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

met the power brokers in this city. He never had any real friends here. Governor Reagan not only wants to know them, but he needs them to get this place working again.”

The social diplomacy effort began just days after the election. Nancy Reynolds, the Reagans’ aide from their Sacramento days, was already in Washington as chief lobbyist for the Bendix Corporation and knew the city’s major players. She arranged for the incoming first couple to host a candlelit dinner on November 18, 1980, at the exclusive 1925 F Street Club, which was housed in a nineteenth-century Greek Revival mansion just blocks from the White House.

Reynolds was amused by the first few responses she got to the invitations she sent out by telegram: “Are you sure this is serious? It’s not a practical joke? I’m a Democrat.” More than fifty leading figures from political, social, religious, and sports circles showed up. One woman ordered wine during the cocktail hour but changed her mind: “Oh, make it Scotch and water! The Carters are gone.” After dinner, the enchanted guests—many of whom had done their best to defeat Ronnie during the election—crowded around the president elect. The front page of the next day’s New York Times declared: “After four long years as wallflowers, members of the Washington establishment will finally have a suitor in the White House. Never was a neglected belle more eager to be wooed.” Two nights later, columnist George Will—whom the Times dubbed the Reagans’ “unofficial social director”—hosted another party for Ronnie and Nancy at his house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Will also prevailed on New York’s social doyenne Brooke Astor to put on a five-course dinner for fifty in the Reagans’ honor at her Park Avenue apartment.

Nancy’s hand was obvious in all of this; in fact, she had been laying the groundwork for years. She could not bear the perception among the sophisticates of New York and Washington that her husband was some kind of unpolished, unlettered cowboy. “The approval of the establishment was important to her,” said television newsman Chris Wallace, whose journalist father, Mike Wallace, had been a friend of Nancy’s mother going back to the 1940s. “There was no question that she wanted the big stage, and she defined success in a very conventional way.”

Among the capital’s power brokers, none was more important than Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, whose grand, art-filled home on R Street in Georgetown functioned as a salon for DC’s most interesting and influential people. Nancy had gotten to know Graham a decade earlier through their mutual friend, author Truman Capote. “I couldn’t go to their dinner at the F Street Club because I was going to be out of town,” Graham recalled later. “I called up Nancy Reynolds and said I was so disappointed I couldn’t come, and she said, ‘Why don’t you invite them to dinner?’ And I said, ‘I couldn’t do that. I didn’t vote for them, and the paper didn’t endorse them.’ That would be like trying to have it both ways. But Nancy Reynolds said, ‘Just invite them and see.’ ” So she did. Graham’s dinner on December 11 brought together an all-star list of DC luminaries, who for that night put aside their political differences and the still-raw feelings from the election. Henry Kissinger was there, as were Carter’s White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, National Urban League president Vernon Jordan, and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his journalist wife, Sally Quinn, who had written blistering profiles of Nancy.

The president elect’s hard-Right supporters were not enamored with any of this. When an image of Ronnie kissing Graham at her doorstep appeared in newspapers across the country, the Wall Street Journal called it “a photograph that may upset arch-conservatives almost as much as the famous one of Jimmy Carter bussing Leonid Brezhnev at the Vienna summit.” Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus lobbying organization, warned in a speech to evangelical activists: “If by June the Washington establishment is happy with Ronald Reagan, then you should be unhappy with Ronald Reagan.” But others understood the shrewdness of co-opting the enemy this way. Richard Nixon had spent his presidency chafing at the mercilessness of what he called the “Georgetown set.” They helped destroy him, he believed, with a thousand snubs and slights. In a letter to Deaver, Nixon wrote that he was “enormously impressed by the way our man has taken over the Washington establishment by storm. There will, of course, be some rough times ahead, but I am confident that he is building up enough equity that he will be able to sail on no matter how rough the sea gets.”

The weeks between the November election and the January inauguration did not go entirely smoothly, however. Even as the Reagans were wowing DC kingmakers, there was no letup in the constant drama and tension within their dysfunctional family. On November 25 Ron and Doria, who lived together in a one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment, were quietly married. Only after the fact did Nancy and Ronnie learn of the ceremony, which was performed in the chambers of a New York judge. The couple’s sole witnesses were a Secret Service agent and a friend of Ron’s. The bride wore red cowboy boots with a black sweater and slacks; the groom, blue jeans and tennis shoes. At the time, Nancy had yet to warm up to Doria personally or approve of her twenty-two-year-old son choosing a woman seven years older than he was. An unnamed friend told People magazine: “She loves young Ron and cried for days after he got married.”

Ronnie’s election victory also brought no letup in the battle between Nancy and her antagonists in the media. Her tone deafness and poor timing didn’t help. Particularly damaging was an interview she did with United Press International’s Helen Thomas on December 10, just two days after Beatles legend John Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park West. Nancy repeated her long-standing opposition to gun control and