The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

people. He was almost entirely guileless. There was no cynicism in him whatsoever. He tended to assume that other people—certainly people who were working for him and professed similar sensibilities—were like that too,” Ron said. “My mother, on the other hand, understood that people had hidden agendas and that not everybody who talked a good game would back that up. She was unforgiving when she thought somebody had betrayed my father. When somebody needed to go, she was the one to know it first and, often as not, to make that happen.”

Stu Spencer, who served as Ronnie’s chief political strategist from the dawn of his career in California, described the Reagans as “an inseparable team politically and personally. He would never have been governor without her. He would never have been president without her.” Nor without her might he have survived in the Oval Office, much less departed with a renown that would continue to shape politics for more than a generation after he left. That she would be capable of filling this role was far from obvious in her early naive days as California first lady, but over the years, Nancy grew to understand her power and to use it with great effect. When Ronnie’s presidency was on the brink of collapsing under scandal during his second term, it was Nancy who remained clear-eyed enough to put together the rescue effort. She was relentless and ruthless in engineering the firing of Donald T. Regan, his autocratic White House chief of staff. “Her particular quality was she was street smart,” Reagan biographer Edmund Morris said. “She was aggressive and a street fighter, which Reagan was not. She handled all the nasty business.”

Nancy exercised an influence unlike any first lady before or since. She was not the conscience of her husband’s presidency, as Eleanor Roosevelt had been to FDR. She claimed no policy portfolio, as Hillary Clinton did—disastrously, on health care—during Bill Clinton’s first term in the Oval Office. Nor was Nancy secretly running the government in her husband’s stead, though some critics compared her with Edith Wilson, who essentially assumed President Woodrow Wilson’s duties for the last year and a half of his second term after he suffered a near-fatal stroke in 1919.

Hers was the power that comes with intimacy. The first lady was the essential disinterested observer of the ideological battles and power struggles that went on in the White House, because she had but one preoccupation: Ronald Reagan’s well-being and success. She knew what he needed—rest, time to himself, encouragement—to be able to perform at his best, and she made sure he got it. Nancy also recognized that, unless he had the right set of people advising him, he could be led astray by his trusting nature and tendency to delegate. Her instincts, time would show, were usually right. “She was the guardian,” said James A. Baker III, who was the president’s first chief of staff and later his Treasury secretary. “She had a terrific political antenna, much better than his, in my view.”

And yet, though she was hypervigilant in tending to her husband’s image, Nancy was confoundingly clueless about managing her own. He was called the Teflon President because nothing bad ever seemed to stick to him. If that was the case, she was the Velcro First Lady. She made many missteps, and the damage from them adhered. Terrified for Ronnie’s safety after he was nearly killed by a would-be assassin just two months after he took office, she turned to an astrologer to determine when and how he should travel and make public appearances. Her purchase of more than $200,000 worth of White House china created a headache for her husband amid a recession during which the Reagan administration was cutting poverty programs. She “borrowed” designer clothes and did not give them back.

Feminists held a particular kind of scorn for a first lady who gazed at her husband as if in rapture and who proclaimed over and over again that her life did not begin until she met Ronnie. Betty Friedan, a mother of the modern women’s equality movement, had been a year ahead of Nancy at Smith College. Friedan declared the first lady to be “an anachronism” who would deny “the reality of American women today—what they want to be and what they need to be.” Just a few of the names that Nancy was called: The Iron Butterfly. The Belle of Rodeo Drive. Fancy Nancy. The Cutout Doll. The Evita of Bel-Air. Mommie Dearest. The Hairdo with Anxiety. The Ice Queen. Attila the Hen.

Nancy was complicated, and just about everyone who dealt with her found her difficult at times. But while she had the image of a haughty socialite, the first lady in person could be charming and, truth be told, more engaging company than her husband. Nancy was worldly, an excellent listener, an eager gossip. She had at the ready a deep, disarming laugh. It was the opposite with Ronnie. For all his affability, there was a remoteness to his nature. He was at heart a loner who liked people but didn’t need them.

“He doesn’t let anybody get too close,” Nancy acknowledged. “There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.” She understood that Ronnie’s penchant for self-isolation developed as a survival skill. He was the child of an alcoholic father who led his family from one uncertain situation into another. The collapse of Ronnie’s first marriage devastated him. Nancy learned to grapple with and ultimately overcome his emotional inaccessibility during their frustrating, on-again-off-again courtship. “You can get just so far to Ronnie, and then something happens,” she reflected. “It took him a long time, I think, to feel that he could really trust me.”

Nancy too had a precarious early life. She was the product of a broken marriage, estranged from her birth father and left for a time with relatives by her mother. The trauma left her forever