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

In Saint Petersburg, she visited a facility for Straight Inc., one of the most well known of a growing number of programs around the country that took a “tough love” approach to young drug users. The kids, many of whom had been brought to the program against their will by their parents, were strip-searched on arrival and could not even go to the bathroom without being monitored. Straight Inc. was becoming controversial for using allegedly abusive tactics on young people and had already been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Nancy—accompanied by almost a dozen Secret Service agents, 20 members of the press, and 3 aides—met for nearly three hours in a hot auditorium with 650 parents and 350 kids enrolled in the Straight program. What she heard was horrifying and heartbreaking. Asked whether they had ever gotten their younger brothers or sisters high, more than half of the young people raised their hands. Some said they had also given drugs to their pets and to children they babysat. Most also admitted to having been arrested or overdosing. They told of being high at the dinner table and hiding narcotics under a parent’s mattress. Nearly all of them said they had started with pot. Each of their testimonies ended with the words “I am a druggie.”

It was a cathartic event, punctuated by tearful apologies on the part of the children and forgiving hugs from their families. Nancy “just cried. I mean, she just balled up and cried. And you could see the emotion flowing out of her,” Turner said. “She really knew she was doing something right. She had it in her gut that she was doing something right, and she had to do it.” Something else happened, Turner added: “In the plane back from Dallas, this transformation occurred. She went out and talked to the press on her own. That’s the first time. She felt secure.”

News about Nancy was all over local and national newspapers and on television. And for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t negative. A picture of the first lady surrounded by children in a school classroom spread across three columns of the front page of the New York Times. In the Washington Post, reporter Donnie Radcliffe wrote that Nancy “was finally being noticed more for her social awareness than her social life” and had “scored some stunning media successes as she observed the drug abuse programs. After months of publicity about her tastes in clothes, china, and White House redecorating had been contrasted with the country’s growing economic problems, the first lady’s often-stated interest in drug abuse prevention was claiming the headlines.”

The morning after she returned from the trip, her staff took advantage of the new glow around Nancy to clean up one controversy that lingered. They announced that the first lady had decided she would no longer accept free designer clothes, because people were “misinterpreting” her efforts to draw a spotlight to the American fashion industry. (It was a promise she would break.)

Then her aides set about filling her schedule with more trips to promote her antidrug campaign. Nancy was soon venturing out across the country just about every other week, hitting sixty-five cities in thirty-five states over the course of her years as first lady. In 1983 she played herself on NBC’s popular situation comedy Diff’rent Strokes, starring fourteen-year-old Gary Coleman, which had an audience of twenty-eight million and was the most popular show in the country among children between the ages of six and eleven. That same year, she shared anchoring duties on a broadcast of ABC’s Good Morning America that was devoted entirely to the subject of drug abuse. With popular actor Michael Landon, who had starred on the long-running Little House on the Prairie, she cohosted a two-part program called The Chemical People that aired on three hundred public television stations. The number of community-based antidrug groups across the country tripled to three thousand. Nancy was also getting a thousand letters a month on the issue, which accounted for half the correspondence she received. “I’ve tried to get the message across through hundreds of interviews, tapings, speeches, events, and visits,” she said in a speech to newspaper publishers in May 1987. “Every mile, every meeting has been worth it. My work against drugs has provided me with the most fulfilling years of my life.”

Nancy also took her message global. In 1985 she hosted drug abuse “summits” at the White House and at the United Nations for dozens of wives of world leaders. These sessions were not without their moments of awkwardness and tension. Nicaraguan first lady Rosario Maria Murillo—whose husband, President Daniel Ortega, had been branded by Ronnie as “the little dictator who went to Moscow in his green fatigues”—told Nancy categorically that her country had no drug problem, thanks to its Marxist form of government. In truth, Nicaragua had a thriving cocaine trafficking industry, some of which was linked to top officials in Ortega’s own government. The year before, DEA agents in Florida had seized 1,452 pounds of cocaine that had been flown in there from the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.

In October 1988, near the end of Ronnie’s presidency, Nancy addressed the United Nations as the leader of the US delegation to a session on youth, families, and crime prevention. For someone who disliked speech making, this was a daunting moment. She was accompanied by George Shultz, who recalled that she insisted upon arriving an hour early. When she took her seat in the chamber, she noticed that it was nearly empty. Nancy turned to the secretary of state, her eyes brimming with tears. “George,” she asked, “doesn’t anybody want to hear what I have to say?”

“Don’t worry, Nancy,” he assured her. “When it’s your turn, this place will be jammed.”

Shultz was right. The delegates showed up and were spellbound. But the message that Nancy was there to deliver caused heartburn within her husband’s administration. Where US officials had been pushing