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

previous first ladies, Nancy had little to do with the wives of lawmakers and lobbyists. They were offended when she did not join their busy club, Pals and Gals, which met for regular luncheons and golf outings. Pat Brown’s wife, Bernice, had been a regular. The gals thought Nancy snobby and standoffish; she didn’t see why she should be expected to make small talk with women whose husbands were constantly carping in the news media about hers. Nor did Nancy hide the fact that she considered the state capital a backwater—a place where there was nowhere decent to shop for clothes or get her hair done. The Reagans spent every possible weekend back at their home in Pacific Palisades. Where a decade before they had been B-listers in Hollywood, their social standing in Los Angeles had soared with Ronnie’s election. Nancy soon joined her best friend, Betsy Bloomingdale, as a fixture on the International Best Dressed List and ultimately was named to its Hall of Fame.

As imperious as she might have seemed in those early years, the truth was that Nancy was insecure and naive about the expectations that came with her new life. There was a price to be paid for not understanding that she and Ronnie had moved into a world that played by different rules. They were used to the movie business, which was lubricated by fantasy. Studios in the Reagans’ day had the power to bury scandals and fill the gossip columns with manufactured tidbits about their stars. Politics, on the other hand, ran on cynicism. On this stage, there was a harsher kind of spotlight, one that accentuated every imperfection.

Nancy emerged onto the political scene in the turbulent 1960s, at a time when broader social forces were taking hold. She was a proudly—no, fiercely—traditional wife, which made her a pathetic caricature in the eyes of women who were joining the burgeoning feminist movement. Reporters snickered at the way she fixed her gaze on her husband during his speeches, sure that it had to be an act. “While other Reagan fans alternately applaud or laugh at the governor’s one-liners, Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth,” Cannon wrote.

A profile by the brilliant writer Joan Didion in the June 1, 1968, issue of the Saturday Evening Post set the tone for years of media narrative about Nancy. The story, headlined “Pretty Nancy,” began with a scene in which a television crew was setting up a shot of the California first lady picking flowers in the garden of the executive residence. It was the most ordinary kind of photo op. But in Didion’s hands, it became a metaphor for artificiality—“something revelatory, the truth about Nancy Reagan at 24 frames a second.”

“[W]henever I think of Nancy Reagan now, I think of her just so, the frame frozen, pretty Nancy Reagan about to pluck a rhododendron blossom too large to fit into her decorative six-inch basket. Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith College and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon,” Didion wrote, adding that Nancy’s was “the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.” Nancy was stunned at how her cooperation with the television crew refracted through the lens of Didion’s contempt. “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled?” Nancy wrote more than twenty years later. “She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.”

Though she would in time grow far more sophisticated in her dealings with journalists, that profile left a bruise that never went away. “The idea that somebody would sit down and interview you at length, and then just torture you, was really shocking to her,” her son, Ron, said. “She was probably wondering, ‘What is this even about?’ Her conception of feminism at the time would have been almost nonexistent. The idea that she was being portrayed as this kind of throwback—she barely understood what the point of the whole thing was.”

In at least one important regard, Didion read the first lady’s character backward. Nancy’s flaw was not that she was skillful at pretense. It was that she wasn’t. As Cannon wrote: “She alienated even those who were disposed to like her with statements that were bluntly honest and undiplomatic.”

Nancy found plenty to fret over during Ronnie’s early years in Sacramento. He got off to a rocky and turbulent start as governor. Though he had run a brilliant campaign, and the electorate was eager for change, Ronnie and his team arrived in the state capital unprepared for the challenges of actually doing the job. Many of the new governor’s key appointments had been selected by his Kitchen Cabinet and came from the business world, which meant almost no one in the senior ranks of his administration had any experience in government. “We were not only amateurs. We were novice amateurs,” press spokesman Lyn Nofziger acknowledged later. Ronnie opened his first senior staff meeting with a question: “What do we do now?”

Personnel problems and infighting beset his administration from the start, but conflict-averse Ronnie was ill-equipped to bring internal discipline to his operation. Nor had the governor anticipated some of the policy challenges he would confront in his first year. His predecessor bequeathed him a fiscal deficit twice as big as he expected, and the spending cuts he proposed came nowhere near meeting the state constitution’s requirement that California balance its budget. So, the conservative who had run for office as an antitax crusader found himself in the position of having to raise revenues by $1 billion, which gave him the ignominious distinction of having signed the biggest tax hike ever for any state in the country.

Compounding the problem had been Ronnie’s choice of a finance director. Gordon Smith,