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

way in which she chose to play the role in which history had cast her. The book also glosses over events and denies some things that are clearly true, such as the fact that she waged a guerrilla campaign against Don Regan with strategic leaks to the press. But Nancy’s assessments of the people around her husband come off as pretty close to the mark. And she is forthright in admitting that she made her share of mistakes, bringing many of her problems—and heartbreak—upon herself.

The book’s dedication is poignant in that regard:

To Ronnie, who always understood

And to my children, who I hope will understand.

Its passages about the strains within the Reagan family stand out as particularly raw. “What I wanted most in all the world was to be a good wife and mother. As things turned out, I guess I’ve been more successful at the first than at the second,” Nancy acknowledged. But she was also unsparing in airing her grievances against the four Reagan offspring, particularly Patti, with whom she was not on speaking terms at the time the book was published. Sally Quinn, reviewing it in the Washington Post, wrote: “What is appalling is the way she attacks her own child. It is so hurtful, so painful, so embarrassing, so pathetic that it takes your breath away.”

Nancy’s book, however, was only one in a stream of uncomfortable Reagan-era remembrances to hit the bookstands in those years. There was astrologer Joan Quigley’s 1990 volume “What Does Joan Say?” The truth, which was that she was consulted on presidential scheduling decisions, was weird enough. But in her book, Quigley took credit for everything from the warming of US-Soviet relations, to calming the controversy over Ronnie’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery, to ensuring the confirmation of a nominee to the US Supreme Court. Many of her claims—“I was the Teflon in the Teflon presidency,” she wrote—were absurd.

That same year, former speechwriter Peggy Noonan came out with What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, a snarky, almost anthropological look at the Reagan years. At times, Noonan wrote, it seemed that “the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” His White House, in Noonan’s telling, was “like a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there is nothing inside.” Noonan posited that Nancy was “a wealthy, well-dressed woman who followed the common wisdom of her class” and “disliked the contras because they were unattractive and dirty.”

Despite what Noonan had dished in the book, she and Nancy would eventually become close. Mutual friends brought them together over dinner in the mid-1990s, shortly after Ronnie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Noonan was surprised to discover how much she liked Nancy. “Everything somehow was changed, and I just wanted to put my arm around her and appreciate her,” Noonan recalled later. “Because suddenly I saw what it had cost her; had always cost her. And I wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

But that kind of reassessment of Nancy would not come for years. In the meantime, she endured criticism from many directions, some of them unexpected. Around the same time that Noonan’s caustic book was published, Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, who had been chief of protocol, joined the pile-on with her memoir titled Keeper of the Gate. Roosevelt castigated the former first lady on a number of fronts, one of which was the quality of the entertainment she chose for state dinners. “Our foreign guests were often subjected to has-been popular singers and other marginal performers who were not up to White House standards,” Roosevelt lamented.

By the first anniversary of the Reagans’ triumphant departure from Washington, Los Angeles magazine had pronounced them “the most unpopular First Couple in history.” In November 1991 a Los Angeles Times poll found that more than two-thirds of the American public viewed Ronnie as an average or below-average president.

That same year, Kitty Kelley’s blockbuster takedown of the former first lady came out. Kelley was well known for unflattering books she had written about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography was more than six hundred pages of gossip, salacious tidbits, and heavy innuendo. Nancy was portrayed as a shallow social climber, an uncaring parent, and the manipulative force behind a dim-brained president. Among the most headline-grabbing—and specious—claims was Kelley’s suggestion that Nancy and Frank Sinatra had a long-term sexual affair.

Kelley had done extensive research and uncovered fresh material that shed new light on some of the broad outlines of Nancy’s life, particularly its complicated beginnings. But every fact that the author dug up was turned in a single direction, to make the case that Nancy was a vain and cruel shrew with no redeeming qualities. A review in the New York Times deemed it “one of the most encyclopedically vicious books in the history of encyclopedic viciousness.” Which pretty much guaranteed that people would rush to buy it. Bookstores sold out within hours, with some reporting it was the fastest-moving volume they had ever seen. The first printing of 600,000 was shipped within a day, and by the end of a week, there were 925,000 copies in print. In Washington, the book was on everyone’s lips. Barbara Bush denounced it as “trash and fiction,” but Nancy’s successor as first lady was reported to have been spotted reading a copy disguised with a different dust jacket.

Nancy was devastated. In several letters Ronnie wrote around the time, he alluded to the intensity of his wife’s distress. “A big thank-you for your letter and thank Pat also. Nancy and I are truly upset and angry over the total dishonesty of Kitty Kelley and her book,” he wrote former president Nixon on April 11. “We haven’t found one person she names as her sources who has ever known her or been contacted by her. Believe it or not, one