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

One of the most important things Clark and Meese figured out was a way to deal with Nancy. The solution was the number two guy in the office: Michael K. Deaver. A smooth former adman, Deaver had risen through the early turmoil to become deputy chief of staff. As Clark and then Meese tired of having to take the first lady’s calls, Deaver’s portfolio grew to include what he would later call the “Nancy Clause.” Others dubbed it the “Mommy Watch.” His job was to handle the incoming from Nancy and keep her out of everyone else’s hair.

Deaver was terrified the first time his secretary announced that Mrs. Reagan was on the phone. Nancy wanted to rearrange the governor’s schedule so that he could make an event she was planning in Los Angeles. Deaver told her that wouldn’t be possible because Ronnie had to be in Sacramento for state business. After a long silence, Nancy agreed. “That was it,” Deaver recalled later. “Flames hadn’t shot out of the handset. State marshals didn’t bust down my door as soon as we were through and order me to start packing. ‘Whew,’ I thought to myself. ‘Just maybe this job is doable.’ ”

What Nancy demanded was, in short, utter honesty. Deaver had given her the facts, without finessing them or treating the first lady with condescension. That respect—along with, Deaver’s detractors would say, his subservience—would be the basis of their close bond over the decades to come. It was to be one of the most significant relationships that Nancy would ever form. Though the two of them would hit some rough patches, each trusted that the other would always put Ronnie’s interest and image first. Each was determined not to see him fail. As Deaver put it: “In taking the job nobody else wanted—the guy who, in addition to other duties, would have to answer to California’s inexhaustible first lady—I had stumbled upon my niche.”

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his niche had found him. “Nancy was soon able to see in me a quality I wasn’t at all sure I possessed: the instinct for how the media operates and how best to present Ronald Reagan to it, a job she had been doing alone for years,” he wrote. “Although I was admittedly nervous in my initial dealings with her, I think she realized after a few months that she didn’t intimidate me. Soon we were huddling on scheduling, politics, the press, speeches, and other affairs of state. I had fully expected to learn the lion’s share of politics at the side of Ronald Reagan. He’s the one who bucked the odds and drove California’s Democratic machine to the ground. But Nancy proved to be a shrewd political player in her own right.”

Ronnie liked the fact that the two were conferring so closely and started referring slyly to Nancy as Deaver’s “phone pal.” Meese and others in the office also began turning to Deaver as a back channel to the first lady, to get her advice without having to deal with her calls. When issues came up that required some persuasion, Nancy coached Deaver on how to win Ronnie to his side: not by arguing the political consequences, she advised, but by pointing out who might get helped or hurt, or how it fit with the governor’s philosophy. “By the time he came into the White House, he really knew Ronnie and understood when to approach him and how,” Nancy wrote. “Mike was never afraid to bring Ronnie the bad news or tell him when he thought he was wrong.”

Another who worked well with the governor’s wife was former local TV news anchor Nancy Clark Reynolds, who had the office next to Deaver’s. She had been hired to handle the broadcast side of the media operation and, by virtue of being one of the few women on the staff, was also assigned to Mommy Watch. She traveled frequently with the first lady, and the two became comfortable with each other. The daughter of a former US senator from Idaho, Reynolds had grown up surrounded by the power players of Washington and was not intimidated by Nancy’s often imperious manner. Eventually she began to appreciate what few others saw in Mrs. Reagan. “She was the smartest person, so up on everything,” Reynolds said to me many years later. “She was the smartest politician I ever knew.”

Reynolds also discerned the vulnerability behind the first lady’s brittle facade. “Nancy is very wary. She’s terribly cautious about the unknown, and suspicious, almost, of strangers or situations with which she’s not familiar,” Reynolds told Lou Cannon in a 1981 off-the-record interview, a transcript of which is in his papers at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “I’ve always said I felt that she had some insecurities.”

As hyper-attuned as Nancy was to her husband’s public image, she had—and would always have—some gaping blind spots when it came to her own. During those early years in Sacramento, she touched off a series of controversies, some of which foreshadowed her later stumbles in Washington.

The first came soon after Ronnie was inaugurated, when she declared that she would not live in the decrepit Governor’s Mansion. The eighty-nine-year-old wooden Victorian Gothic house at Sixteenth and H Streets was not without its charms. The gingerbread structure had a cupola, winding staircases, high ceilings, and big bedrooms. But it was gloomy and located in a seedy part of Sacramento. Its neighbors included a bustling gas station, a no-star motel, and an American Legion hall. The house was also on a major one-way thoroughfare between Reno and San Francisco, where trucks roared by twenty-four hours a day. They idled at the stoplight just outside the mansion, then shifted gears, interrupting dinner-party conversation and making it impossible for insomniac Nancy to sleep at night.

Then there were the safety issues. The mold-scented bedrooms had ropes instead of fire escapes. When a false alarm went off only a month after the Reagans moved in,