Nancy Reagan gave the personal touch
Reporter provides glimpse into former first lady’s time in White House
Nancy Reagan was both a throwback and a groundbreaker. And a romantic.
The 1980 election that sent Ronald Reagan to the White House was the first of the 10 presidential campaigns I’ve covered. The Reagans and I moved to the White House together, in a way. I became the White House correspondent for News
day just as Reagan was being inaugurated.
And that was an event that ended up giving me a glimpse into Nancy Reagan I didn’t expect.
She was famously wary of reporters. They criticized her husband, snooped into her personal life, wrote about her propensity for designer clothes ( borrowed, as it turned out) and sparked a mocking “Queen Nancy” meme when she used private funds to buy a new set of White House china in the midst of a recession.
Her “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign was in part an effort to add another dimension to her image, and in 1982 I sat down with her during a trip to Florida she took to tout the initiative. When the interview was over, I mentioned that my newspaper’s assigned seat at the inauguration had been next to The Baltimore
Sun’s. My seatmate and I struck up a conversation and then walked downtown together to our offices.
Now, I told her, we had gotten engaged — thanking her for the role they had played, inadvertent though it was.
The month before our wedding, a thick cream envelope addressed in calligraphy arrived in the mail. The Dutch may have been mystified about why, exact- ly, this particular couple warranted an invitation to the White House state dinner for Queen Beatrix. I knew it was a wedding present, completely unexpected and quite gracious, from a woman who was more complicated than we gave her credit for at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I think those complications were a key reason Nancy Reagan had a rocky start with the press and the public.
In some ways, she revived the stereotype of the most traditional of first ladies — content to live in her husband’s shadow, consumed with glittering social affairs and her Hollywood friends. Her immediate predecessor, Rosalynn Carter, had attended Cabinet meetings.
The first lady before that, Betty Ford, was so candid that she created headlines her husband had to handle.
In contrast, Nancy Reagan seemed to be one of the ladies who lunch. While it took us a bit to realize it, though, she was also a trailblazer — a presidential spouse who became one of the president’s most trusted advisers and moderating voices on public relations, personnel and even foreign policy.
When it comes to the substance of the presidency, we now know that Nancy Reagan ranks as the most influential first lady to serve between Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.
She had political antennae her husband lacked to sense when aides were serving their own interests rather than the president’s, and she helped engineer the exit even of a White House chief of staff in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal. (Donald Regan got his revenge a year later in his 1988 memoirs when he revealed she was relying on an astrologer to set the president’s schedule.)
She encouraged Reagan to negotiate with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at a time some advisers and many conservatives were skeptical and opposed.
By the time the Reagans moved out of the White House, it was clear that Nancy Reagan had a depth and a determination that hadn’t been fully recognized at first. In the years that followed, during what she called their “long goodbye,” her devoted care for her husband and her advocacy on Alzheimer’s disease and stem-cell research made her a hero to many.
Nancy Reagan died Sunday at age 94 in Los Angeles.
On Wednesday and Thursday, thousands of people paid tribute to her, streaming by her casket at the Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation in Simi Valley, Calif.
She will be buried Friday on a hillside next to her beloved Ronnie.
And by the way, Carl Leubsdorf (now with The Dallas Morn
ing News) and I will be celebrating our 34th anniversary this spring.
Nancy Reagan seemed to be one of the ladies who lunch. She was also a trailblazer.