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

his title included the words ‘of staff,’ ” Nancy observed drily. She had no higher regard for “the mice,” as the cadre of obsequious aides that Regan brought over from the Treasury Department were known.

Regan was also a sexist of the first order. He dismissed calls for economic sanctions against the racist regime in diamond-producing South Africa by saying that America’s women weren’t “prepared to give up all their jewelry.” During the Geneva summit, he posited that female readers of the news would be interested only in the social doings of Nancy and Raisa because they couldn’t possibly “understand throw weights [the maximum payload that missiles can carry] or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human rights.” Still, Regan and the president got along wonderfully. Where the chief of staff was arrogant with the White House staff and with Congress, he and Ronnie connected as two old Irishmen, tickled by the fact that they had such similar last names. Regan had a member of his staff come up with a joke each day, usually a bawdy one, that he could share with the president.

“Ronnie never saw the Don that everybody else saw, because Don didn’t let him,” Nancy told journalist James Mann in a 2005 interview. “So Ronnie never knew all the things that were going on in the office, and all of the people who were coming to me, saying, ‘You’ve got to do something to get that man out of there.’ ” She told Mann that Regan once tried to fire Kathy Osborne, who had served as Ronnie’s secretary going back to Sacramento, because Osborne let a letter get through to the president without Regan seeing it first. “Don thought he was the president many times. But Ronnie never—he never knew,” Nancy said. “Those were hard times.”

Regan did little to hide his contempt for Nancy or his exasperation with her constant phone calls. At one point, he told her that if she had anything she wanted to let him know, she should talk to his deputy. “When I need something, I’ll call you directly,” Nancy replied. “I don’t see any need for an intermediary.”

The tart exchange showed how badly the chief of staff misread Nancy and the silent power she wielded in her husband’s White House. “I’m not the chief of staff of the first lady. I’m the chief of the staff of the president. I’m not taking her shit,” he fumed to Ed Rollins, who was political director at the time.

“Don, I’m just telling you. You’re making a big mistake,” Rollins warned. “You’ve got to deal with her, and it sometimes can be burdensome, but you have to deal with her, because, ultimately, it will do you in.”

Nancy soured on Regan “right off the bat,” Rollins told me. He recalled hearing the first couple arguing over the chief of staff not long after Regan took the job in early 1985. Rollins was following the Reagans one day as they walked through the colonnade that connects the West Wing and the residence. “I was about ten feet behind them, and they’re going at it,” Rollins said. “And finally, he stops, and he turns, and he said to her, ‘Nancy, I heard you the first time. I heard you the second time. I heard you the third time. I don’t want to hear you a fourth time,’ and turned and walked off.”

Nancy had her first direct confrontation with Regan about five months after he became chief of staff, when Ronnie was operated on for colon cancer. The protective first lady and the abrasive Regan battled over her refusal to allow anyone to visit her husband as he recuperated in the days after the surgery. She said Ronnie needed more time and privacy to heal; Regan insisted that a president could not be seen as incapacitated.

During this period, as earlier noted, an event occurred that set into motion the Iran-contra scandal—or, as it also became known, Iranscam. On July 18 Nancy lifted her ban on visitors and allowed National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, whom she liked, to meet with Ronnie in his hospital room. This was only five days after Ronnie’s surgery. Just that morning, doctors had removed his feeding tube and the metal clips from his incision. During what would later become an infamous twenty-three-minute private session, McFarlane informed the president that there were new signals of openness coming from some factions within the regime in Tehran. Ronnie authorized him to begin meeting with Iranian emissaries in a neutral country.

Regan, who was present throughout, said later that he heard no mention of swapping arms for hostages. The president would claim he had no recollection at all of McFarlane’s visit. But Ronnie’s diary entries make it clear that, from the start, he viewed the initiative as having the potential to provide “a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back.” His own words suggest that freeing the hostages—and not seizing a supposed strategic opening to Iran—was the president’s priority. “Okay,” he told McFarlane. “Proceed. Make the contact.”

Ronnie’s willingness to explore a deal for the hostages was a direct contradiction of what he was saying publicly. Exactly a month before his meeting with McFarlane, he had declared at a news conference: “Let me further make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices, wherever they may be, that America will never make concessions to terrorists—to do so would only invite more terrorism—nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so. Once we head down that path, there would be no end to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilized nations must pay.” As the Iran-contra scandal unfolded, America was learning that the president had done exactly what he had vowed not to.

After that hospital visit, Bud McFarlane did not last much longer as national security adviser. He left at the end of 1985, frustrated over his frequent clashes with Regan, who claimed foreign policy