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

Jackie Kennedy had been lionized for her sumptuous renovation of the White House, remaking a residence that she said “looked like it’s been furnished by discount stores.” As Nancy was doing, Jackie had launched the project within weeks of moving in and financed it with a staggering amount of money from private donors. In fact, some of those benefactors, such as Walter Annenberg, were the same people Nancy turned to twenty years later. When Jackie gave a guided tour of the results on Valentine’s Day 1962, an estimated eighty million rapturous TV viewers tuned in for the broadcast, which was carried live on CBS and NBC, and four days later by ABC. Jackie was given an honorary Emmy.

Nancy no doubt expected similar acclaim. It was without question that the place could use some sprucing up. When she and Ronnie arrived at the White House, there were mousetraps poking out from under threadbare furniture. Decorator Graber moved into the official residence for nine months. He and Nancy spent many days scouring a government warehouse near Alexandria, Virginia, for items they could haul out of storage and restore. They scavenged 150 pieces of furniture and art, much of it deteriorated and in need of restoration. Also on the to-do list: badly needed repairs to wiring and plumbing, including some fixtures that had to be made by hand. Thirty-three mahogany doors were sanded and refinished; six dozen lamps got new shades; new draperies were hung on twenty-six windows; and fresh wall coverings went up in ten rooms, seven closets, and eight bathrooms. “The project was designed to reestablish the dwelling, the edifice,” her chief of staff, Peter McCoy, told reporters. “It’s not as if the Reagans will be taking the painted walls with them.”

But where Jackie had beautified the presidential residence in the idyllic glow of Camelot, Nancy’s makeover seemed frivolous during an economic downturn in which average Americans were struggling and her husband was making sharp cuts in social programs. Nor did all of the private donors who contributed to the restoration appear to be operating with the purest of motives. Oil executives, for instance, gave $300,000 toward renovating the White House right after Ronnie decontrolled the price of petroleum. By the time Nancy was finished with her project, the redecorating fund had grown to $822,641.

There was also the fact that most of the improvements would never be seen or enjoyed by the public. Nearly 90 percent of the money was spent on the private living quarters on the White House’s second and third floors. Nancy acknowledged later that she had not understood what a controversy all of this would generate: “Looking back, I think my own naivete, and that of my staff, added to this and perhaps even prolonged it. Washington can be a tough town, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I suspect we all would do things differently if we had it to do over again.”

So overheated did the narrative of Nancy’s extravagance become that almost anything seemed believable. There was a false report in the media that the new first lady intended to take down a wall of the Lincoln Bedroom. “They knew none of those things were true,” she complained to Newsweek in March, “but they went ahead and printed them anyway. It was pretty mean.”

Meanwhile, people began asking when and whether Nancy would begin doing serious work on the charitable projects that she claimed to care about. “My family comes first,” she said. “I have to get Ronnie settled and know that he’s comfortable. It takes awhile to settle in, to develop your own living routines, like what chair he sits in and what chair you sit in in the family sitting room. I want to make the house as warm and comfortable and homey as possible.”

“Comfortable and homey” were not the impressions most Americans got when they finally saw the results of Nancy’s big project. The newly refurbished White House was unveiled in the December 1981 issue of Architectural Digest magazine, a $4.95-a-copy chronicle of excess. The photographer chosen to shoot the photos was a British lord, and they were laid out over an eighteen-page spread. Nancy realized later that in giving the exclusive to such an elite magazine, she had made “a mistake that only added to the picture many Americans already had of me—that I was a fancy, rich woman who kept acquiring more and more expensive items.”

Throughout that first year in the White House, Nancy and her staff struggled to come up with small ways to soften her image. To celebrate her birthday in July, eighteen wealthy donors chipped in $3,800 to repair a municipal swimming pool for the handicapped in a poorer part of Washington. After Nancy snipped the pink bow and pronounced it “the best birthday present I’ve gotten,” Mayor Marion Barry said: “If you have some friends who want to give some more, they’re certainly welcome to.”

But most of her gestures were met with skepticism. Nancy had indicated during the presidential campaign that she would take on fighting drug abuse among the young as her signature cause. In late October she met with teenagers and their parents at Manhattan’s Phoenix House, the nation’s largest drug rehabilitation center. “If we don’t do something, it seems to me we’re just going to lose a whole generation,” she said. “Their brains are going to be mush. It’s the future of our country. I think it’s the most serious problem.”

One account in the next day’s New York Daily News began: “Nancy Reagan got so involved in her tour of the Phoenix House drug treatment center yesterday morning that she was late for her hair dresser, Monsieur Marc.” The coverage also contrasted her comments about the seriousness of the drug scourge with the cuts that her husband was making in funding for treatment programs—including a sharp reduction in federal support for the one she visited. As the criticism mounted, Jackie