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

Kennedy Onassis called with sympathy and some advice. All of this would pass, the former first lady told Nancy, but it might be a good idea to quit reading the newspapers until it did.

The withering press coverage that first year was not confined to the US side of the Atlantic. In late July Nancy traveled to London for the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. She arrived with an enormous entourage, and the incredulous British media pounced. An article on the front page of the liberal-leaning Guardian began: “The one-time starlet of such B-films as ‘The Next Voice You Hear’ (1950) and ‘Hellcats of the Navy’ (1957) flew into Heathrow yesterday with 12 secret servicemen, five hat boxes, and six dresses.” The sober Times of London noted that Nancy had “squeezed more engagements into the week before the royal wedding than Alice’s white rabbit.”

Reporters also noted that Nancy arrived at Prince Charles’s polo match in a six-car motorcade. The queen, on the other hand, drove herself there in a station wagon and was followed by her daughter, Princess Anne, steering a Range Rover. Crowds outside the Royal Opera House booed the American first lady, and one British newspaper claimed, falsely, that she had demanded a front-row seat at the wedding. So huge were the diamond earrings that Nancy wore to the queen’s ball at Buckingham Palace that one reporter blurted out, “Are they real?” Nancy replied, “I’ll never tell.” They were, and on loan from the Bulgari jewelry family, whose spokesman said they were Nancy’s “to wear as long as she wants to wear them.”

Nancy exhibited a blind spot—and a stubborn streak—when it came to the matter of accepting freebies. In early 1981 White House counsel Fielding, accompanied by Baker and Meese, spent a painful half hour with her in the residence explaining in detail how the law worked in that regard. The 1978 Ethics in Government Act required high-ranking government officials and their spouses to report any gifts they received worth more than $35. If one came from a foreign government, and they wanted to keep it, they had to pay for it. Nancy was incensed. Why, she wanted to know, would things that she received from her personal friends be anyone else’s business? It was an argument that she and Fielding would have over and over again. An especially heated dispute involved a $400 set of inscribed silver picture frames from Frank Sinatra. So obstinate was the first lady that Fielding made a practice of sending lawyers from his office to the presidential living quarters once a year on a reconnaissance mission to check for items that Nancy was trying to slip past the rules.

At the same time, the White House counsel discovered he could rely on Nancy to be his ally when other sensitive matters arose. She had supported him when he kicked the Kitchen Cabinet out of the Old Executive Office Building, and she was always ready to help with even more delicate matters—such as when he received reports that one of the freewheeling Reagan children was getting close to the legal and ethical boundaries that Fielding called “the shock line.” Nancy was also proactive in sharing her concerns when she picked up signals of a potential problem that might embarrass the president. In one instance, she learned that US Information Agency director Charles Z. Wick had installed a $32,000 security system in his rented home and charged it to the government. “She didn’t hesitate to let me know that Charlie was doing something wrong,” Fielding said. “I thought it was interesting, because Mary Jane Wick was one of her closest friends.”

Occasionally, Nancy would summon the White House counsel to the residence, but more often, he would hear from her by telephone. Fielding could decipher the first lady’s mood from the moment he picked up the line. “Fred…” she would say slowly. One Fred signaled it would be a friendly chat. “Fred… Fred…” meant something was bothering her. If Nancy said his name three times, he knew she was in a state of high alarm. There were many three-Fred conversations over the course of Fielding’s five years as White House counsel, and even a few four-Fred ones.

“These calls became the source of some amusement in my office, especially in the first two years, since I was trying to stop smoking, and often I would relapse during or after a call from the East Wing,” Fielding said. “But, in fairness to Nancy, she was usually right in her assessment of a situation and often had seen the problem before anyone else. She could be very harsh in her candid assessments of people, but her motive was never a petty or personal one—it was always to protect the president.”

In the fall of 1981 came another controversy, one that would dwarf even the furor over Nancy’s decorating project. As she would ruefully recall: “If the renovations made people angry, the new White House china drove them crazy!” Earlier first ladies could have told her that buying expensive formal dinnerware was a bad move during times when Americans were worried about keeping food on their own humble plates. When Eleanor Roosevelt ordered a new set of china in 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression, the outcry was so great that she had to hold a news conference to defend herself against charges of extravagance. Eleanor explained that the cost of ordering 1,722 pieces for $9,301.20—at government expense, unlike the Reagan china, which was paid for by a private foundation—was actually lower than trying to replace existing pieces. Besides, it would put Americans to work.

The origins of Nancy’s disastrous endeavor went back to the Reagans’ very first state dinner on February 26, 1981. It was in honor of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had an especially close and important relationship with the president. In the Iron Lady’s toast to her host and hostess, she cracked a joke about the controversial White House makeover: “I’m told,