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

this delicate task was a snub of the West Wing communications shop, which had recently been put in the hands of hard-liner Patrick J. Buchanan, whom Nancy mistrusted. Buchanan had worked in the Nixon White House and had been a major force in driving its harsh and divisive rhetoric pitting what it claimed was a “silent majority” against the liberal elite.

Amid the turmoil and controversy surrounding the planned Bitburg visit came an unexpected stroke of grace and generosity. Ninety-year-old General Matthew Ridgway, who had led the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during World War II and was the last living four-star general to have served in the European theater, volunteered to go to the cemetery with Ronnie, Kohl, and a German veteran. “I am a soldier, and I have never done anything political in my life,” he told Deaver. “But it appears to me that my commander in chief is in trouble, and I would like to help. I would like to lay that wreath in Bitburg for him.” The Germans suggested that Ridgway perform the ceremony with one of their own revered World War II veterans, General Johannes Steinhoff, an ace Luftwaffe fighter pilot who flew a thousand combat missions and survived being shot down a dozen times. He was severely disfigured in the final weeks of the war when his plane crashed and its fuel tanks ignited. “With all due respect,” Deaver said when the Germans offered to have seventy-one-year-old Steinhoff participate, “you better snake-check that son of a bitch for everything he’s worth.”

So it was arranged. Ronnie and the German president would spend only eight minutes at Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, would make no remarks there, and would supervise the laying of the wreath rather than perform it. Still, Nancy was beside herself—and she blamed Deaver. “I could not recall our ever having been on opposite sides of an issue. But now she was convinced that I had ruined her husband’s presidency and perhaps the rest of his life,” Deaver later wrote.

Right up until the last minute, Nancy argued that the cemetery trip should be canceled. But as she began to understand that this was one battle she would not win, she turned to her astrologer Joan Quigley for guidance on how to contain the damage. That led to a series of last-minute changes in the schedule. Quigley determined that the ceremony must take place in the afternoon. Nancy told Deaver to change the takeoff time from Bonn to Bergen-Belsen by twenty minutes. Then she insisted that the arrival time be shifted by another twenty-five minutes. Each new demand required complex adjustments to security arrangements. “Everything we were doing, we were constrained, because she wasn’t going to let us do anything that Joan didn’t plan on” and approve, said Henkel, who was in charge of the advance operation. Years later, Deaver told Lou Cannon: “It was a nightmare.”

The day of the event, Kuhn went to the guesthouse at Gymnich Castle near Cologne, where the Reagans were staying, to go over the final details with Ronnie. Nancy came into the room when she heard his voice and had another meltdown when Kuhn mentioned that the president was to touch the wreath.

“No,” she said, “we’re not doing it that way.”

Kuhn tried to reassure her: “Mrs. Reagan, it’s all worked out, and it’s gonna be fine.”

“No, it isn’t,” she shot back. “We’re not doing it.”

Kuhn looked at Ronnie, who said nothing. So, the president’s assistant picked up a phone and said, “Get Mike Deaver right away.” Deaver arrived and immediately figured out the situation. Silently, he embraced Nancy. “He held her for like a minute. It seemed like a long time, just held her tight, close to him. Never said one word, and then let go and walked out, and then she was okay,” Kuhn told me. “He knew how to communicate with her without even speaking to her. And Reagan and I were looking at it. I could tell what Reagan was thinking. Reagan thought it was amazing. You could just read his eyes, you know? That Mike had that kind of way with Nancy Reagan. And then I was able to go on with the briefing.”

Ronnie’s emotional speech at Bergen-Belsen salvaged what could be salvaged of the day. “This painful walk into the past has done much more than remind us of the war that consumed the European continent. What we have seen makes unforgettably clear that no one of the rest of us can fully understand the enormity of the feelings carried by the victims of these camps,” the president said. “The survivors carry a memory beyond anything that we can comprehend. The awful evil started by one man—an evil that victimized all the world with its destruction—was uniquely destructive to the millions forced into the grim abyss of these camps.” Ronnie then quoted words that the camp’s most famous victim, teenager Anne Frank, wrote three weeks before her capture: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”

Reagan biographer Edmund Morris would later write that with that speech, “his agony—such as it was, brief as it was—transmitted itself, via television, into millions of human hearts.” But the scars lingered, particularly with Jewish Americans. Ronnie had lost some of his moral authority, and it was clear that just six months after his triumphant reelection, the White House was off its game. “We survived; but Bitburg was another sign that an era was ending,” Rollins wrote later. “These are the kind of things that always jump up and bite you when your political fortunes are in decline. In the first two years, when the revolution was riding tall in the saddle, Bitburg would have been a blip on the screen.”

Despite Nancy’s anxiety over Ronnie’s fortunes,