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

overlooked the Pacific from the top of San Onofre Drive in Pacific Palisades. On clear days, they could see all the way to Catalina Island. As it was being constructed, Ronnie drew hearts with his and Nancy’s initials in the wet cement on the patio. The five-thousand-foot ranch-style house “pointing the way to the electrical future” was fitted with every conceivable gadget. Among its wonders were a hidden projector in the dining room for movie screenings, a retractable roof over the atrium, lights that changed color to give different effects, three refrigerators, and two freezers. At night, the Reagans sat on the deck after dinner and watched the lights of the city sparkling beneath them. “You see,” Ronnie would tell Nancy, taking her hand, “I’ve given you all these jewels.”

The house was also a marvel of engineering. It used so much power that GE had to install a three-thousand-pound switch box, twelve feet long and eight feet high, at 1669 San Onofre. Ronnie joked that they had a direct line to Hoover Dam. “I wasn’t wild about having my home turned into a corporate showcase,” Nancy wrote, “but this was Ronnie’s first steady job in years, so it was a trade-off I was more than happy to make.”

There were other accommodations to Ronnie’s new career that Nancy found harder to accept. Chief among them were her husband’s long absences. Ronnie’s contract initially committed him to at least sixteen weeks a year on the road. Most of that time was spent on trains, because he was terrified of flying. Starting with his first appearance at a turbine plant near GE headquarters in Schenectady, New York, he visited 130 company facilities over eight years and met 250,000 employees. He sometimes gave as many as fourteen speeches in a day. Ronnie had a twenty-minute pitch, from which he would pivot to questions and answers where workers would share their opinions and their concerns. “No barnstorming politician ever met the people on quite such a common footing. Sometimes I had an awesome, shivering feeling that America was making a personal appearance for me, and it made me the biggest fan in the world,” he recalled later. The folks he met loved him back. After one speech, Ronnie signed more than ten thousand photos, blistering his fingers. By his recollection, he walked so many miles of concrete floor in GE’s plants that he sometimes had to cut his laces to get his shoes off.

Nancy would later muse: “Although he wasn’t running for any political office, essentially he spent eight years campaigning—going out and talking to people, listening to their problems, and developing his own ideas about how to solve them.” It was in those speeches that Ronnie developed both his feel for what resonated with Middle Americans and many of the nascent ideas that would become his philosophy for governing. As columnist George Will noted in an interview with me: “Those GE years were very important to Reagan because he went around the country talking to those people on factory floors for GE who became Reagan Democrats. That’s where he learned the vocabulary and the cadence of speech and all the rest.”

Still, the stress that his travel put on their marriage was hard on both Ronnie and Nancy. On yet another trip to Schenectady, he wrote her:

I find myself hating these people for keeping us apart. Please be real careful because you carry my life with you every second.

Maybe we should build at the farm so we could surround the place with high barb wire and booby traps and shoot anyone who even suggests

one

of us go to the corner store without the other. I promise you—this will not happen again. How come you moved in on me like this? I’m all hollow without you and the “hollow” hurts.

I love you

Ronnie.

Their family, meanwhile, was growing again. Nancy was determined to do what Jane could not, which was to give Ronnie a son of his own flesh and blood. After two miscarriages, she did. She spent the final three months of that pregnancy in bed, taking weekly hormone injections so that she would make it to full term. Patti’s delivery had been difficult. Ronnie was unenthusiastic about having another child—not because he didn’t want one but because he feared putting Nancy through an ordeal that might risk her health and “take chances with a happiness so great I couldn’t believe it.” He arrived home from a GE tour just in time to make it to the hospital for Nancy’s scheduled Cesarean section on May 20, 1958. Then he waited, in what he described as a “cold terror,” wishing “I could turn back the clock and cancel out this moment.

“… At 8:04 a.m., a nurse told me Ronald Prescott had arrived, weighing eight and a half pounds. Again, that wasn’t the first thing I wanted to hear. I’m in favor of a rule that, under the circumstances, nurses will begin their announcement with the words, ‘Your wife is all right,’ ” Ronnie wrote later.

To the world, the Reagans presented an image of what every American family wanted to be in the middle of the twentieth century. Ronnie was named “Screen Father of the Year” in 1957 by the National Father’s Day Committee, an organization that existed solely to confer such honors. In GE ads, Nancy was living every housewife’s dream as she marveled at how easily she could turn out a souffle with her state-of-the-art appliances. In reality, her son said, she “couldn’t make steam. She was just the worst cook.” Even coffee was beyond Nancy’s abilities in the kitchen.

Nine-year-old Patti and three-year-old Ron beamed with their parents in front of the fireplace for the 1961 Christmas Eve episode of GE Theater. One ad segment touted the glories of modern electrical illumination and featured Patti rocking her doll Cynthia in a cradle. “Notice the lights,” Ronnie exulted. “They look like Japanese lanterns, and they’re just as colorful.” Nancy, Patti, and Ron also did a commercial for Crest toothpaste,