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

tidbits and insights about the internal workings of the White House. First among them was columnist George F. Will. “The person that all of us giggled about was George Will. I think she had a big crush on him,” Nancy’s brother, Dick, told me. “They would have lunch together. It was all out in the open, but still. One Christmas, she left the president and my family alone. We were up in the living quarters, and she was downstairs showing George Will all the Christmas presents, the big cake, and so on and so forth.” Kuhn recalled an instance when the ever-punctual Ronnie got impatient with his wife for delaying the liftoff of their helicopter so that she could finish a chat she was having with Will about thirty yards away. “Goddamn Sam, what’s going on here?” Reagan asked Kuhn. “What the hell are they talking about?” Nancy also once had Kuhn personally deliver a Valentine card to Will’s house.

“We had lots of lunches together. We went lots of places. We had lunch set up in Gunston Hall in Northern Virginia, George Mason’s house,” Will told me. (Mason, a statesman and delegate to the US Constitutional Convention of 1787, played an important if undersung role in the early United States.) “We spent a lot of time together; toured the battlefield at Bull Run.” Nancy would also slip away from Camp David to have lunches with Will at the historic Yellow Brick Bank Restaurant in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. At a state dinner for Indonesian president Suharto in the fall of 1982, Nancy made sure Will was put at Ronnie’s table. “This was a big honor, and all that stuff, and I hated it, because it was full of people just taking turns telling the president how wonderful he was, which bored him and bored everyone else,” the columnist recalled. Will refused to go to another, until December 1988, when Nancy was able to lure him to one for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with a promise that she would seat Will, a consummate baseball fan, with Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio.

Pretty much everyone who was in the know in Washington sensed Nancy’s hand at work when Will wrote a scathing column in early 1986 about George H. W. Bush. It was a critical time for the vice president. With Ronnie in his second term, his Number Two was trying to lay the groundwork for his own run for the presidency. Will declared that Bush lacked any core principle beyond his unbridled desire for the top job: “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny ‘arf’—the sound of a lapdog.”

Nancy’s distaste for the Bushes, which had been so evident on the convention stage the night Ronnie selected his pick for the 1980 ticket, had not abated. Nancy’s and Barbara’s hostility toward each other was one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. “It’s too bad, but it was what it was. No doubt about it, it was not a warm and friendly relationship,” James Baker told me. “The Bushes felt that Nancy treated Barbara rather shabbily.”

One explanation—perhaps the simplest—is that the acrid taste of the 1980 primary battle between their husbands still lingered for both women. It was always clear to Nancy which of the two men Barbara thought should be sitting in the Oval Office rather than attending funerals of foreign leaders as a stand-in for the other. “I think in politics, the political wives often form more lasting animosities than their husband-competitors do,” Will speculated, when I asked him about the rivalry. “I’ve always thought that the reason you don’t want women in combat is they wouldn’t obey the rules of order. They’re too fierce.”

George H. W. Bush told his biographer Jon Meacham that the tone of the relationship had been set early. He got a startling visit right after the 1980 election from Kitchen Cabinet member William Wilson. “It turned out he was carrying water for Nancy on this. The message was, ‘Stay out of the paper, get a lower profile, back down. Tell the Shrubs to keep a lower profile,’ ” Bush said. “We weren’t taking a high profile, not doing the Washington thing of saying this or that, and it burned me up, and it burned Barbara up. She was very unhappy about it, deservedly so. We couldn’t back down if we hadn’t backed forward. We hadn’t done anything. Hadn’t done a damn thing. And I was very careful about that, always. Still don’t know what drove that. But Nancy and Barbara just did not have a pleasant relationship.”

If Nancy wanted the Bushes to keep their heads down, it may have been in reaction to the vice president’s undisguised ambition to run in 1988 for the job he had failed to win in 1980. Nancy was suspicious that Bush put his own future ambitions above the imperative of contributing to Ronnie’s current success, and that the Bushes were counting the days until the Reagans would leave. She also told family members of one conversation with Barbara that offended and infuriated her. During the Iran-contra scandal, the lowest point of the Reagan presidency, Barbara suggested that Ronnie should consider the possibility of resigning, Nancy claimed. That way, the vice president could assume the nation’s highest office and then run in 1988 as an incumbent. It is hard to imagine that even blunt-spoken Barbara Bush would have been so direct and insensitive at what was a fragile moment for the Reagans. But the fact that Nancy took whatever Barbara did say that way, or that Barbara might have implied anything that could be so interpreted, spoke to the depth of their mutual mistrust.

The tensions put White House chief of staff Jim Baker, who was also Bush’s closest friend and adviser, in a difficult spot. “When I first went in there, I bent over backward to make sure everybody knew that my loyalty was with Ronald Reagan and not with George