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

“Hey, at least this one’s not crazy,” Deaver said drily, in reference to Quigley. “Jeane Dixon was nuts.”

Shortly after that, Henkel was summoned to a meeting with Nancy in the residence. “Bill, I want you to understand and feel what it was like the day my husband was shot. I am the daughter of Loyal Davis. I went into that room, and I saw six doctors with panic in their eyes. My naked husband lying on that thing. I knew he was dying,” she told him. Then she explained how Quigley had known this would be a dangerous day for Ronnie to leave the White House.

“The thing that was paramount with her was that it came down to good days and bad days. Is it a bad day for the president’s safety? Is this a day he should go out of the White House and do a public event?” Henkel said. So as Deaver had done before him, Henkel began giving Nancy proposed schedules to run past Quigley—both long-range, going out over the next year, and near-term ones, for the next two weeks. Sometimes Nancy would complain to Henkel that she needed more details to provide the astrologer, who was getting paid by the hour: “Bill, this is costing me money. I wish you could be more precise.”

Henkel told me that Quigley also weighed in on decisions that were not directly related to the president’s physical safety: Which day might be good to give the State of the Union address? Which was most auspicious to hold a press conference? In 1985, after Margaret Thatcher told Ronnie that the new leader of the Soviet Union was different from his predecessors and might be someone it was possible to work with, Nancy had Quigley do the chart of Mikhail Gorbachev. Quigley advised the first lady that Gorbachev’s sign, Pisces, aligned well with Ronnie’s. “She came back saying, ‘These two have some coincidental things.’ It was a very favorable thing in terms of these two people have, by the stars, some good vibes,” Henkel recalled.

Nancy generally spoke to Quigley on Saturday afternoons while she was at Camp David and then called Henkel on Sundays at home. His wife could not understand why he would excuse himself and take the call somewhere out of earshot. “Bill, what’s wrong with you?” she used to ask. “Why so secret?” Meanwhile, at the White House, Henkel was getting grief from the new chief of staff, Don Regan. A brusque and demanding former CEO of the investment firm Merrill Lynch, Regan had been Ronnie’s first Treasury secretary, and then swapped jobs with Jim Baker in February 1985. Regan regularly berated Henkel over the fact that the schedule was always in a mess. “He was beating the shit out of me,” Henkel said.

So Henkel went to Deaver and Nancy and told them the chief of staff had to be let in on the secret. Regan thought it had to be a joke when Deaver first informed him about the astrologer. “Humor her,” Deaver advised him, and Regan soon realized he had no choice but to do so. He began keeping a color-coded calendar on his desk, with the dates highlighted like a traffic signal: green for good days, red for bad ones, and yellow when the outlook was iffy to send the president out for speaking events or to commence negotiations with foreign powers.

Regan apparently never learned the name of the mysterious figure that Nancy referred to only as “my friend,” but he said her influence shaded much more than his desk calendar. “The president’s schedule is the single most potent tool in the White House, because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he is going to do it. By humoring Mrs. Reagan, we gave her this tool—or, more accurately, gave it to an unknown woman in San Francisco who believed that the zodiac controls events and human behavior and that she could read the secrets of the future in the movements of the planets,” he wrote later.

Others, including Henkel, have a different view. Quigley—despite the claims she would later make in a book—was not setting policy, he insisted. “At the end of the day, I think it was pretty benign, and I don’t think it was anything harmful,” Henkel said. “In the big picture, I think it was a positive because [Nancy] went into these events with a confidence based on her trust in Joan and what this stuff meant to her, and I think that’s an asset to the president, because they were so close. She was so supportive of him. I come from this whole thing with deep admiration for her.”

But that ignores the paradox of Nancy’s reliance on an astrologer as a security measure. It is hard to imagine anything more fraught with risk than giving an outsider, someone Nancy had not met in person more than a few times, intimate knowledge of the president’s movements, and even the power to determine when they would happen.

None of this might ever have come to light had it not been for the ugly ending of Regan’s tenure as chief of staff in February 1987. Nancy had engineered his firing, blaming Regan for the Iran-contra scandal that was threatening to swallow Ronnie’s presidency. Regan took his revenge against the first lady with the publication of a sensational memoir, for which he had received a $1 million advance from publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. He also signed a $125,000 deal with Time magazine to excerpt it. Newsweek, however, got the scoop in early May 1988, a couple of weeks before the book’s release date.

On the very first page of For the Record, Regan wrote: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to