I know I’m a bit late with this, but it took a while to find the right picture. This is Nancy Reagan circa 1946, “Broadway Nancy”, three years before she got to Hollywood, for a career that lasted all of seven years. Nancy Reagan really didn’t belong on the stage, or the screen. That chin, that nose, amirite or amirite? She willed herself into an acting career that ended when she was in her mid-thirties, just as she willed herself into a size 2 dress all of her life. She was never a star. But Nancy enjoyed a revenge that is the privilege of a very, very few. The roles she never got to play on the stage or the screen, she played in real life.
During the Reagan Administration, and after, Nancy had the reputation, almost entirely undeserved, of being the “good fairy” who magically caused bad people to disappear and good things to happen. She was the implacable enemy of people who, she felt, cared more about themselves than about Ronnie, and she did worry, a lot, about what the country club folks thought of Ronnie, as filtered through the gossip of her more than country club friends. But as far as actually affecting policy goes, her real influence was almost nil, unless you call her championing of “Just Say No”—her own fanatical self-discipline and self-control offered as a role model for ghetto kids growing up in circumstances she could not imagine, nor did she wish to.
Nancy most cited triumph was giving the boot for White House Chief of Staff Don Regan, but Don had already pissed almost everyone off, plus the Iran-Contra scandal more or less demanded that a large head should roll, and, in such cases, the White House chief of staff’s head is uniquely vulnerable, both because he’s “the boss” and because his replacement doesn’t require Senate confirmation. It would probably would have been fairer to fire Nancy, who constantly fucked things up with her astrologically grounded demands for schedule changes and other accommodations.
It’s true that Nancy wanted Ronnie to work out some sort of reduction in tension with the Soviets, but it was Ronnie, and Margaret Thatcher (and Mikhail Gorbachev) who ended the Cold War. Reagan, unlike almost every other member of his administration, grew up in pre-Pearl Harbor America, and peace, rather that war, was his idea of “normalcy”. Thatcher had no such memories, but Britain always felt the financial burden of the Cold War far more than the U.S. did. In any event, as Nancy herself always said, no one could make Ronnie do something he didn’t want to do.
Afterwords
No one is less deserving of sympathy than Don Regan, deservedly best remembered for coining the term “fuck you money”, which he proudly possessed in spades, but Big Don did get a bad rap over Iran-Contra. The story is that in the “old” Ronald Reagan White House, all voices were heard and all options considered, until Donnie took over and insisted on being a one man show. But Ronald Reagan was the driving force behind Iran-Contra from start to finish, brushing off repeated objections from the two strongest voices in his administration, George Shultz and Casper Weinberger. Donnie was an innocent, albeit irritating, bystander.
