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

insecurities. She manufactured crises and drama. “My mother was difficult at times, could be emotionally—abusive is too big a word, because it implies a kind of calculated cruelty that was constant. She was an anxious personality, and her anxieties, particularly when my father was away, were visited upon her children,” Ron said. “You didn’t know quite who you’re going to be dealing with today, so you had to be wary of her.”

Trouble would erupt every time his father had to be on the road for a few days. “There was sort of a routine to it, where you could just count on her picking a fight at some point. It might be about nothing, really, but she’d start in on you, and eventually, as a twelve- or fourteen-year-old, you’re going to snap back. And that’s it. There you go. That’s what [she] wanted,” Ron said.

“My perception of it as a kid, and still today, is that one way to kind of get [his father] back into the family, in her mind, was to create some incident with one of the kids, either Patti or me,” Ron told me. “In her mind, I think, he had left, and he needed to be pulled back. And this was the way to do it, somehow. Of course, my father hated any kind of interpersonal stuff like that; any strife in the family.”

Ronnie invariably accepted without question Nancy’s version of the horrible things his children had supposedly done in his absence. He would pull Ron aside and tell him: “Now, now, Ron. You know you’ve hurt your mother very much. She’s in there crying her eyes out, and I know that it would mean the world to her if she could just hear those two little words: ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

As the years went by and he matured, Ron began to comprehend the dynamic that was driving the drama between his parents. He rejected the guilt that was being foisted on his small shoulders. “At first, when you’re six or something, that kind of works. You feel terrible: ‘My God, what have I done?’ By the time you’re twelve or so, it’s like, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ ” Ron said. “Then you start saying, ‘I’ve got nothing to apologize for. And I know you won’t believe me, but she starts a fight every time you leave.’ ”

Dysfunctional strains also developed between Nancy and her two stepchildren from Ronnie’s first marriage. “Now that I’m older and more experienced in life, I think there’s probably more I could have done to help Maureen and Michael when they were young,” Nancy wrote decades later. “If I had been more confident in myself as a mother, I think I would have. It’s too bad that the most important job we have in life—parenting—is the one we have no training for.”

Though Nancy’s relationship with Maureen had been an easy one when she was dating Ronnie, that changed after she married him. Maureen felt displaced. Her father had started a new family, and it stung her to hear him call Patti “Shorty,” which was the nickname he had once used for her. Jane had also remarried. Maureen didn’t really feel at home in either household. Nor did either seem to want her. She was shipped off to a Catholic high school in New York and then to a college in Virginia, from which she dropped out at the age of eighteen. (None of the four Reagan children got a degree.)

Maureen made a rocky entry into adulthood. It began with a brief marriage to a District of Columbia police officer who beat her. She left him after he slammed their kitten into a wall. “When I told my parents about the divorce, I simply told them the marriage hadn’t worked out, but I didn’t tell them why,” she wrote later. “The shame and embarrassment I’d felt from the first had by this time grown into something I could not get past. I had built a wall, and I decided to leave the wall intact.”

Because she lived so far away, Ronnie’s eldest was only an occasional presence on San Onofre. Nonetheless, she was startled when she visited around 1960 and discovered that eight-year-old Patti had no clue they were sisters. When Maureen told her they were, Patti burst into tears and ran from the room. “Dad was quite embarrassed when he explained to me later that afternoon, ‘Well, we just haven’t gotten that far yet,’ ” Maureen recalled.

That was around the time that fourteen-year-old Michael, who had become a discipline problem for Jane, was sent to live with his father and Nancy on the recommendation of a psychiatrist. Michael’s was the saddest situation of any of the four Reagan children. He arrived at the Reagan home with no wardrobe other than his school uniforms. When Nancy took him to a dentist, she discovered he had ten cavities.

Michael had been barely out of diapers when Ronnie and Jane divorced, and the turmoil that followed—a succession of boarding schools, new stepparents on both sides—left him feeling, as Maureen did, that he had no place to belong. But Michael had additional, deep-seated insecurities about having been adopted, a fact about himself he learned when he was four. He learned not from his parents, but from Maureen, who blurted it out during a quarrel. And there was something else—a secret he would reveal many years later. Michael was sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was eight years old. The man had also taken lewd pictures of him, which Michael was terrified would surface someday. His secret made the boy feel ashamed and confused and dirty.

Nancy, at the time, knew none of this. “I was flying blind with Michael, and I had no idea what was really going on with him,” she wrote. “Michael and I had such rough times during that period that there were times when I could have killed him. Teenagers can be difficult in any case, but Mike was especially troubled and rebellious.”

Michael had hoped that