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

but I kept wishing Nancy would not let it get to her. I wanted her to rise above the provocation, smile sweetly, and look ingenuous with her beautiful brown eyes wide open. I was surprised that a woman as controlled as Nancy Reagan would let herself get rattled, in full color on international TV. I wanted to shout at her, ‘Smile, Nancy! Smile!’

“Part of the problem was that no one dared to tell the First Lady such things.”

Barbara Bush, on the other hand, found the rivalry amusing, and allowed herself a bit of glee in the idea that Nancy might have finally met her match. In her diary, Barbara noted that she had been impressed by Raisa’s “marvelous” coloring, and that the Soviet first lady’s hair was a softer shade of red than the constant press references to henna would suggest. “She is a lovely looking creature, smaller than the size twelve we are reading about, more a six or an eight,” Barbara wrote. “She is a prettier package than the pictures show. I don’t know how old, but think the paper said fifty-three or fifty-five. That’s funny, for we really don’t know if Nancy Reagan is sixty-five or sixty-seven, and she won’t tell. I guess Raisa won’t tell, either.” Barbara also noticed that as Raisa’s visit progressed, her skirts were getting shorter and shorter to match Nancy’s. She wondered whether a seamstress was working overtime at the Soviet embassy.

There was one event where Nancy would not be outshone: the state dinner. She made sure everything was perfect, though she had to work around the Gorbachevs’ insistence that they be out of there by ten. There was also a surplus of male guests, because the Soviets had brought along so few women to Washington. For entertainment, Nancy booked the renowned pianist Van Cliburn, a Texan who had not played in public for nine years. He had a big following in the Soviet Union going back to 1958, when he won the first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the age of twenty-three. The achievement, coming at the height of the Cold War, also earned Cliburn the only ticker-tape parade that New York City has ever thrown for a classical musician. When the pianist began playing the beloved Russian melody “Moscow Nights” as an encore, the Gorbachevs started singing along, and by the second verse, the entire Soviet delegation had joined in.

After the going-away ceremony on the South Lawn, which took place in a heavy rainstorm, Barbara Bush accompanied Raisa to the airport. At one point, Barbara asked Raisa whether she knew that Nancy had recently undergone a serious operation for cancer. Raisa replied that in her country, something so personal would be considered unmentionable. Barbara averred that in the United States, it would be hard for a first lady to disappear for several weeks without the press knowing about it.

“What if the first lady had an abortion?” Raisa asked.

Barbara was taken aback and said she didn’t think that was comparable to a mastectomy. She told Raisa that Nancy had been courageous in going public and probably saved many lives by encouraging women to have mammograms. “We arrived at the airport before we could pursue this anymore,” she wrote in her diary.

There would be one last summit between Ronnie and Gorbachev, in May 1988. The president and Nancy traveled to Moscow with a four-day stopover in Helsinki, Finland, to reset the president’s body clock. Nancy made a point not to pack any gowns in her favorite color, red, for fear that she might be sending a message she didn’t intend. As they were driven from the airport, she was delighted to see Moscow streets lined with cheering crowds. The Reagans got a rapturous reception in the Soviet capital, much as the Gorbachevs had the previous year in Washington.

At one point during the trip, reporter Sam Donaldson asked the president whether he still considered the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

“No,” Ronnie said. “I was talking about another time and another era.”

But when Raisa took Nancy through the Kremlin, the two adversaries picked up right where they had left off. This time the flashpoint was religion. As they walked through the Assumption Cathedral, a fifteenth-century Russian Orthodox church where the czars were coronated, Nancy noted the religious imagery all around and asked whether services were ever held there.

“Nyet,” Raisa replied. The tour ended abruptly.

Nancy had finally found a way to get under Raisa’s skin. A couple of days later, they were to tour Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, where Nancy had specifically requested to see some of its famous icons. Raisa arrived early and gave the assembled media some background on the gallery. When Nancy got there, a reporter asked the American first lady about Raisa’s contention that the pieces had artistic and historic value, but no religious significance.

“I don’t know how you can neglect the religious implications,” Nancy replied. “I mean, they’re there for everybody to see.” She pointed out that one of the icons, the most famous, was called The Trinity. It is a fifteenth-century depiction of three angels who in the Book of Genesis were said to have visited Abraham to inform him that his ninety-year-old wife Sarah would bear a child.

“You realize we arrived on Trinity Sunday,” Nancy told Raisa, who gave no indication that she did.

Religion was a particularly sensitive subject in Washington-Moscow relations at that moment. Ronnie had served notice before the summit that he planned to bring a spotlight to the plight of Soviet Jews, and particularly the “refuseniks” who were not being allowed to emigrate. Nancy proposed they visit the apartment of one of the more well known of those families, the Ziemans, who had applied to leave the Soviet Union eleven years before. Yuri Zieman, the patriarch, lost his job as a scientist when he applied for a visa and was working as a plumber. In the months before the Reagans’ arrival, he came down with a brain ailment that required treatment unavailable in Moscow.

Plans were