First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (28 page)

T
HE HARDEST PERIOD
of the Carter presidency was during the Iran hostage crisis, which consumed the last 444 days of her husband’s presidency. On November 4, 1979, Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took more than sixty Americans hostage. The hostage takers, who were mostly students, said that the American hostages would not be released until the shah, an exiled former Iranian leader who had sought treatment for cancer in the United States, was sent back to Iran so that he could stand trial. The revolutionaries said the shah was “anti-Islamic” and they accused him of stealing billions of dollars. Rosalynn admitted that she wanted to send the shah back to Iran so that the hostages would be released, but she knew he would most likely have been killed. “I never stopped wishing we hadn’t let him come into the country in the first place. I wished Jimmy had followed his first instincts. But when the shah became ill, it was the right thing to do, and I suppose we always have to do ‘the right thing.’” The bulk of the campaigning in 1980, when Carter ran against Ronald Reagan, fell to Rosalynn because the President decided to stay in
the White House to handle the crisis. She checked in several times a day from the campaign trail, and when she could not speak with her husband she talked directly with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who even initiated meetings with her to discuss how to handle the crisis. “I kept her abreast because I knew she would be discussing those issues with the President.”

When the Carters left the White House in January 1981, they returned to Plains and embarked on the longest and most ambitious post-presidency in American history. Despite all of his accomplishments, Jimmy Carter says, in all of his ninety-one years he is proudest of marrying Rosalynn. “That’s the pinnacle of my life.”

L
IKE
B
ETTY
F
ORD,
whose father was an alcoholic who died in an apparent suicide when she was just sixteen years old, Nancy Reagan had a painful relationship with her father, who left her mother a few months after she was born. Her mother, Edith, was a Broadway actress who got a divorce from Nancy’s father and passed along her own incredible determination to her daughter. When she arrived at the hospital to give birth to Nancy and was told there were no rooms available, Edith said, “No rooms? Then I guess I’ll have to lie right down on the floor of this lobby and have my baby here!” Edith sent a two-year-old Nancy to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., so that she could pursue her acting career. Nancy’s six-year abandonment haunted her forever. When she was five years old she got double pneumonia.
If I had a little girl
, Nancy said to herself,
I’d certainly be there if she was ever sick
.

When Nancy was seven years old, her mother married a prominent surgeon named Loyal Davis, and Nancy moved with
Edith to live in Chicago. Edith gave up acting and devoted herself to promoting her husband’s career. The family lived on the city’s wealthy Gold Coast in a fourteenth-floor apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Nancy begged Loyal to adopt her but he resisted because her biological father was still alive. But she was determined, and by age sixteen she was officially Loyal’s daughter. As with her mother, once Nancy had her sights set on something it was going to happen. Once she decided Ronald Reagan would be her husband, Nancy won him over by going to his Los Angeles horse ranch on weekends and helping him with the decidedly unglamorous task of painting the pickets on his fence.

Nancy so appreciated the unconditional love she received from her husband that she fiercely protected him from anyone who she felt did not have his best interests at heart. The men in the West Wing were absolutely afraid of crossing her. The West Wing staff called Nancy “Evita” (after Argentina’s first lady Eva Perón) and “The Missus” behind her back. “At the end of the day, first ladies are going to bed with the president each night and may say, ‘I really want you to do this for me,’” said a staffer. “And then he will likely say yes.”

In a letter Lady Bird sent to Nancy on November 9, 1994, five years after Ronald Reagan left office, Lady Bird refers to an interview Nancy gave to Charlie Rose a few weeks before at the 92nd Street Y in New York. In that interview Nancy skewered Oliver North, who was the Republican Senate candidate in Virginia at the time. When Rose asked her about North she said, “Ollie North—oh, I’ll be happy to tell you about Ollie North,” pausing for laughter and applause. “He lied to my husband and lied about my husband—kept things from him he should not have kept from him. And that’s what I think of Ollie North.” She was referring to North’s central role in the Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration admitted to selling arms to Iran in violation of an
embargo in exchange for the release of hostages, and to using the proceeds of those sales to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. “The last time you and I talked, we were discussing giving or not giving interviews,” Lady Bird wrote. “I feel I know exactly why you did it—because he [Oliver North] tried to hurt your husband—my reaction would be to feel like striking back. But I can’t resist telling you, Nancy, that the ‘fall-out’ of your interview was a most wonderful surprise and help for me and mine!” In a strange twist, Nancy Reagan, the most well-known Republican woman at the time, helped Lady Bird’s son-in-law, Democratic Virginia Senator Charles Robb, in his reelection bid because Oliver North was his opponent. Nancy’s comments helped destroy North’s political career, and Robb won the election.

Nancy was especially furious about the way her husband’s chief of staff, Don Regan, was handling the Iran-Contra scandal. Nancy prodded her husband to get out and make a public statement and fire the people responsible, something he had always resisted. But once President Reagan took his wife’s advice and spoke publicly about the scandal and acknowledged his mistakes, his popularity surged. Nancy helped push out National Security Advisers Richard Allen and William Clark, Secretary of the Interior James Watt, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler. But Don Regan was the best-known casualty of her anger. Two years after becoming her husband’s chief of staff, he was fired. Reagan’s first chief of staff, James Baker, explains Regan’s departure simply: “He did not take care to make sure that he had one-half of the team [Nancy] on his side, which was a fundamental mistake.”

Nancy thought Regan was pushing her husband in all the wrong ways. She worried about Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union address, which came just three weeks after he had prostate
surgery. (“He doesn’t need to work full-time,” she told Regan, “he can work out of the residence.”) She was not the only one who did not think Regan was up to the job. Vice President George H. W. Bush told the First Lady, “You’ve really got to do something about Donald Regan.”

“I’ve
got to do something? What about
you
?” she said.

“Oh, no, no, no. It’s not in my job description.” Firing high-level presidential aides was not technically in her job description, either, but, she said, “It landed on my watch.” If no one else was going to take charge then she would. She deftly arranged for her husband to meet with former Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Strauss, whose opinion the President respected, and who also wanted Regan gone. Strauss’s advice helped bolster Nancy’s argument and Regan was soon out.

Later she said Regan had overstepped in other ways, even trying to monitor the President’s phone calls. There was no doubt in her mind that he had to go after he hung up on her twice. “You might have been able to get away with it once, but not twice!” the Reagans’ son, Ron, said. “That was really the end of Don Regan. That’s not something you’re going to do to my mother.”

In her memoir, Nancy, a self-described worrier, wrote, “In my next life, I’d like to come back as Ronald Reagan. If he worries, you’d never know it. . . . I seem to do the worrying for both of us.” Before President Reagan left for a trip, Nancy would give him a three-by-five card with reminders:
5 p.m.: Take medication; 6 p.m.: Dinner; 9 p.m.: Brush teeth; 9:30 p.m.: Bedtime
. After his surgery for an enlarged prostate in 1987 she reminded him, “Honey, stop talking, go take your bath.” George Hannie, who was a White House butler, says Nancy would watch the President get ready for press conferences in the Rose Garden from the window in the West Sitting Hall, and she would let everyone know if she thought
his jacket was not quite right. “Here, go bring him this one,” she’d say, handing a butler a different jacket. Once there was hardly any time before the news conference was set to begin, and the butler did not want to bother the President, but he dutifully raced to the Rose Garden. No one wanted to disappoint Mrs. Reagan.

Reagan’s adviser Michael Deaver remembered one hilarious visit to an Episcopal church near Middleburg, Virginia, during the 1980 presidential campaign. After making sure the sermon would be suitable and nothing would catch the Reagans off guard, he agreed that they would attend an eleven o’clock service. The Reagans were stunned, however, when they were invited, along with the rest of the congregation, to the front of the church to take Communion. Nancy had a look of panic on her face, and as they walked up the church aisle she whispered, “Mike! Are those people drinking out of the same cup?” At the Reagans’ church in Los Angeles, Bel Air Presbyterian, small glasses of grape juice and squares of bread were passed between the aisles, so the Reagans really had no idea what to do. Deaver told Nancy that she could simply dip the wafer into the cup, but when she did, it fell in. Reagan followed his wife’s lead and dropped his wafer in the wine. Nancy was mortified, but as her husband stepped out into the midday sun he had a smile on his face, confident that all had gone well. It was Nancy who was left to worry about whether the press would notice that the Reagans had no idea how to take Communion.

Nancy was most concerned about who was advising her husband, and she had final say. The First Lady wanted James Baker, a more moderate Republican, to be chief of staff in her husband’s first term, even though her husband wanted the more conservative Edwin Meese. Baker got the job. “I would never have been in the Reagan White House had it not been for Nancy Reagan,
I’m quite confident of that,” Baker admits. Baker picked Deaver, a close confidant of Nancy, as his deputy, a smart decision that showed he knew just how important it was to have the First Lady in his corner. Nancy worked to make sure that her husband was surrounded by aides who were loyal, and she favored moderates because she knew that he would have to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress and that moderates would have a better chance of getting deals done. Reagan political consultant Stuart Spencer says, “She made decisions on who was going to be around him from the campaign to the [California] governor’s office to the White House. That was her role.” She was at almost every campaign meeting, and she cultivated wealthy California friends who she knew could help her husband’s gubernatorial campaign and, later, his presidential campaign. “I talk to people, they tell me things. And if something is about to become a problem I’m not above calling a staff person and asking about it,” Nancy said at a 1987 luncheon at the American Newspaper Publishers Association convention in New York City. “I’m a woman who loves her husband and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare.”

She even had a hand in foreign policy. She felt that it was important for the United States to open up a dialogue with the Soviet Union. She thought that National Security Adviser William Clark was too much of a hard-liner when it came to the Soviet Union. She was constantly talking to Secretary of State George Shultz, a moderate, and she eventually pushed Clark out. “Ronnie thought,” she hastened to add, “as did I, that there had to be a breakthrough. . . . Well, I didn’t just sit back. I was talking to people.”

In September 1984 the President invited Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko to the White House. Nancy swept in, wearing
one of her signature bright red dresses. The men were having sherry before lunch. “Does your husband believe in peace?” Gromyko asked her.