Kati Marton (42 page)

Historically, great and powerful leaders have been entitled to both their courtesans and their consiglieri. In Nancy Davis Reagan, Ronnie had both. He could not have been elected president without her drive and will. Without Nancy as his sterner half, he could not have conveyed the image of well-being that was key to both his election and his presidency. Nor would he have achieved the easing of Cold War tensions, perhaps his most enduring legacy, without his wife’s encouragement and intrigues.

Nancy, like several of her predecessors, served her husband, not the country. He was her career. She was the ultimate “insider” first lady. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, she had no separate policy agenda. Unlike Rosalynn Carter, she sought little recognition for herself as an independent policy maker or presidential emissary. His policy
was the only one that mattered; his legacy would be inseparable from hers. The famous and much mocked gaze that she fixed on him when he spoke seemed to make this detached man perform at maximum capacity. During the greatest crisis of his presidency, this insecure, superstitious but politically shrewd woman helped bring him back from the brink.

There is perhaps no more important presidential power than choosing the right people to fill key positions. FDR, Truman and Kennedy made brilliant and consequential choices. In this critical presidential territory, Reagan ceded extraordinary ground to his wife. She made no apologies for her involvement in White House personnel decisions. “Most of my suggestions were about personnel,” she admitted. “I don’t know much about economics or military affairs, but I have strong instincts about people, and I’m a good judge of character. As much as I love Ronnie, I’ll admit he does have at least one fault: he can be naive about the people around him.” But Nancy
was
generally a shrewd judge of people. Those she backed—George Shultz, Mike Deaver, Jim Baker, Howard Baker and Bob Strauss—were the right ones for her husband’s legacy.

ON THE SURFACE
, she and Reagan could hardly have been more different. She was small and brittle. He was a big man, tall and muscular, with a strong sense of his own power—the power of his physical presence and that of his voice. No detail was too microscopic for her attention. He was indifferent to details. Worry etched Nancy’s face and pitched her voice high, sometimes causing her to stammer. His voice—self-assured, yet humble, hopeful and intimate—connected with people. Her self-consciousness made those around her edgy. Ironically, his voice as well as the rest of his persona were really a way to keep people at bay.

And yet this easy man and this nervous woman became opposite sides of one coin. “In some ways,” he wrote, “Nancy and I are like one human being.” Both had been permanently scarred by traumatic childhoods. She could trust no one except the one person who was as dependent on her as she was on him. The wholesale intimacy her husband
exuded that made him irresistible to so many masked an almost complete emotional detachment.

The son of a failed salesman who was an alcoholic, Ronnie learned to retreat from reality into his own world, to see and hear only what he wanted to. He was nine when his family finally settled down in Dixon, Illinois. The remote little boy did not learn to form real attachments, and he never would. Always the new boy in class, he had learned to please everybody. The trauma of finding his father passed out in the snow, or the routine chaos of life with an alcoholic, instilled in Reagan a fear of anything “unpleasant.” For the rest of his life, he avoided confrontation and emotional entanglement. His sanctuary was an idealized America of solid, uncomplicated midwestern values. In this fable, he cast himself as a straight and simple hero, a man of action, not words. As an actor in films extolling American virtues and, finally, as president, Reagan, remarkably, realized his original vision of himself.

He called Nancy his “everything,” and claimed she had “saved his soul,” but even with her he kept a veil over his emotions and could be remote. Throughout their married life Reagan spent hours in solitary physical labor, chopping wood and building fences at his ranch. “There’s a wall around him,” she wrote. “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.”

WHEN RONNIE AND NANCY MET IN 1949
, he was still bruised from his recent divorce from actress Jane Wyman. The breakup had stunned him, stripped him of his equilibrium. He was despondent in a way his friends had never seen. As always with bad news, for a long time he simply refused to believe it. “Janie is a pretty sick girl in mind,” Reagan wrote the head of his fan club, Lorraine Wagner, in January 1948, “but I’m still hoping that things will be different when she gets over this nervousness, so don’t listen to things you hear, please. I know she loves me, even though she thinks she doesn’t ….”

Reagan, for whom marriage and family were articles of faith, was not supposed to be divorced. That he did not see the breakup coming was in keeping with his willed blindness toward anything smacking of
“unpleasantness.” But others remarked on Wyman’s weariness with Reagan’s new obsession. It wasn’t their shared craft that stirred Ronnie’s passion but politics, particularly the threat of Communist infiltration into the Screen Actors Guild. Like many politicians, he was mesmerized by his own voice and a set of repetitive ideas. He failed to see their effect on his wife. “Don’t ask Ronnie for the time,” Jane once dryly cautioned a friend, “because he’ll tell you how the watch is made.” Though she has rarely expressed herself on her marriage to Reagan, his inability to form an intimate emotional connection no doubt weakened their bond. The Reagans’ two children, Maureen and Michael, could not compensate for the loneliness Jane felt alongside her husband. Not even with his children was Reagan able to drop his diffidence. His older brother, Neil, recalled that though Ronnie was a strong swimmer, “I taught Maureen to swim …. He didn’t bother with her …. Dutch thought children should be on their own ….”

Reagan was on Nancy Davis’s list of eligible Hollywood bachelors. With the help of director Mervyn LeRoy, she engineered a dinner invitation. Nancy was immediately, almost too easily, smitten. Indeed, she was looking for just such a partner: manly and commanding. By shoring up his ego and making herself indispensable, Nancy gradually wore down his resistance to a new emotional entanglement. “How come you moved in on me like this?” Ronnie asked Nancy once they were married. He would soon discover that what the thirty-year-old struggling actress lacked in beauty or talent, she compensated for in determination and focus.

No doubt it helped that she was almost as wary of intimacy as he was, after the incurable wound of having been abandoned by her own actress mother for six years, and left in the care of relatives. Later, Nancy rationalized her mother’s neglect. “It nearly killed her to do it, but she had to make a living, since she wouldn’t accept alimony. As long as Mother had to work, this was the best possible arrangement.” But Nancy had to admit that she “missed her—terribly. No matter how kindly you are treated—and I was treated with great love—your mother is your mother, and nobody else can fill that role in your life.” When Nancy was sick, she recalled years later, “I was angry that Mother was a thousand
miles away in a touring company. I remember crying and saying, ‘If I had a little girl, I’d certainly be there if she was ever sick.’”

Nancy saw her mother’s precarious life as an actress suddenly transformed by a strong, wealthy, socially prominent man. Almost overnight, nine-year-old Nancy went from a poor relation, the ward of her mother’s sister, to a world of privilege. Her stepfather, whom she revered, was Dr. Loyal Davis, the noted Chicago neurosurgeon. He became Nancy’s role model for a husband. In Dr. Davis’s universe, men were the leaders, and women their devoted helpmates. Nancy brutally severed all ties with her own father so Davis could adopt her.

Later, Nancy understood that Jane Wyman had been too interested in her own career and insufficiently interested in politics. Nancy was not about to make the same mistake. She knew how to listen. She knew how to make Ronnie feel like an American hero. Nancy must have recognized certain vulnerabilities behind his winning cowboy grin. He seemed to need the love of the faceless, distant crowd, but not too much intimacy. She, in turn, needed a single person who would be all hers, who would provide the comfort and security withheld from her as a child and would allow her to adore him, protect him, even
create
him. Thanks to her stepfather’s devotion to conservative causes, Nancy was already genuinely interested in politics. She married Ronnie on March 4, 1952.

Thus began the transformation of a forty-one-year-old movie actor with declining career prospects into one of the dominant political figures of the latter part of the twentieth century. Nancy discovered that she had never really wanted a career after all, and had pursued acting “only because I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry.”

Ronnie and Nancy, and before long two children, soon became the very image of the wholesome American family, circa 1964. Looking for a positive corporate face, General Electric found Reagan appealing and admired his ease before the camera no matter what he was selling. He had an uncanny ability to connect with the audience not as an actor in character but as Ronald Reagan. From the small screen, Ronnie, Nancy, Patti and Ron beamed out the message that all was well in the land.

If something seemed unreal about the appearance of perfection in the Reagans’ marriage, it was because they wanted it that way. Each had
sampled reality and found it wanting. The artificial could be controlled more easily. The Reagans were not who they appeared to be. Nancy was never really a housewife; she did not intend simply to play the role of Harriet to his Ozzie. Ronnie’s evangelical zeal was more rhetorical than real. With few exceptions—he genuinely hated communism and big government and loved missile defenses—he, with Nancy’s help, chose his politics opportunistically. They were sure only of Ronnie’s magic. It was clear he had a personal magnetism that went beyond the actor’s craft. People warmed to the optimism he exuded. “They look at me and they see themselves,” he liked to say.

To be sure, others, like Lyndon Johnson and JFK, had also been masters of invention and hyperbole. Politicians tend to exaggerate as a professional way of life. But Reagan’s great strength was that he seemed to
believe
his own fantasies. Facts were less important than his larger message. Even before he became an actor, Reagan had perfected the ability to make the unreal sound real. As a sportscaster in Davenport, Iowa, he never left his studio, yet conveyed the thrill of the game by embroidering on the spare information coming over a Teletype. He never left the United States during World War II, but decades later he seemed convinced he had. “When I came back from the war,” he used to begin stories, even though he spent those years making army training movies at a military base in Los Angeles. His stories about the liberation of the concentration camps and all those brave G.I.’s were so personal, so gripping, his style so engaging, it almost didn’t matter that he had not been an eyewitness. (Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, leaving a private meeting with Reagan, told his staff he had just learned that Reagan had witnessed the liberation of Dachau. Of course he had not.)

This was Reagan’s magic: the ability to convince people that something had happened when it hadn’t. With his masterful storytelling ability, he pulled people into his narrative. He learned this from his father, Jack. His mother, Nelle, much like FDR’s and LBJ’s mothers, imbued Ronnie with a sense of his own destiny. The son was to redeem the father’s failure. For though Reagan’s politics evolved over the years from Roosevelt Democrat to Goldwater Republican, then from Cold War zealot to peacemaker, Reagan was essentially always selling himself.

The Reagans’ love and need of each other, however, was authentic.
“It’s time to move on to the next town,” Ronnie wrote Nancy in March 1955, when he was traveling for General Electric, “and every move is a step toward home and you. I love you so very much I don’t even mind that life made me wait so long to find you. The waiting only made the finding sweeter.”