Actor James Stewart once speculated that had Ronald Reagan met Nancy Davis before he married Jane Wyman, Reagan never would have gone into politics. “She would have seen to it that he got all the best parts … won three or four Oscars and been a real star.” That was his way of saying that, but for Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan would never have become president. Once in the job, she made sure he became a great one.
The Reagans forged one of the most successful partnerships in all of history. In many ways they were opposite sides of the same coin. “My life did not begin until I met Ronnie,” Nancy Reagan once said. “I cannot imagine life without her,” Reagan said of his wife. Many politicians are in the habit of using the word “we” to describe their campaigns or administrations. When Ronald Reagan used it, those who knew him best knew that he was primarily thinking of himself and Nancy.
The son of an alcoholic father and a strong-willed mother (not all that different from the woman he married) Ronald Reagan learned to hide his emotions, avoid direct confrontations, and divert his eyes from the unpleasant. “I lived in a world of pretend,” he said of his childhood. Nancy, the daughter of a divorced actress, spent much of her childhood in the homes of various relatives. She knew little of a stable family life until she was eight years old and her mother married a successful Chicago surgeon, who adopted her.
It is little wonder that the instant the two first met, when Nancy called upon the president of the Screen Actors Guild to seek his help in refuting accusations that she had Communist sympathies, they became inseparable. Both brought to their marriage a sense of caring and stability that had been wanting in their lives.
Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition and genial nature caused him to look for and see only the best in people. Nancy stood guard against bad apples, self-promoters, and incompetents. She was also willing to take the heat for a president who was said to have glided through the controversies of his administration in a suit of Teflon. It was this aspect of her that prevented many of her contemporaries and historians, operating with the benefit of hindsight, from recognizing her true value and from appreciating her true contributions to her husband’s administration.
Like all strong-willed people, Nancy Reagan had detractors. Too many who disagreed with his politics or policies held her responsible for much of what they disliked. Few stopped to consider that Ronald Reagan was always the man he wished to be and Nancy Reagan made certain that he was. As Ronald Reagan was making his journey from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, some old Hollywood friends attributed his conversion to the influence of Nancy Reagan, her family, and their “right wing” friends.
After Reagan had become president, some of his staunchest supporters blamed the first lady, chief of staff James Baker, and their in-house public relations genius maven, Michael Deaver, for applying the brakes to the Reagan Revolution. “Let Reagan Be Reagan,” they said.
As historians continue to recount the events of Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary and transformational presidency they find, time and time again, Nancy Reagan stepping in to avert pending disaster and to bring out the best in her husband. She played a major role in replacing Reagan’s first campaign manager in 1980. She was constantly at his side as he recovered from a near death experience two months into his presidency. She stepped in to reverse a public relations fiasco that went by the name of “Bitburg.” During the Iran-Contra scandal, she played a critical role in getting her husband to reorganize his White House and waive “executive privilege” as investigators sought to put the pieces together.
A product of the same industry as her husband, Nancy Reagan came to appreciate the power of paradox. She was one of the first to appreciate that a man with those credentials was perfectly poised not only to make peace with an adversary he proclaimed an “evil empire,” but in a way that won the Cold War without firing a shot. Behind the scenes, and usually over the telephone, she pushed back against the doubters.
“Theirs was the real thing,” the Reagans’ friend William F. Buckley Jr. wrote. He advised readers not to regard Reagan’s consort as a “silent female appendage,” who confined her role to gazing adoringly at her husband. “She has positions, stated and unstated,” he said, on people, issues, and other matters. That she did.
Alvin S. Felzenberg, a presidential historian, is writing a political biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
