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

well under way—a red White House phone had even been installed in their apartment—when the Soviets passed the word to the American delegation that the Ziemans would never be allowed to get out unless the Reagans canceled their visit to the family’s home. The Reagans settled instead for seeing the Ziemans at a reception they hosted for hundreds of dissidents at Spaso House, the US ambassador’s residence.

“Was this a bluff? Nobody could say, but we didn’t want to take any chances. No promises were made, but it was hinted that if we left the Ziemans alone, they would be allowed to leave the country,” Nancy recalled. “Two months later, they were given their visas—but only after Ronnie called the Soviet ambassador and reminded him of the implied agreement.”

On the final night of their trip to Moscow, the Reagans sat with the Gorbachevs in the gilded, red-curtained royal box at the Bolshoi Theatre and saw its world-famous ballet company perform. Then they went to dinner at a dacha. Nancy was exhausted by the time they headed in for the night, but they stopped at Red Square. America’s first couple got out of the car and strolled hand in hand, posing and waving for photographers in front of landmark St. Basil’s Cathedral. “It would have been a shame to go home without seeing it,” Nancy wrote later.

This supposedly spontaneous photo opportunity capped the summit with an image that would leave more of an impression than the news stories, which lamented the fact that it had not produced any tangible new initiatives. But what the summit lacked in substance, it more than made up for with thrilling symbolism. Americans heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. There had been the sight of Ronnie putting his arm around Gorbachev as the two of them had taken their own walk in Red Square. Blimps over the Kremlin dangled the American and Soviet flags.

All of it spoke to the fact that the world was entering a new era. As Ronnie’s presidency reached its final months, his vision was on its way to being achieved. After four decades of Cold War, two leaders had decided to trust each other enough to bring it to an end. However, the Nobel Peace Prize that Nancy had dreamed of for her husband would go to Gorbachev, alone, in 1990.

Nancy saw Raisa only one more time while Ronnie was in office. They were both in New York in December 1988 for a United Nations meeting where Gorbachev was to announce that he was reducing Soviet military forces by a half million troops. By then, George H. W. Bush was the president elect. The two first ladies crossed paths at a luncheon at the home of Marcela Perez de Cuellar, the wife of the UN secretary general. “I will miss you and your husband,” Raisa told Nancy with apparent sincerity. “As for the two of us, it was destiny that put us at the place we were, next to our husbands, to help bring about the relationship that our two countries now have.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

While Ronnie was making progress toward a historic rapprochement with the Soviet Union, storm clouds were building at home. In his final two years as president, he would be hit by his most serious crisis, a scandal that shattered the nation’s trust in his character and threatened his survival in office. Nancy would once again step into her role as his enforcer and guardian. One of her greatest obstacles, as it turned out, was her husband’s obstinacy. But Nancy persisted, convinced that Ronnie had never needed her so badly.

The darkness began near the end of 1986. This was a year in which Ronnie counted a host of major domestic achievements, among them a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s tax system and the passage of a major immigration bill he had championed. On September 14 Ronnie held Nancy’s hand as they made a rare joint address from the West Sitting Hall of the residence and called for a “national crusade” against drug abuse. Six weeks later, the president signed into law a tough $1.7 billion anti-narcotics bill. He handed his pen to Nancy as a souvenir. “She started long before the polls began to register our citizens’ concern about drugs,” he said. “She mobilized the American people, and I’m mighty proud of her.”

But the 1986 congressional campaign season was a brutal one for the president’s Party, as midterm elections during a second term tend to be. The stakes for this one were enormous. Hanging in the balance was the survival of the Senate majority that had ridden to Washington on Ronnie’s coattails six years before. The GOP Senate had been his legislative bulwark against the Democratic House on fiscal issues and foreign policy. A fully Democratic Congress would ensure no further progress on the unfinished business of his conservative agenda.

On the final weekend before the election, Ronnie returned to Southern California, where he had launched his political career, and made a stop in Orange County, an epicenter of right-wing activism. The speech he gave to a crowd of 1,200 in a Hilton ballroom was sentimental—almost elegiac.

“I remember coming to Anaheim twenty years ago in my first campaign for governor. Orange County was essential to success. And everything we’ve accomplished since then in Sacramento and, yes, in Washington began with that margin of victory provided here in Orange County. I delight in telling some people, who don’t understand, outside of the state of California, that Orange County is where the good Republicans go before they die,” he said. “Today you are no less vital to securing the gains that we’ve made and keeping our country moving forward. Your support is indispensable again, so let me ask you this one last time: come Election Day, let’s get out the vote and see to it that our team wins the day.”

During that campaign, Ronnie hit the road as if he himself were on