Nancy Reagan: A Uniquely Influential First Lady

That was author Karen Tumulti talking about Nancy Reagan, one of the most controversial and underestimated first ladies this country has ever had. I'm a Land Bervier and this is Seneca's on women to hear. We are bringing you one hundred of the world's most inspiring and history making women. You need to hear. Nancy Reagan's time as First Lady was marked by both admiration and criticism. She brought elegance

and sophistication to the White House. She drew attention for her anti drug campaign I'll just Say No, and she was attacked for purchasing a new set of presidential china that costs more than two hundred thousand dollars, but she was so much more. Karen Tumulty, an award winning journalist and columnist for The Washington Post, has written a must read book about Nancy Reagan that reveals her in all her complexity and shows why she's considered a uniquely influential

first Lady. Listen to Karen Tumulty and learn why Nancy Reagan is one of Seneca's One Women to hear. I'm here today with Karen Tumulty, award winning journalist and author of a new book about Nancy Reagan. Aaron, welcome. It's delightful to be with you. Oh Milan, It's wonderful to be with you as well. Thank you. Your book is called The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. Why that title? What

was the triumph? Um? I think that it explores her influence, uh, both in the rise of Ronald Reagan, you know, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, in the success of his presidency and ultimately in the shaping of his legacy. But it also does not flinch from, uh, the many traumas that she experienced in her life, her flaws, her demons, and you know, it also goes through the difficulties of the political environment in which she lived and

the really turbulent times in the country. Karen, You've had such a distinguished career as a political reporter and now you're a call missed for the Washington Post. What got you interested in doing a book about Mrs Reagan? After all, you've covered other first ladies, You've had a wealth of possibilities and what you might take up in a book.

But why Nancy Reagan? Well, this was actually an idea that Simon and Schuster, my publisher, came up with, and they came to me in the fall of sixteen and said they this was just months after after Nancy Reagan had died, and said they were interested in a biography of her. And honestly, you know, I thought she might be sort of an interesting and you know, multi layered

subject to write my first book about. But it really was I worked on this book for four and a half years, and it really wasn't until I was at least two years into the research that I began to sort of put together all the many strands of her story. And the most important of that was the incredible influence that she wielded in the Reagan White House, not just as you know, the closest adviser to a really unique president who really was close to only one person in

the world and he married her. Um, but also in the shaping of of policy. I ended up writing a lot more in this book than I anticipated, for instance, about foreign policy, about her role in the you know, in the warming of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that led up to the end of the Cold War. And I think the heart of the book is the chapter on the Iran contrast scandal, where Nancy Reagan really almost singlehandedly ran the effort that rescued

her husband's presidency. You know, it really is a fascinating biography because, as as you said so well, she is multi layered, and I think many of the layers that you tell us a great deal more about um in the book are not very well known. In fact, I would imagine UM it's one of the amazing revelations of the book, because we've had activists, first, ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt. We've had trend setters like Jackie Kennedy, women who changed

the national conversation like Brave Betty Ford. What do you think Nancy's legacy will be well. First of all, you have to understand what Ronald Reagan was. He, for all of his political gifts, was very conflict a verse. He was a an eternal optimist, and he really really needed a troubleshooter, somebody who could watch his back, somebody who was actually a better judge sometimes the people around him

than he was. As James Baker, the first White House Chief of Staff in the the Reagan administration, told me, she had amazing instincts, and in fact, her instincts were better than his. And if she had any ideology, it was one thing, the success and well being of Ronald Reagan. And so her legacy really will be I think his legacy, which would have been very, very different, I think had he decided to marry just about anyone else. And again this is not I mean she had. She was a

very controversial first lady. She seemed like a throwback to the mid twenty century. Feminists scorned her, and she made a lot of mistakes. She brought a lot of trouble upon herself, but when it came to what was good for her husband, she was almost unerring. And the men in his administration who didn't recognize that. Who didn't realize what a valuable ally she could be. Who got on her bad side tended not to last for very long. And there were some men in the administration who fell

into that category. And there were others, I'm sure who saw her as a tremendous ally. There were, and I think chief among them would have been, uh, Michael Deaver. Her closest sort of associate was the White House Deputy chief of Staff, and together the two of them really managed Reagan's image. But the other two people who were really shrewd about both her power and how valuable she could be were White House Chief of Staff James Baker

and Secretary of State George Schultz. And often those two would find themselves aligned against the more ideological members of the administration. Those three actually, and um, it was often, as Baker told me, if you could convince the first lady that something was in Ronald Reagan's best interest, you had a pretty good shot of getting him on board too. And they, of course, the two of them were so

instrumental in Reagan's foreign policy. Uh. And certainly that period with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the possibilities that that now represented for the United States in the world. So I don't think many of us, if many at all, understood what an influential role she played in all of that. That's really correct. I opened the book on something George Schultz.

I interviewed him. He was nineties seven years old, and he told me about a dinner that Nancy Reagan invited him over to when he didn't know the Reagan's very well. It was just two couples in the White House where he first began to realize how anxious Ronald Reagan was. Now, now the dissolution of the Soviet Union looks like it was almost inevitable, But at the time, uh Reagan was

a president who had decades of anti communist rhetoric. He was presiding over the biggest peacetime military build up in history, and most of the people in his administration were hardline hawks who really thought there could never be any such

thing as a working relationship with Moscow. But it was at that dinner, at that private dinner, that George Schultz began to realize that the Ronald Reagan was not who he thought he was on this issue, and that that was in fact the entire reason Nancy Reagan had set up that dinner so that so that he could see something about her husband that really had the potential to

change history. That's really fascinating. So in any ways, she was underestimated, because when I think back at the headlines that she got during some of those years, the headlines were about the fancy wardrobe and the china and things that really were not substantive at all and didn't really cast well on her, as you've already said, So it seems like she she was tremendously underestimated, and particularly the

role that she played for her husband. Do you think he would have made it to the White House without her? I asked that question of people over and over, people like James Baker, people like Stuart Spencer, who was his campaign manager going back to his first race for governor, his closest political advisor. They were unanimous. He absolutely could not have been president without her. Uh, in part because I mean he had a vision, he had political gifts.

He could connect with the country in a way that I think we hadn't seen anybody do in a very long time. I mean, this is a president who won forty nine states, but um, he he was a solitary figure, and she was really the one who built the network, the staff holding of his rise. As Luke Cannon wrote in one of his biographies of Reagan, Ronald Reagan always knew where he wanted to go, but Nancy Reagan had a better idea of what it was going to take

to get there. So interesting, Well, I know you've covered many a first lady in your time, and it's a very peculiar job in many ways, because there is no job description, and one is only there by virtue of with whom she is married, to whom she is married.

And given how much we now know thanks to you in this book, what do you think the public reaction would have been had there been greater knowledge of Mrs Reagan's political involvement, as you said, all the way from shaping foreign policy to political decisions about personnel, it would not have been good. As you said, every first lady has to sort of invent this job for herself, and she has. It's a product of her own interests, the product of her times, a product of her spouses needs,

his strengths, his weaknesses. But one thing that a number of them have learned the hard way that would include eleanor Roosevelt. That would include your old boss, Hillary Clinton. Is that when the word powerful is applied to a first lady, it is usually not intended as a compliment.

And while it was very you know, in the first term, I think people really wrote Nancy Reagan off as a shallow, dilettante socialite when the extent of her power became clear during Iran Contra, when among other things, she engineers the firing of the White House Chief of Staff and then White House Chief of Staff Don Reagan. All of a sudden, a lot of the traditional conservatives in the press turned

on her. William Staffire Uh, Scottie Restin in the New York Times, Uh Sapphire comparator to Edith Wilson, unelected figure trying to run the country. I forgot whether it was Sapphire or Restin, but one of them actually referred to Ronald Reagan in one of his columns as impact by Yeah, that wouldn't be good, Uh if it came out as the idea under a person's biography, Right, that's correct, senecas one hundred women to hear will be back after the

short break. Well, you know, these first ladies are truly fascinating in their own right, and they're often caricatured, and we don't really understand them, I think because of the situations in which they find them, so they're sort of divorced from their own biographies. What was it about Nancy Reagan's background and growing up that made her into the woman she became, Her incredible nose for danger, her her instincts.

I think we're shaped by what was a very anxious personality that that I traced back to the childhood trauma. She was at one point abandoned by her actress mother and sent to live with relatives for six years. Um she ultimately, you know, her mother gets remarried and she worships her adoptive father, but she actually has to engineer

the adoption herself. And so I think she grew up and her son, as her son Ron told me, you know, with sort of a shadow on her spirit, this since this fear of abandonment, that no matter this idea that no matter how well things are going, the bottom could dropout at any moment. That seems to be confirmed two months in her husband's into her husband's presidency, when she almost loses him to would be assassin's bullet, and it really does leave her anxious and wary and convinced that

there there is a trap waiting around every corner. Was it at that point that she consulted with astrologers and was trying to take that advice and have the president's staff schedule him accordingly. That is one of the weirder things that we have ever heard of any first lady doing. And I one thing I do is I try to take the reader, almost minute by minute by the day of the day in March of when Reagan was shot. Reagan was a deeply, deeply religious person, an optimistic person.

He comes out of that experience thinking God preserved him for a reason, He's got a purpose. It's you know, everything's going to work out fine. Nancy Reagan did not really have that kind of grounding in religious faith, and so she is so anxious and weary. She is desperate for anything that can give her a sense of control, no matter how uh you, no matter how wacky it

might sound. And one day, shortly after the assassination attempt, her friend Merv Griffin, the entertainment executive who shares a July six birthday with her and an interest in astrology, tells her, will you know there was there's this woman in San Francisco who knew that March was going to be a bad day for your husband. And that's the

point at which she begins consulting this woman. And when it is revealed by in a book by Don Reagan, the White House chief of staff, that she had fired, um, it become was just one of the biggest embarrassments I think any White House has had in our lifetime. It's really always surprising, I think when things like this can happen. It's clear that that it has been quite a feat.

As you sort of alluded to earlier in our conversation about the time you spent working on this book and the amount of research and interviewing you did, and I wonder, given this fascinating portrait of Nancy Reagan, and in many ways one that most of us didn't know about her or only new very tiny indications, what was the most

challenging part of writing this book for you? Maybe what surprised you along the way, either in your interviewing or in some of the research you did, it really was some of the impact that she had at on policy at crucial moments, uh during a rand Contra. When her husband is finally going to give his first speech on AIDS, she would not trust the West Wing to do the speech writing. She would actually go out and get her

own outside speech writer to do the job. Um. The other thing that I think is really important in the book is the post presidential years after he leaves office. Very shortly after he leaves office, he has diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He begins a long, you know, a decade of his life where he is essentially incapacitated. And it really does fall on Nancy Reagan's shoulders to to shape and mold his legacy. She she puts a lot of energy into

getting the library off the ground. She makes sure that his his diaries are published, his letters are published, so that people can see in his own handwriting, Um, what kind of thinker he was. She was also very suspicious of people on the right who would sort of seek to appropriate her husband's name and his image for things

that maybe Ronald Reagan wouldn't have agreed with. UM. One thing that for instance, in the ninety nineties, after Republicans took over the House, one of the things they wanted to do was kick Franklin Delano Roosevelt off the dime, Roosevelt who they didn't like, and replace his image with Ronald Reagan. And Nancy Reagan actually stands up and says, I do not support putting my husband on the dime. As she said, he admired Franklin Roosevelt more than any

other president. He would not support this. So she really, you know, she she was careful and wary of people from both sides who would try to turn Ronald Reagan into in someone in some cases something he wasn't or

something that really wasn't true to what he believed. You know, when when people talk about her dedication to him, that dedication went beyond the love they had for each other to to this kind of interest in ensuring that his place in history and his and the characterization of him was what she thought he would have wanted, and she wanted to help him ensure that that happened. If over and over people would tell me, in some ways she

was more interested in that than he was. She at one point goes out and picks Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, and gives him incredible access to Reagan and the White House at the book turns out to be a disappointment to her. But as Edmund Morris told me, you know, Ronald Reagan, could it cared less who wrote his biography? Uh, And and she just in some ways, I mean, she really did want history to see him

as a great man. And that really, more than anything else, I think, drove her instincts on pushing him to reach out to the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. She didn't want him to go down in history as a warmonger. She wanted him to go down in history. And she believed also that this was truer to his own beliefs, as you know, somebody who was capable of pulling the world back from the nuclear abyss, even though his image was as kind of a you know, quick on the

trigger trigger cowboy from the West. Yeah, and you mentioned access. I guess enough time had elapsed in there not being on the national stage. It sounds like many many people agreed to speak with you m very frankly about the as times. That is so true. Um, as I mentioned George Schultz was when I talked to him. Uh. Nancy Reagan's stepbrother, who has recently died, was in his mid nineties.

I do think that some people told me these stories, and they were not all flattering stories, but they were telling me these stories in part because they knew that if they didn't tell them now, they would never be told. And so you benefited from that, and we as readers of this book that truly get to benefit from that and understand this period in history. You really created an extraordinary read Karen, and I hope lots of our listeners will.

We'll get the book and be as fascinated by it and learn a great deal about this period that we thought we knew well, but clearly we didn't know at least this aspect of it as well as we might have. Well, thank you so much, Milan. It's it's really been my my, my pleasure. I don't want to let you go because I want to take advantage of this minute or so that we have left um to take advantage of the fact that you're one of the most seasoned and astute

political commentators on the national landscape today. And I wanted to ask you, certainly in light of the book and the period you were writing about, and what's happened to us. You know, obviously it's a time of terrible political partisanship and polarization that's dividing us and and and really under

under mining even sort of a modicum of bipartisanship. And I I remember thinking about the story we all do know and and still here quoted about how a president Reagan and the speaker O'Neil would certainly disagree on the issues, uh, but they would get together in evenings and play cards and get along amiably and uh and really respect each other.

And we seem to have lost that. I wonder in writing the book and in covering politics today, and you write in your column very cogently about the issues, what you think it will take for us to get back there, because I'm sure our listeners also wring their hands wondering about the fact that we all just need to get along. You're correct. And what I came to Washington in the nineteen eighties, and you know, as I mentioned, Reagan won re election with forty nine states. I can't even imagine

any politician who could do that today. But it always seemed that the the goal in the eighties was to get things done, whether it was tax reform, which required by partisanship, whether it was immigration, a huge rewriter the immigration laws. Again it required by partisanship, But politicians then seemed to believe that voters would put wish them if they didn't get things done. Now it sometimes seems that they believe that voters send them to Washington to stop

things from getting done. And and I don't know what the answer to this is. I mean, part of it is everybody gets to crawl into their own media silo and only here people who are already agree with them. But I do think, you know, every time I think it can't get any worse, something happens and it does. And not until voters start punishing elected officials instead of rewarding them for the kind of behavior that we see,

is anything really going to change. Well, I do hope things get better, as I'm sure all of us do. And on that note, I just want to thank you again for writing this book. I want to tell our listeners that it's a wonderful read. Go out and get a copy of The Try of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty. It's not just fun to read it, it really is a great learning experience. So thank you Karen for writing it, and thank you for all you do and for your

great columns as well. Thanks again, Gwen. What a fascinating life Karen Tumulty has revealed so much we never knew about Nancy Reagan. Here are three things I took away from that conversation. First, as Nancy Reagan's experience shows, being first lady is harder than most of us can imagine. There's no job description. Each first lady has to set her own priorities and she will always be judged and criticized. Second,

like so many women, Nancy Reagan was tremendously underestimated. In her research, Karen Tumulty discovered a woman of sharp instincts, fierce loyalty, and an iron will that propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House and kept him there when he suffered a presidential crisis. Finally, we have Nancy Reagan to thank for some of the international progress made during the

nineteen eighties. It was she who pushed her husband to reach out to the Soviet Union during a time of historic change, so that Ronald Reagan would be seen as a peacemaker and be sure to get a copy of Karen's book, The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. It is a great read. Tune in next Thursday to hear about our next featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is a collaboration between the Seneca Women podcast Network and I

Heart Radio, with support from founding partner Pung. Have a Great Day.