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

the ten-day, five-nation European trip turned out to be a triumph for her personally. She got rave reviews in the media when she danced the flamenco in Madrid and met with parents concerned about drugs in Bonn. After a private audience at the Vatican with the pope, John Paul II handed her a message in which he lauded her work “against drug abuse and in the rehabilitation of those whose lives have been affected by this social evil.”

The following month, NBC aired a one-hour documentary about the first lady. Correspondent Chris Wallace said she was “at the peak of her power and the peak of her popularity. In polls these days, she does even better than her husband.” In the West Wing, however, things were not so felicitous. Deaver and Baker were gone. Rollins joined the White House exodus. New chief of staff Regan brought in his own team of advisers—a group that would become known within the building as “the mice.” The communications operation was in the hands of the bombastic Buchanan.

But even as Regan tightened his hold, those who worked for him could still feel Nancy’s will, like the pull of an unseen magnet. Peggy Noonan, a talented young speechwriter, described it this way: “Her power was everywhere, in personnel, in who rose and fell, she was on the phone with [national security adviser Robert C. “Bud”] McFarlane about foreign affairs, on the phone nixing and okaying trips and events, arranging to closet the president with this policy analyst or that, calling to get the speeches earlier. She was everywhere.”

Nancy and Regan had their first big run-in in July 1985. It was a struggle for control in the area where Nancy considered herself the first and final authority: Ronnie’s health and well-being. John Hutton, a new White House physician, had noticed that medical records showed a fluctuation in the president’s hematocrit number, the percentage of red blood cells to total blood volume, which might be a subtle indicator of a malignancy in the lower gastrointestinal tract. He recommended a colonoscopy, a diagnostic procedure not as common at that time as it is today. On Friday, July 12, Ronnie and Nancy boarded Marine One on the South Lawn for a short helicopter hop to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Ronnie declined anesthesia for the procedure. As the flexible scope made its way through his descending and transverse colons, Hutton and the other physicians followed its progress on a TV-like screen and were relieved to see only a few benign-looking growths called polyps, similar to ones the president had had removed in the past. Then it took a turn downward into his right colon. “Suddenly, looming up in full view of the scope and occupying most of the lumen of the cecum was an enormous mass, purple in color, and with a large malignant-appearing crater in its middle,” Hutton recalled. Even without a biopsy, they knew they were looking at cancer. They studied it in silence, for fear that saying anything would alarm their patient. Thoughts began racing through Hutton’s head: “How do I tell the First Lady?” “What impact will this have on our country, the presidency, and perhaps the world?”

Nancy was waiting in a nearby office with White House spokesman Larry Speakes. Before telling the first lady, Hutton whispered to the press secretary: “It’s cancer.” The doctor steered Nancy into a small office and delivered the news. He was struck by her composure. She insisted on knowing all the details—what this meant, what was next. Nancy noted that Chinese president Li Xiannian was set to visit Washington a week and a half later and asked whether the surgery could be delayed until after that. Hutton told her he wanted to do it as soon as possible, preferably the next day. Nancy agreed but made one request: she wanted to be the one to tell her husband. And she forbade the doctors from mentioning the word cancer to him.

They entered the president’s room so silently that Hutton could not even hear his own footsteps. Ronnie looked up and asked, “Why do you all look so glum?” Nancy sat on the bed and put her arms around him. “Honey,” she said, “the doctors have found a polyp that is too large to be removed the way the other ones were. The only way they can get it out is surgically. As long as we’re here, why don’t we do it tomorrow and get it over with?” Hutton was relieved. “Her aplomb was extraordinary. How easy she made it for us, as we then explained the procedure we would perform,” he said.

Ronnie took it calmly and said with a smile, “Does this mean I won’t be getting dinner tonight, either?” As she left his room, Nancy leaned against the wall, and the tears that she had been holding back came pouring out. That night, in the White House, she lay on Ronnie’s side of the bed, just as she had the day he was shot in 1981. And once again, she wrote in her diary, “What would I ever do without him?”

The operation began at eleven o’clock the following morning. This time White House counsel Fred Fielding rectified a mistake he had made when Ronnie was put under anesthesia after the assassination attempt. Fielding had Ronnie sign a document authorizing Vice President Bush to act as president temporarily. It was the first time ever that a provision of the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been invoked to deal with a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Nancy stood by Ronnie’s bedside as he put his signature to the historic document. The president joked that Bush should be informed that Nancy didn’t convey to him as part of the brief transfer of power.

The operation went smoothly. A large polyp was removed, along with two smaller ones and nearly two feet of intestine. A few minutes after seven o’clock, Nancy and her brother, Dick, went into the recovery room. Ronnie was groggy, with