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

a necessarily favorable way. She had once been dismissed as a shallow dilettante—the “marzipan wife,” in Gloria Steinem’s memorable phrase—and mocked for her adoring gaze and her frivolous, acquisitive enthusiasm for decorating and designer fashion. Nancy was now understood to be a shrewd and powerful operator in her own right. The woman so often labeled Queen Nancy was suddenly being portrayed as a size-2 Lady Macbeth. “If anyone had said six years ago that one day Nancy Reagan would be called power-hungry, we would have cut off his or her bar tab. I’d never seen her hungry, period,” columnist Ellen Goodman marveled in the Boston Globe.

Both the nature of the criticism and the source of it took a dramatic turn. Where earlier Nancy had drawn the contempt of feminists and her husband’s liberal political opponents, she was now under fire from traditionalists, who preferred that presidential spouses hew to a mold they recognized. As so many of her predecessors had learned before Nancy, when the word powerful is used about a first lady, it is rarely intended as a compliment.

Regan had barely cleaned out his desk when the fire began. On March 2 well-connected conservative columnist William Safire wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times: “At a time he most needs to appear strong, President Reagan is being weakened and made to appear wimpish and helpless by the political interference of his wife.… This is not Rosalyn [sic] Carter, ‘the Steel Magnolia,’ stiffening her husband’s spine; this is an incipient Edith Wilson, unelected and unaccountable, presuming to control the actions and appointments of the executive branch.” Safire, not bothering to disguise the sexism that underlay his diatribe, also referred to Nancy as being at “the top of the henpecking order.” His fellow columnist James Reston suggested two days later that the president should start “putting his own house in order, since nobody elected Nancy.” A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll later that month found that an unusually high 39 percent of Americans thought the president let himself be influenced too much by his wife.

But Nancy also found some unlikely defenders. The day after the Safire column appeared, Washington Post columnist Judy Mann, who had been among the first lady’s harshest critics in the past, offered a rebuttal: “The gentlemen who could exercise the greatest influence on the president couldn’t do the job. Mrs. Reagan did the dirty work for them, and now they are out to get her.… The first lady is the only one on the White House team who can’t be fired. That put her in a position to do something that no one else was able to do: get the presidency back on track. The president doesn’t look like a wimp. He had a wife who understood what had to be done and was willing to do the dirty work. That makes him a pretty lucky man.”

It didn’t help things for Nancy when Howard Baker, the incoming chief of staff, added more fuel. As he was flying up to Washington from Florida to assume his new job, Baker told his airline seatmate, the executive editor of the Miami Herald: “When she gets her hackles up, she can be a dragon.” So, it was inevitable that the next time reporters had a chance to question Ronnie, one of the first things he was asked was: “What is Mrs. Reagan’s role in running the government?”

“Not the one that has been bandied about in the press,” the president retorted.

Then came the follow-up: “Which part of it do you have the greatest objection to, Mr. President, of the many reports that have been written about that?”

Normally, Ronnie deflected questions such as these. He didn’t this time: “Well, the idea that she is—you realize I’m breaking my rule here, but you’ve touched a nerve here with that—but the idea that she’s involved in governmental decisions and so forth and all of this and being a kind of a dragon lady. There is nothing to that, and no one who knows her well would ever believe it.”

A reporter pointed out that the “dragon” comparison had been made by the president’s chief of staff, who, as it happened, was sitting on a couch nearby. Baker smiled sheepishly, which brought laughter all around—except from Ronnie. The president doubled down on his defense of his wife, insisting falsely she had had nothing to do with Regan’s departure. He repeated the fictitious narrative he had been using about the chief of staff’s resignation: “As I stated in my statement, he had spoken to me months before about his desire to leave. And then when all of this came up, decided that he would see it out and wait until after the Tower Commission report came in.” Baker tried to clean up the mess he had made. “The first lady is a distinguished citizen of this nation,” he said. “She’s a great lady, and she obviously is a lady of strong conviction. That’s what I meant.” He added that he planned to give Nancy a call. When reporters asked what they would talk about, Baker said, “Whatever she wants.” That brought another round of laughter.

Despite its uncomfortable start, Nancy’s relationship with Baker turned out to be a far smoother one than she had known with Regan. She became especially close to Deputy Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, who handled many of Baker’s management responsibilities and succeeded him as chief of staff in Ronnie’s final year as president. Duberstein respected the first lady, tolerated her frequent phone calls, and solicited her input. “She became my partner, a major help,” he told me. “She had an uncanny understanding of her husband that nobody else had, and she was willing to share that with me.”

The two of them developed an amiable routine. Nearly every weekday, Nancy would call Duberstein about a quarter to nine, as Ronnie was heading out of the family quarters toward the Oval Office. She let Duberstein know what her husband had read in the paper