside the White House fence, as presidents typically did. Concerns about security also scotched Nancy’s plans to go out and do her Christmas shopping, so she had to ask friends to buy her gifts for her. Ronnie ordered Secret Service protection for the troika of Deaver, Baker, and Meese, and, for a while, mock presidential motorcades wended through Washington as decoys to draw out would-be assassins.

Ronnie’s handwritten Christmas letter to Nancy at the end of that first difficult year was a particularly tender one; two pages of reassurance and love on White House stationery. It also offers a glimpse of how differently Nancy looked in his eyes from the image of her that was being forged in brutal Washington. Their lives had changed in ways they could never have foreseen, but their devotion to each other had not. Ronnie began by lamenting that a president constrained within the fortified White House had not been able to select a Christmas present for the person he loved most:

Dear Mrs. R.

I still don’t feel right about your opening an envelope instead of a gift package.

There are several much beloved women in my life and on Christmas I should be giving them gold, precious stones, perfume, furs and lace. I know that even the best of these would still fall far short of expressing how much these several women mean to me and how empty my life would be without them.

There is of course my “First Lady.” She brings so much grace and charm to whatever she does that even stuffy, formal functions sparkle and turn into fun times. Everything is done with class. All I have to do is wash up and show up.

There is another woman in my life who does things I don’t always get to see but I hear about them and sometimes see photos of her doing them. She takes an abandoned child in her arms on a hospital visit. The look on her face only the Madonna could match. The look on the child’s face is one of adoration. I know because I adore her too.

She bends over a wheelchair or bed to touch an elderly invalid with tenderness and compassion just as she fills my life with warmth and love.

There is another gal I love who is a nest builder. If she were stuck three days in a hotel room, she’d manage to make it home sweet home. She moves things around—looks at it—straightens this and that, and you wonder why it wasn’t that way in the first place.

I’m also crazy about the girl who goes to the ranch with me. If we’re tidying up the woods, she’s a peewee power house at pushing over dead trees. She’s a wonderful person to sit by the fire with, or to ride with or just to be with when the sun goes down or the stars come out. If she ever stopped going to the ranch I’d stop too because I’d see her in every beauty spot there is, and I couldn’t stand that.

Then there is a sentimental lady I love whose eyes fill up so easily. On the other hand, she