The Triumph of Nancy Reagan
Americans have mixed attitudes towards First Ladies.
They want presidential wives to be supportive helpmates to their husbands, but only to a point. They are all right with them helping on policy but not too much. They like First Ladies who have style and panache, but not when they flaunt it.
Nancy Reagan was one of the most successful presidential wives, yet she was often an enigma. That is in part because, ironically, this one-time Hollywood actress was less adept at managing her own image.
Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty does a great service in her new book by taking us behind the public façade. The Triumph of Nancy Reagan is a detailed, insightful, and gossipy look at the wife of Ronald Reagan, one of our most consequential, yet controversial presidents. It is a bit long and sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, but ultimately succeeds in bringing the subject to life.
Nancy Reagan was one of the most successful presidential wives, yet she was often an enigma. That is in part because, ironically, this one-time Hollywood actress was less adept at managing her own image.
Though Tumulty did not get to interview Nancy Reagan (she started the book after the former First Lady died in 2016) she spoke to many of the people close to the family and made extensive use of her papers. The result is a book that demonstrates respect and admiration for the subject but does not shy away from her shortcomings.
Tumulty distills the essence of Nancy Reagan’s clout and modus operandi when she writes: “Hers was the power of 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.” (4)
Unlike other First Ladies such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Reagan did not have her own extensive policy agenda. She was intent on doing all that she could to ensure her husband’s success and the fact that he is thought of as one of the nation’s most consequential presidents is in no small part due to Nancy Reagan’s skills.
While her story had a triumphant ending, it started out in uncertainty.
Nancy Robbins had a difficult childhood. Her parents divorced when she was young and she barely knew her father. Her mother, Edith, was at first a struggling and then a mildly successful actress, traveled a lot and left Nancy with relatives as a young girl. Everything changed when Edith married a successful Chicago physician, Loyal Davis, who later adopted Nancy.
The family lived affluently though not extravagantly and the adolescent Nancy spent time with some of her mother’s show business friends, including frequent houseguest Spencer Tracy, who would later help Nancy get a screen test. She became a debutante and went on to Smith College where she studied in the school’s fledgling theater department.
After graduation, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and had a so-so acting career. Though she became both a good networker and someone who took advantage of family connections. An occasional dining companion was Katharine Hepburn (another friend of Edith) and an occasional escort was Clark Gable, whom she met through mutual friends.
There are differing accounts of how she met Ronald Reagan and Tumulty does not reach a definitive conclusion about which one is true. But Nancy had a hard time getting him to commit because he was pining for his ex-wife, Academy Award-winning actress Jane Wyman, who had left him. Also, he was cheering himself up by dating around with such rapidity and promiscuity that it would no doubt have horrified his future supporters among evangelical Christians.
“However their paths finally crossed, it seems safe to say that Nancy set her sights on Ronnie and that she was not going to let him slip past her. Nancy, after all, had declared upon her arrival at MGM that her major goal was to find a husband. (78)
She succeeded.
There are differing accounts of how she met Ronald Reagan and Tumulty does not reach a definitive conclusion about which one is true. But Nancy had a hard time getting him to commit because he was pining for his ex-wife, Academy Award-winning actress Jane Wyman, who had left him.
They married in 1952 and while their acting careers were on the decline, they had a strong marriage that often left little room for others, including their two children, Patti and Ron Jr. The parents were disengaged and less than thrilled with their offsprings’ rebellious natures, though they eventually reconciled after many tumultuous years.
Tumulty deals with the family drama in great detail and were the book not such a great biography, you might think parts of it were a soap opera script.
Not surprisingly, since she is one of the best political journalists around, Tumulty’s book shines brightest when chronicling the Reagans rather meteoric rise in politics. She takes readers into the backrooms and provides ample evidence of Nancy Reagan’s impressive political instincts and emotional intelligence. Though she was initially reluctant about her husband’s ultimately successful candidacy for governor of California, she came around and was a masterful behind-the-scenes strategist who helped craft his image as a genial conservative who could resonate with the average voter.
Although Ronald Reagan mostly governed as a conservative both in California and as president, his wife saw to it that he always had a strong pragmatic side. But beyond shaping his ideological image, she had a sixth sense of what people and actions could help or hurt him.
“Nancy was Ronnie’s early-warning system, determined to spot potential problems before they had a chance to become too attached to him,’’ Tumulty writes. “She watched the president’s popularity closely and pored over the numbers in private sessions with his pollster Richard Wirthlin.’’
Her efforts mostly paid off.
The country had a strong economy during much of the Reagan administration, which lasted from 1981 to 1989, though his domestic policies were criticized by some for hurting those in the lower socioeconomic groups and Reagan could have a tin ear on racial matters. As a result of Reagan’s canny negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, the United States and the Soviet Union de-escalated many of the tensions of the Cold War.
Nancy Reagan strongly encouraged these efforts with an eye towards burnishing her husband’s reputation as a peacemaker, even though his liberal adversaries often depicted him as a bit too trigger happy.¹
The Reagan administration’s biggest failures were its early delays in confronting the AIDS crisis and the Iran-Contra scandal. Nancy Reagan’s early intelligence system failed her in both cases and the result was not only massive policy debacles but substantial damage to her perennially detached husband’s reputation. She eventually recovered and engineered personnel changes to at least stop the bleeding.
“Nancy was Ronnie’s early-warning system, determined to spot potential problems before they had a chance to become too attached to him,’’ Tumulty writes. “She watched the president’s popularity closely and pored over the numbers in private sessions with his pollster Richard Wirthlin.’’
After his presidency, she worked hard to shape his historical legacy and was active in building and overseeing the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. She also saw to it that his diaries were published, to show that he was often more engaged in political matters than was often portrayed in the media.
Tumulty noted that Nancy Reagan was “determined to refute the counternarrative of him. Even as Ronnie was beatified on the Right, there were still those in the elite circles of the Left who saw him less as a leader and visionary than as an actor who read words that others had written for him.’’ (566)
As effective as she was at shaping her husband’s reputation, Nancy Reagan had trouble with her own. Her love of fancy clothes and lavish furnishings caused the media to often depict her as a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
She repaired some of the damage by satirizing herself and appearing in ratty clothes at a Washington dinner and singing “Second Hand Clothes,’’ to the tune of the Barbra Streisand standard “Second Hand Rose.’’²
The policy project she worked on was combatting drug addiction (despite occasionally self-medicating to combat her near-constant anxiety) and she urged people to “just say no.’’ The slogan had a nice ring to it, but many public health experts said it was too simplistic an approach for dealing with more profound physical and psychological problems.
When Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, Nancy Reagan was both his primary caretaker and a forceful advocate for additional research funds and to permit greater use of stem cell research. This rehabilitated her image.
The reader comes away with a clearer picture of Nancy Reagan than one does of her successor and bête noire Barbara Bush after reading USA Today reporter Susan Page’s 2019 biography, The Matriarch. Page interviewed George and Barbara Bush but she never seems to get too far beneath the surface of the former First Lady.
Despite not having been able to talk to either of the Reagans, in The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, Tumulty does more with less.
