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

the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which was a fantasy about a friendship between a space alien and a little boy, made him nostalgic for an era when Hollywood was cranking out more heart-warmers. But he had one criticism: the end credits seemed to go on forever. “In my day, when I was an actor, our end credits were maybe fifteen seconds long,” Ronnie said. “Three and a half minutes, that’s fine—but only show that inside the industry. Throughout the rest of the country, reduce your credits to fifteen seconds at the end.”

Chief among the many reasons that Nancy loved Camp David was the restorative effect it had on Ronnie. If he couldn’t be at his beloved ranch in California, this was the closest thing to it. She pushed back against the tendency of his aides to load him down with briefing papers and other work to take with him on their weekends. “Reagan was a voracious reader. You could give him one page or five hundred pages, and he’d read the five hundred pages,” his executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, told me. “He’d complain about it. He’d say, ‘Jim, they’re telling me more than I need to know. I already know all this stuff.’ But he read it anyhow.”

Richard Allen, Ronnie’s first national security adviser, was surprised when Deaver once handed him back a thick packet of documents that Allen had sent to Camp David the previous weekend. Cut any future ones by three-quarters, Deaver told him.

“He reads it all,” Allen protested.

“Yes, I know,” Deaver replied. “That’s what I’m telling you. I want it cut by seventy-five percent.”

What Allen didn’t realize at the time, he said later, was that Deaver “was on a mission from Nancy, because the president had his nose buried in this stuff on weekends.”

Nancy also encouraged Ronnie’s sojourns at Rancho del Cielo. She had never loved it there; she went because she knew how much he did. While he chopped brush and busied himself with repairs, she would plant herself in a chair by the pond and spend hours on the phone with her friends. Nor did she share his love of riding. At ten thirty each morning, Ronnie would saddle both their horses—his, English style; hers, Western—and ring a bell to summon Nancy. “I can’t tell you how many times he rang it more than once,” Secret Service agent Petro recalled. Once Ronnie got her out on the trails, Nancy pleaded with him constantly to make the horses go slower. Returning from their rides, they would stop alongside each other. Ronnie would dismount and walk around to her horse. Nancy would then throw a leg over the saddle and leap into his waiting arms. Watching this ritual one day, White House physician John Hutton thought to himself: “Good Christopher Columbus, how does anybody keep a romance going for this many years with that intensity?” The doctor was slightly embarrassed—and yet mesmerized—by it all. “I felt like I was a kid watching a sister necking on the couch with her boyfriend. I felt guilty about doing it, but I couldn’t resist,” Hutton said.

On the front door of the modest 2,400-square-foot, two-bedroom house was a sign that summed up Ronnie’s vision of the perfect retreat from the stress and pressure of Washington:

ON THIS SITE

IN 1897

NOTHING HAPPENED

The Reagans spent a total of 335 days of his presidency, adding up to more than eleven months, at the ranch. But every day the two of them were there, a government car would drive up the winding road with a stack of mail, newspapers, and documents for Ronnie to read. And even when Ronnie headed out in his battered red 1962 CJ-6 Willys Jeep for the tranquility of the brush and woodlands, he was followed by Secret Service agents, a doctor, and a military aide with a portable telephone.

Once they got back to Washington, Nancy stood guard over Ronnie’s schedule, continuously battling against the tendency of aides and advisers to jam it with more than she thought he could handle. At receptions, she watched her husband closely for the first sign of fatigue. She’d tug at his sleeve gently—and sometimes rudely—to tell him it was time to go.

That someone needed to resist unreasonable demands on the endurance and strength of a man in his seventies became clear on his first presidential trip to Europe in June 1982. The ten-day itinerary was brutal: Ronnie, who was never able to get much sleep on airplanes, flew overnight and landed in Paris on the night of June 2. He had a day of meetings with Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand, and hosted a formal dinner at the American ambassador’s home that night. The next day, he helicoptered to Versailles for economic summit talks with Thatcher and Mitterrand, plus the heads of government of Japan, West Germany, Canada, and Italy. Their three-day summit ended with a banquet that lasted until one in the morning, after which Ronnie met with Al Haig and others for an update on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that day.

With only a few hours of sleep, he headed to Rome on June 7 for a meeting with Pope John Paul II. The papal library where they met was overheated, and as the pope held forth in his tranquilizing voice, Ronnie nodded off. Nancy, sitting behind him, cleared her throat and shuffled her feet, hoping to wake her husband, but by then, it was too late. The assembled press had seen it all. As Helen Thomas of United Press International recounted: “While the pope spoke, Mr. Reagan sat in an armchair next to him. His eyes closed on at least three occasions. His chin fell to his chest, and at one point reporters observed that he seemed to slide down in his chair.” All of the news accounts mentioned the president was seventy-one years old.

And the trip had only just begun. After that, the presidential entourage flew to England, where Ronnie went horseback riding with Queen Elizabeth II, gave an address