The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

“Early in the evening, Mrs. Davis—Mrs. Loyal Davis—was reported by her maid to be at a dinner party, but shortly afterwards she answered her own door with pin curls in her hair and two newspapers under her arm. She denied emphatically that she is or was a policewoman.”

Edie, whose newspaper photo caught her without her false teeth in, deflected the embarrassment with her typical flair. At lunch the next day at the Casino Club, she greeted the other society matrons: “Bang, bang! Stick ’em up! I’m Dick Tracy!”

So, what was really going on? The payments to Edie had started the previous August. That was right around the time of Loyal’s military enlistment and two years after the cancelation of Betty and Bob, when things had become more stressful financially for the Davises. Nancy later offered an elaborate—and unconvincing—explanation for how her mother ended up on the city payroll. While Loyal was overseas, Edie had helped start a Chicago Service Men’s Center near the navy yard. Her daughter claimed that when she discovered “some of these young kids were being picked up by prostitutes and infected with venereal diseases, she had herself sworn in as a policewoman so she could go out on the streets of Chicago and protect those boys.”

Perhaps Edie was involved in some sort of undercover operation. It is more likely, however, that the mayor was looking for a backdoor way to pay her for political work she was doing on his behalf. That included helping to write, direct, and produce his weekly radio speeches. Kelly, who came from a working-class background, certainly needed the professional assistance. He was famous for his malapropisms, which included pronouncing vitamins as “vitamums,” and once introducing Admiral William Halsey, the acclaimed World War II commander, as “Alderman Halsey.”

Just twelve weeks before the story of her supposed secret life as a policewoman broke, Edie—a Democrat—gave a radio testimonial in favor of Kelly’s reelection titled: “A Republican Woman’s Appraisal of Mayor Kelly.” She declared, without irony, that “Mayor Kelly has proved his right to be called the best mayor Chicago ever had. There has never been a single scandal connected with his administration which involved either himself of any member of his Cabinet.”

One night, when Edie was throwing yet another of her dinners, Loyal was startled to see both Kelly and Republican governor Dwight Green arrive. Surely, he thought, his wife had made some horrible error. The two men had run a bitter campaign against each other in 1939 for Chicago mayor. So Loyal was astonished by what actually happened when they encountered each other in his apartment. Not only did the opposing party bosses greet each other warmly, but after dinner, they huddled in private conversation. The governor then asked to use the phone and, when he returned, assured the mayor that he had “taken care of” whatever it was they had been discussing. “Until then,” Loyal marveled, “I thought political rivals must be dyed-in-the-wool enemies but soon learned that this is more apparent in campaigns than it is in the day-to-day administration of government.”

Reagan biographer Bob Colacello put it this way: “What Edith understood and Loyal would learn was that power transcends political affiliation, and ideology need not get in the way of social success. In other words, whom you know is more important than what you believe.” Those pragmatic lessons about cultivating influence and turning adversaries into allies would not be lost on Edie’s daughter.

CHAPTER THREE

When Nancy filled out a questionnaire for the twenty-fifth reunion of her Smith classmates in 1968, the first lady of California listed this as her occupation: “Politics! And wife and mother.”

Smith College was, as Girls Latin had been, a rigorous academic environment that catered to daughters of wealth and privilege. Tuition at the time was $600 a year, plus $500 for room and board, which was more than it cost to go to Yale University. “I always had it in my mind that I wanted to go to Smith,” Nancy told Judy Woodruff in an interview for a Public Broadcasting System documentary broadcast in 2011. But not many young women came to the Northampton, Massachusetts, campus in 1939 with an eye toward making a professional mark of their own. Fulfilling their dreams meant finding the right mate, raising his perfect children, and keeping dinner warm when he stayed late at his office.

Bettye Naomi Goldstein, a brainy girl from Peoria, was a year ahead of Nancy at Smith. She recalled: “You had no women role models, virtually none, that combined serious work with motherhood [and] marriage, which had become almost exaggerated values for women.” Bettye dropped the coquettish e from the end of her first name and took her husband’s surname when she got married. At her fifteenth reunion in the late 1950s, Betty Friedan did a survey of her Smith classmates and was struck by how unhappy they seemed in their confining lives as highly educated suburban housewives. The former Bettye Goldstein realized she was one of them herself, left with a “nameless, aching dissatisfaction” because she had never pursued a career in psychology after doing graduate work in the field. Friedan’s book about what she called “the problem that has no name” was published in 1963. The Feminine Mystique became the manifesto that sparked the feminist movement. Those rigid, midcentury values that Friedan rejected were the very ones Nancy Reagan would one day come to represent for scornful feminists. “She has not advanced the cause of women at all,” Friedan told Time magazine in 1985. “She is like Madame Chiang Kai-shek, doing it the old way, through the man.”

At Smith, Nancy was not a particularly serious student. She would later joke that she majored in “English and drama—and boys.” When she first stepped onto the ivy-strewn campus, pampered young women still had the luxury of dealing with nothing more nettlesome than finding ways to get around their weekend curfews. But when Nancy was a junior in 1941,