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

a tube coming out of his nose and another one going into his arm. For the first photograph that would be released publicly after the surgery, Nancy leaned in to kiss her husband, positioning her head and his so that his nasogastric feeding tube would not show.

Two days after the surgery, on July 15, a pathology report confirmed that the tumor was malignant. The doctors assured Nancy and Ronnie that they had gotten it all. The president should have every expectation of making a full recovery and leading a normal life, they said, though he would no longer be able to eat the popcorn that he loved. In the future, Ronnie would deny that he had even had cancer. As he saw it, “I had something inside me that had cancer in it, and it was removed.”

Nancy closely monitored the briefings that her husband’s medical team was giving the reporters who were clamoring for information. The first lady was aghast to see diagrams of her husband’s insides being broadcast on national television. She was also concerned that one of those providing information to the media was Dr. Stephen Rosenberg, the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, who had been blunt with the Reagans in private conversations about the fact that someone who has had cancer is never entirely out of the woods. Sure enough, Rosenberg began his presentation by making a statement in the present tense, not the past: “The president has cancer.” Nancy, watching from her husband’s hospital suite, was furious. “Goddamn it,” she said, “I knew he was going to do that.”

Ronnie was in the hospital for a week, during which Nancy and Don Regan were at loggerheads over the chief of staff’s insistence that the president return to conducting business right away. “For three days, she insisted that he see no one in the hospital. She wouldn’t let him see George Bush. She wouldn’t let him see Bud McFarlane, George Shultz, Weinberger—nobody,” Regan told Lou Cannon later. “Because in her opinion, he couldn’t be tired out this way, he couldn’t risk not having a good recuperative period, that he might exhaust himself doing that. On the other hand, I reminded her that he was still the president of the United States and different from most mortals and that he had to carry on the business of state and that it looked very peculiar.” Regan argued that other world leaders, as well as the American public, would become “a little bit apprehensive as to, is this man all right?”

It also annoyed Nancy that Regan was taking a government helicopter back and forth from the hospital each day, while she was commuting by car. “I must have had some inkling, even then, of what increasingly bothered me about Don Regan, which was that he often acted as if he were president,” Nancy recalled later. Regan tried to shrug off her complaints, until he got a call from Ed Hickey, who was in charge of scheduling military transportation for the White House. “I’d cancel the helicopter if I were you, Don,” Hickey said. “The first lady’s staff are talking about it.” Regan argued that the drive would take forty-five minutes each way, but when Hickey told him, “The buzzards are out,” Regan finally gave in. “Okay,” he said, “cancel the damn helicopter.”

Nancy was not entirely successful in keeping out visitors. One who made it into Ronnie’s room was national security adviser McFarlane. Nancy had told Regan that if McFarlane had anything that the president needed to know, he could put it in writing. But McFarlane insisted that he had to see Ronnie in person. The brief meeting in Ronnie’s hospital room five days after his surgery would later be recognized as a fateful one. McFarlane told the president that there were signals from Iran suggesting the possibility of establishing a dialogue after years of having no relations. Ronnie confided to his diary that the “strange soundings” coming from Iran might also provide an opening to solve another problem that was weighing on his mind. In March 1984 William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, had been kidnapped by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with ties to Iran. Over the next fifteen months, six more Americans had been taken hostage.

Ronnie still had the impulses of the young lifeguard who more than a half century before had saved seventy-seven souls from drowning in the Rock River. Opening a channel to Tehran, he wrote, “could be a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back.” The president authorized McFarlane to meet with two Iranian government representatives in a neutral country. So began a series of events that would lead to the swap of US weapons for hostages—the core transaction of the Iran-contra scandal that would blow up the following year.

Shortly before Ronnie left the hospital, he delivered his regular Saturday radio address, in which he said: “I’d like to indulge myself for a moment here. There’s something I want to say, and I wanted to say it with Nancy at my side, as she is right now, as she always has been. First ladies aren’t elected, and they don’t receive a salary. They have mostly been private persons forced to live public lives, and in my book, they’ve all been heroes. Abigail Adams helped invent America. Dolley Madison helped protect it. Eleanor Roosevelt was FDR’s eyes and ears. Nancy Reagan is my everything.”

At the end, Ronnie added, “By the way, are you doing anything this evening?”

What neither of them knew was that they had not put the subject of cancer behind them. When doctors had pulled the tape from Ronnie’s nasal tube, his nose started bleeding. Then the skin crusted and began bleeding again. Ten days later, a biopsy revealed that what appeared to be a pimple was actually basal cell carcinoma, a common and normally curable form of skin cancer. Nancy, still sensitive about all the intrusive news coverage about Ronnie’s colon cancer, wanted it to remain a