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

weapons, and learned to gauge whether patience or urgency better suited the challenge at hand. Ronnie’s personal aide, Jim Kuhn, saw Nancy in action many times. “She knew how to lay the groundwork. She knew how to put things together. She knew how far she could go with ‘Ronnie.’ She knew what she could get away with,” he said. Nancy acknowledged as much. “Does the president sometimes say no to me? Sure,” she told NBC’s Chris Wallace in 1985. “Does his no always end it? Not always. I’ll wait a little while; then I’ll come back at him again.”

As the years have gone by, appreciation has grown for the role that she played in her husband’s success. Among those who have acknowledged how essential she became was Richard Neustadt, considered the preeminent scholar of the American presidency. Neustadt, a liberal, advised every Democratic president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton and was a founder of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He saw Nancy as a vital player in Ronnie’s presidency because she had “a good ear and a fine eye.” She let neither political ideology nor personal attachment cloud her judgment in that regard. “Her husband’s close associates, however valuable or liked or even loved, were to be sacrificed, in her view, from the moment their continuation on the scene could compromise the president’s public relations,” Neustadt wrote, adding, “When it came to people, her targets seem well chosen, aim unerring, and timing right for someone who must wait for someone else to pull the trigger.” Every president, Neustadt added, would do well to follow this principle: “Never let your Nancy be immobilized.”

Sometimes Nancy also had to dissuade her husband from doing things that appealed to his principles but had the potential to hurt him politically. In 1986, for instance, during a meeting with White House counsel Peter Wallison, Ronnie raised the idea of not disclosing his tax returns the following year. Though letting the country take a look at them is not required by law, Jimmy Carter had set a precedent for presidents to do so voluntarily. Nixon released his too, but only after those for one year were leaked. Ronnie complained that it was an unfair expectation of presidents, because average citizens did not have to make theirs public. Withholding their release would not benefit Ronnie much. He had less than two years left in office. But he contended that setting a new precedent would be helpful to whoever followed him in the White House.

Wallison was about to argue that this break with normal practice would be hard to explain. Americans would not see it as a principled stand but rather a sign that Ronnie had something to hide. Before Wallison could make that point, however, Nancy beat him to it. “She could not bear the thought of the criticism such a step would bring, she said, and Reagan backed off,” Wallison recalled. “Every president, no matter how good his political instincts, needs someone to bring him back to reality on occasion, and Ronald Reagan—a president with a particularly idealistic streak—was especially in need of this kind of counsel.” So, the tradition of releasing presidential tax returns would remain unbroken for the next thirty years, until celebrity real estate developer Donald Trump was elected despite refusing to hand over his.

Nancy was Ronnie’s early-warning system, determined to spot potential problems before they had a chance to become attached to him. “It really reaches a point where something’s gone much too far, in my opinion. So it seems to me, sometimes, that if you can catch it before it reaches that point where a lot of people are maybe hurt, then it’s easier to stop it right in the beginning, rather than let it build up a head of steam,” she said.

That meant she had to be a consummate gatherer of information. Ronnie rarely made a telephone call, except when his advisers asked him to. Nancy was on the line constantly, working her network. She watched the president’s popularity closely and pored over the numbers in private sessions with his pollster, Richard Wirthlin. She was also vigilant about his coverage, devouring newspapers and newsmagazines, as well as what was being said on the nightly television broadcasts. During the day, Cable News Network, the twenty-four-hour channel that launched in June 1980, was on constantly in the residence. The first lady also went through thousands of pictures taken by the official White House staff photographers, tearing off the top-right corners of ones she found unflattering and writing “O.K., per N.R.” on images she deemed suitable for public release.

Aides learned early not to try to wing it when Nancy interrogated them, because the chances were, if she asked a question, she already had an inkling of the answer from one of her other sources. “I always said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’ll find out,’ ” said her special assistant, Jane Erkenbeck. The first lady also wanted things done immediately. It would take Erkenbeck five minutes to get from the residence to her office in the East Wing. By the time she reached her desk, the phone was often ringing. Nancy was on the line, wanting to know whether her assistant had gotten the information or done the task of the moment. “I learned from her that things can be done very quickly. Especially when you say, ‘I’m calling for Mrs. Reagan,’ things get done,” Erkenbeck laughed.

“There was always something wrong, always something wrong,” said Kuhn. In the office of Ronnie’s executive assistant, the phone had lines marked WH1 and WH2. When Kuhn saw WH1 light up late in the afternoon, he knew it was Nancy—and that she wasn’t calling to congratulate him on what a good job he was doing. Sometimes Kuhn would hear a long pause on the line when he picked it up. Nancy wasn’t going to tell him what was bothering her; she expected him to know and to tell her how it was being