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

tunnel from the Treasury Building, which was located next to the White House at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was the same way that Strauss and Rogers had come for their private session with Ronnie in December.

Both Spencer and Parvin described the subsequent scene to me. While the three visitors were dressed in business attire, the president was wearing a jogging suit. He had spent the day at home reading the board’s report and had gotten all the way to the appendices. Nancy was going back and forth between the sitting room and the den where the television was, catching the latest reports on Regan’s resignation.

“John,” Spencer told the former senator, “tell the president what’s going on.”

For the next two hours, it fell to Tower—a longtime supporter and admirer of Ronnie—to explain to the president, in the bluntest of terms, what his investigation had uncovered. Tower told Ronnie that this scandal could destroy his presidency. He even warned that the president himself could be facing criminal charges and should consider retaining an outside lawyer. The only thing that could save Ronnie now, Tower insisted, was admitting what the public knew already about the real reason for the arms sales.

They also spoke a bit about the human toll the scandal had taken. Two weeks before, on the morning that Bud McFarlane had been scheduled to testify before the Tower Board, the former national security adviser had attempted suicide by downing more than two dozen Valium. When paramedics arrived at McFarlane’s home, his distraught wife was holding a note he had written, which she refused to show them. A Valium overdose is rarely fatal, unless the highly addictive antianxiety medication is mixed with alcohol or other drugs. But McFarlane spent the next two weeks in Bethesda Naval Hospital, during which he was interviewed twice by the Tower Commission. That he could have been driven to such a desperate action weighed heavily on those in the family quarters that day. Parvin recalled that someone—he can’t remember who—remarked that of those who had been swept up in the scandal, McFarlane “was probably the most decent and conscientious of the lot.”

Ronnie listened largely in silence as Tower finished delivering what Parvin described as the “hard truth” of what his commission had found. Then, as the meeting concluded and Tower got up to leave, the president did something astonishingly graceful toward the man who had just belted him with a scathing assessment of his performance and judgment. He thanked Tower for his service to the country. The former Texas senator could not hold back his emotion any longer and broke down sobbing.

Parvin finally knew what he would write: the words that Ronnie was at last ready to say. The president delivered them from the Oval Office the following Wednesday, March 4, which also happened to be the Reagans’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” he said in the twelve-minute speech. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true; but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower Board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran, deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake.” Ronnie admitted that he had been so preoccupied with the welfare of the hostages that he hadn’t asked the questions he should have or paid enough attention to what members of his staff were doing in his name.

The speech was a success. Veteran journalist R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in the New York Times: “President Reagan spoke to the American people tonight in a spirit of contrition that has not been heard from the White House in a quarter century.… Not since John F. Kennedy took the blame for the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 has any president so openly confessed error.” An overnight CBS News poll showed a 9-point jump in the president’s approval rating, nudging it back into positive territory, at 51 percent to 42 percent. Richard Wirthlin’s internal numbers looked even better.

Ronnie’s presidency had been pulled back from the abyss. And to a degree that he himself most likely had not recognized, Nancy had run the rescue operation. She was more attuned to the danger than her husband was, and a sharper judge of character. Where he was averse to confrontation, she was willing to mow down anyone whose presence became a problem, regardless of how long or how faithfully they had served Ronnie in the past. She had persisted, no matter how hard the president resisted her efforts and her advice. And she had been right. Nancy came through for Ronnie, when so many of the supposedly smart men in his administration had failed him. Nearly two decades later, David Abshire wrote: “When Nancy was brought in after the scandal broke, she was key in the turnaround, bringing in outside advisers, protecting the president from foolish moves on premature public appearances, and—looking long term—bringing in a new chief of staff. Truly it can be said that Nancy Davis Reagan played the crucial role in saving the Reagan presidency and has thereby achieved a special place in the history of first ladies.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Four days after Don Regan stormed out of the White House, Nancy gave a speech to the American Camping Association. In it, she made what she insisted was an innocent reference to her childhood summers at Camp Kechuwa: “I don’t think most people associate me with leeches or how to get them off. But I know how to get them off. I’m an expert at it.”

No one saw that as merely an offhand comment. Nancy’s role in salvaging her husband’s presidency from the wreckage of the Iran-contra scandal reshaped her image, and not in