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

marveled editor Andy Kowl of Fast Lane, the lifestyle magazine for men under thirty that had commissioned the survey. “If this had been a multiple-choice question, we would never have included her name.”

Nancy, traveling in Sweden to promote her antidrug cause, was amused and more than a little delighted when she learned of the survey result. “I talked to my husband last night,” she told reporters on her plane. “He said, ‘I’m sitting here with a poll in my hand, and I think you’d better get over here real soon.’ ”

Iran-contra continued to make headlines during 1987. One key remaining question was whether Ronnie had known of the illegal diversion of money from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels. In July Oliver North, wearing a uniform bedecked with ribbons and medals, delivered his testimony to the House and Senate select committees investigating the scandal. He spoke under a grant of limited immunity from prosecution, which meant that nothing he said to the lawmakers could be used against him. The television networks cleared their normal broadcast schedules to carry it live, and tens of millions of Americans tuned in. “Throughout the conduct of my entire tenure at the National Security Council, I assumed that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved it,” North said.

But the critical juncture came days later, when former national security adviser John Poindexter told those same committees that he had deliberately withheld information from Ronnie about the funneling of profits from the arms sales to the contras “so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability for the president if it ever leaked out.” Poindexter was the only living person who had both known of the diversion and who had met with the president alone. His statement, given under oath, did not reflect well on how the White House had been managed or the president’s competence as a chief executive. However, it ensured that Ronnie would not be held directly accountable for the illegal secret operation that had grown out of the disastrous arms sales.

His presidency seemed to be getting back on track, and his job-approval rating began inching back toward positive territory. At the end of the year, he and Gorbachev held their summit in Washington, and there would be another in Moscow before he left office. Ronnie was moving closer and closer to the place in history that Nancy envisioned for him, which was as a peacemaker of historic significance.

In November it was announced that he had settled on a spectacular, hundred-acre site in California for his presidential library. It would be built on a mesa in Simi Valley, a small city in eastern Ventura County. The land was nestled among the mountains and, on the clearest of days, offered a view of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. Prominent conservatives, including Ed Meese and Bill Clark, had pressed for locating the library at Stanford University, where it would work in tandem with the conservative Hoover Institution, a preeminent think tank of the Right. But some on Stanford’s faculty protested that having both Hoover and the Reagan Library on campus would compromise Stanford’s independence by tying it to right-wing Republicanism. And Ronnie wanted it in Southern California, where it would be easier for him to visit.

Wherever it was located, the project would require raising massive amounts of private funds, which meant the Reagans were once again turning to wealthy benefactors. Robert Higdon, who had been brought aboard by Mike Deaver in the mid-1980s to help set up the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, recalled that Ronnie had little appetite for this part. Nancy, on the other hand, had no reservations about doing what had to be done. At events with big donors, “he would show up. He would never ask anybody for a cent, where she wouldn’t hesitate. She was a closer,” Higdon said. Under the law, however, the Reagans were not allowed to know who had contributed or how much until after Ronnie was out of office.

In August 1987 the Reagans tapped assistant to the president Fred Ryan to begin organizing for the years after Ronnie would leave the White House. At that point, Ryan—who decades later would become publisher of the Washington Post—had been working for two years on planning for the library. A Californian, he relished the chance to return to his home state when the Reagans did and to serve as the chief of staff for Ronnie’s postpresidential operation. “I talked to him about what he wanted when he left office. Did he want to retire and go to his ranch? Nobody could have held anything against him for doing that. He was in his late seventies, and that would be a natural thing to do. Or did he want to have a limited involvement?” Ryan recalled. “He made it very clear that he wanted to continue to speak out on the issues he’d spoken out on as president, and things he thought of as unfinished business that he wanted to devote time to.”

Ryan began sounding out opportunities for the soon-to-be-ex-president to work with a speaker’s bureau and write his memoirs. He pondered how much partisan activity would be appropriate for a man who had spent eight years in the White House. Scouting for potential office space, Ryan found what he thought was the ideal building: a brand-new one among the shiny high-rises in Los Angeles’s Century City area. It was close to the house where the Reagans would be living, and, looking west, it offered a view of the ocean, something Ryan knew the president wanted. He was initially told there were no vacancies. But suddenly the top floor became available, after the makers of the movie Die Hard finished using it for the famous action scene at the end of the 1988 thriller in which there was a shootout with hostage-holding terrorists, and the roof of the building went up in a ball of flame.