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

two hairdryers worth a total of $1,200, a $720 hydraulic white leather salon chair, a $230 manicurist’s stool, and $1,800 in wall coverings. Redken Laboratories also donated makeup and other beauty products.

So toxic had Nancy’s image become that the president himself felt compelled to defend her at a testy, nationally televised news conference. Reporter Barry Cunningham of the Independent Television News Association, a national video service, put the question to him: “Your administration is being called ‘millionaires on parade.’ Do you feel you’re being sensitive enough to the symbolism of Republican mink coats, limousines, and $1,000-a-plate china at the White House when ghetto kids are being told to eat ketchup as a vegetable?” Ronnie retorted that he had not counted any mink coats, that the ketchup policy had been changed, and as for the china: “Nancy’s taken a bit of a bum rap on that. There has been no new china for the White House since the Truman administration, and the truth of the matter is that at a state dinner, we can’t set the tables with dishes that match.”

Nancy was also giving comedians plenty of fodder. Johnny Carson, for instance, quipped on the Tonight show that the first lady’s favorite junk food was caviar and her religion was Christian Dior. So, Nancy decided that her best defense—perhaps her only one—was to join in on the joke. On November 5 she traveled to New York to accept an award at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a white-tie event where big-name politicians poke fun at one another and themselves. Nancy enlisted White House speechwriter Landon Parvin, who had a knack for comedy, to put together some remarks for her. At the dinner, Nancy scoffed at the “Queen Nancy” postcards: “Now, that’s silly. I’d never wear a crown. It would mess up my hair.” She also announced that her newest charitable endeavor would be “the Nancy Reagan home for wayward china.”

It was a small step in the right direction. Her most persistent critics, however, were unimpressed. “Good lines, delivered by a pro. But one-liners aren’t going to solve her problems,” columnist Judy Mann wrote in the Washington Post. “The fundamental problem with Nancy Reagan’s image is Nancy Reagan. She is a woman out of her times, a first lady out of the past. She would have been a smash in the 1950s.”

Soon after, Nancy found herself at the center of yet another storm, this one—for once—not of her own making. It came about because of an awkward discovery in the office of National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen. Inside a little-used safe there, military officers found an envelope holding $1,000 in $100 bills, which turned out to be a payment that a reporter and a photographer for a Japanese magazine had brought to an interview they did with Nancy the day after the inauguration. The kimono-clad journalists tried to hand the envelope directly to the first lady, in keeping with the Japanese custom of bringing expensive gifts to important business meetings. Allen recognized what was happening and snatched it. He gave the envelope to his secretary and planned to send it along later to the White House counsel’s office. Instead, it ended up in his safe and was forgotten.

Though Allen was later cleared of any wrongdoing, Nancy saw to it that he was gone. His reputation was far less important to her than the fact that his blunder was an embarrassment. What’s more, she already had misgivings about Allen, a stridently conservative cold warrior whom she considered out of his depth as Ronnie’s chief foreign-policy adviser. Years later, Allen expressed surprisingly little bitterness about his ouster and the role the first lady had played in engineering it. “There were roller-coaster times with Nancy Reagan, but even though, in the end, she was the principal cause of having me put out to pasture, I had no animus against Nancy. She was just protecting her man,” Allen said. National security adviser turned out to be a hard job to hold on to in the Reagan White House. Over the course of his eight years in office, Ronnie would go through six of them. The first lady played a key role in several of their departures.

Nancy, however, did not always get her way when it came to dispensing with aides whose loyalty or usefulness to Ronnie she doubted. The same month the Allen controversy broke, Atlantic Monthly magazine published an explosive story in which Reagan budget director David Stockman suggested that Ronnie’s supply-side economic philosophy was a fraud, meant to give a new luster to old trickle-down economic policies that heavily favored the rich. Stockman, a brainy, self-promoting former Michigan congressman, told journalist William Greider that he had adjusted figures in the Office of Management and Budget computers to reflect unrealistically rosy scenarios. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Stockman admitted.

Nancy joined Deaver and Meese in demanding that Ronnie fire Stockman. The president refused, arguing that he needed Stockman’s expertise and trusted his judgment. “Had it been up to me, Stockman would have been out on the street that afternoon. I saw him as a shrewd and crafty man who knew exactly what he was doing,” Nancy wrote later. “If Ronnie had thrown Stockman out when that story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, he would have made an example of him. It would have been a signal to everybody else who worked for Ronnie that he expected their loyalty.”

But Nancy also recognized that she herself was becoming a liability to the young Reagan presidency. Polls showed she had the ignominious distinction of being the most unpopular first lady in modern history, with negative sentiment toward her running double what it had against her predecessors. During one particularly rocky news cycle, she lamented to Sheila Tate: “You know, some days, I feel like if it rains, it must be my fault.”

The cold fact she had to face was that for Ronnie to succeed, she would have to