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

make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” As soon as word got out about what he had revealed, Regan’s blast at Nancy was all anyone was talking about. “I’ve been in publicity eighteen years, but I can’t remember as much interest in a book as this one,” one book publicist told the New York Times.

How explosive this revelation would prove to be was slow to dawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sheila Tate, who had only recently left her job as Nancy’s press secretary, says she had been unaware of Nancy’s relationship with Quigley. The day the news broke, Tate returned from lunch to her office at a public relations firm and found at least fifty phone messages from reporters. Her first call was to Elaine Crispen, Nancy’s new spokeswoman. Crispen assured Tate it would be no more than a one-day tempest. “I could not have disagreed more. I told Elaine that unless they did something to diffuse it, this astrology business would be like an albatross around her neck,” Tate recalled. “I really felt heartsick.” As did Ronnie. “The press have a new one thanks to Don Regan’s book,” he wrote in his diary on May 3. “The media are behaving like kids with a new toy—never mind that there is no truth to it.”

Indeed, the claims that were making it into the press went far beyond Regan’s characterization of the astrologer’s role when it came to scheduling. One headline in the New York Post read: “Astrologer Runs the White House.” Everyone, it seemed, was weighing in. “As a Christian,” former president Jimmy Carter said, “I don’t think the guidance of our lives should come from the moving of stars.”

Though Regan did not mention Quigley’s name—and apparently didn’t know it—journalists soon tracked her down. Nancy begged her to say nothing, but Quigley felt that her professional reputation was on the line. She argued that she was not one of the charlatans and imposters in her field, and needed to “represent reputable astrologers honorably.”

Quigley soon had a book deal of her own. Published in 1990, it offered an often implausible version of events. Not only did the astrologer claim to have determined the timing of just about every major event of the Reagan presidency, she took credit for reshaping the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and even for deciding when the president’s cancer surgery should take place. There is no evidence those things were true.

Nancy was chastened by the stir she had created with her secret reliance on Quigley’s predictions, but she felt that she had only done what she needed to do to handle the uncertainty and anxiety of getting through every day. “What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine,” she wrote later. “Don’t criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it—except, possibly me.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rehabilitating her image was not the only challenge that Nancy was grappling with as Ronnie’s presidency moved into its second year and beyond. Though most of the Reagan offspring were not around much, they continued to be a source of drama, stress, and awkwardness.

Where Ronnie’s recent predecessors had small children and adolescents living with them in the White House, the four Reagan kids were grown and trying to forge lives and identities of their own. Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron had little in common. Their temperaments and personal histories had taken them in different directions, and their connections to each other were tenuous. But each was struggling with a paradox that nearly all children of celebrated parents face: along with suffocating scrutiny comes a bounty of opportunities that they did nothing to earn. Expectations are thrust upon them that they will never be able to meet.

“There is a secret thought that the offspring of famous people keep tucked away,” Patti once wrote. “It becomes the focal point of our lives, although it takes years to see that. It’s what makes us run from who we are, rage against the huge shadow we feel dwarfed by, sabotage ourselves again and again. We vilify anyone who suggests we have a legacy to live up to, shoes to fill, a torch to carry. Because underneath it all, deep inside us, we think they’re right.”

For Nancy, the belated arrival of Loyal Davis in her life had salvaged her childhood. Claiming his name as hers gave her stability, a sense of belonging, an identity that finally seemed complete and whole. For Ronnie’s children, having a towering figure at the center of their existence had the opposite effect. It increased the gravitational pull of their own self-doubts and fueled their inner suspicions that they were no more than faint copies of an epic original.

In this particular family, there was also the off-balance dynamic of a husband and his second wife so closely bound together that his progeny—only two of whom were also hers—felt shut out. It was hard to miss the disconnect between Ronnie’s idealized view of American life and the impossibility for any flesh-and-blood family to live as though they were in a Norman Rockwell painting. “During Ronnie’s presidency, our family and its problems were written about constantly,” Nancy recalled. “Ronnie had run for office on a platform of traditional family values, which both of us believe in and try to practice. But I always felt hurt when people said we were hypocrites because our own family sometimes fell short of those values.”

Even Ron, his parents’ favorite, tested them. Ronnie and Nancy had been publicly supportive of Ron’s unconventional choice of a dance career in 1976. Their misgivings were evident, however. Ron had been dancing for more than four years before his parents attended one of his performances, at a benefit gala for the Joffrey Ballet in March