Ronald Reagan... Nancy

NANCY REAGAN

As Nancy and I settled into our new routine, she proved once again that, first and foremost, she's a nest-builder. Because the White House belongs to all the American people, Nancy said it should be the prettiest house in the land, and she set out to make it so. As far as I'm concerned - and thanks to her - it is. She began with the great Central Hall on the second floor that opened up from our living room. When she started out, its spectacular chandeliers shone on drab walls and dull, worn carpeting. It was a beautiful space badly in need of a renovation. The same was true of many other rooms in the White House. With the help of Ted Graber, an old friend of ours who is a decorator, Nancy set out, as her first project, to recapture the lost beauty of the Central Hall. She saw to it that its floors were sanded and refinished for the first time in thirty years. For the first time in over fifty years, its mahogany doors were stripped and refinished, new carpeting was laid, the walls were painted and some were covered with lovely wallpaper. The result was stunning. Suddenly the drab hall had become a beautifully furnished parlor illuminated by those glittering chandeliers. That was only the beginning: As time went on, virtually every room in the White House felt the touch on Nancy's good taste and her determination to make it the most beautiful house in America.

She did it at no cost to the taxpayers. She went out and raised contributions from Americans who shared her dream of making the White House beautiful again. Once she got started, members of the White House staff began pitching in. A kind of treasure hunt began. Dipping into their memories, veteran staffers told her about pieces of fine furniture, mirrors, paintings, and so forth that had adorned the White House in years past and were gathering dust in nooks and crannies around Washington. Nancy went looking for them and brought the best back. She found a priceless English antique octagon desk, for example, that had been given to the White House when John F. Kennedy was president and was hidden under a layer of dust in a Quonset hut used by the government as a storage unit. I'll never forget one night when we were having dinner alone and a butler who had worked in the White House for over thirty years put Nancy's meal down in front of her, then turned slightly and looked down the length of the Central Hall. "It's beginning to look like the White House again," he said very quietly.

Some people in the news media criticized Nancy's work on the White House. I'll never understand why. They gave the impression that she was extravagantly spending a fortune of public funds on unnecessary changes and new furnishings when in fact the furnishings were coming out of storage or being paid for by private contributions, not taxpayers. A classic example was the new set of state china she ordered for the White House.

Although it was frequently necessary at state dinners to serve well over a hundred guests, the staff told Nancy that, because of breakage and souvenir collectors, there weren't enough matching dishes to go around for large groups. As a result they had to use unmatched sets of china whenever there was a sizable group at the White House for dinner. Knowing that the White House needed it, Nancy accepted the gift of a new set of White House china with 4,372 pieces that cost about $200,000. But taxpayers didn't pay a cent for it; it was purchased by the Knapp Foundation and donated to the White House. Yet for some reason, some of Nancy's critics still claim she bought the china; it was a bum rap, a backhanded way of getting at me.

During the eight years we lived in the White House, it became a real home because Nancy worked to make it that way. I never stopped missing California; I've often said that a Californian (even one transplanted from the Midwest like me) who has to live someplace else lives in a perpetual state of homesickness. California, I like to say, isn't a place, it's a way of life. I once told Margaret Thatcher that her people should have crossed the other ocean to get to this continent; that way the capital of the United States would have been in California. But Nancy made the White House into a wonderful home for us, furnishing it with our things from home, and I felt very comfortable there - it was home. After the drab second-floor Central Hall was restored, we seldom closed the doors opening out from our living room, and the hall became an extension of it. As I sat looking across to the other side of the building, I never failed to remark to myself how magnificent it was.

Nancy wanted to make the state dinners we had at the White House more relaxed, as if guests were attending a dinner party at home. She worked hard to choose an interesting variety of guests, inviting people form the academic world, sports, business, entertainment, another fields. The routine at these dinners was usually the same: After a private reception upstairs, we would descend the grand staircase with the guests of honor, there'd be a receiving line, then Nancy and I would escort them into the state dining room. If the guest of honor was male and married, I sat with his wife beneath Lincoln's portrait. Nancy sat across the room with the male guest of honor at her table; that way, the guests on one side of the room would not feel any less important than those on the other side. While dessert was served, a group of army violinists known as the Strolling Strings came into the dining room and played; then I'd give a toast, the guest of honor would respond, and we'd go into the Blue Room for coffee followed by entertainment in the East Room. From there, it was into the foyer where a marine band played dance music.

At our state dinner honoring President Pertini of Italy, the Strolling Strings had begun moving among the tables when I saw one of them, a very pretty young woman, stroll very close to Pertini. Since I'd heard this courtly gentleman still had an eye for a pretty girl, I tried to catch Nancy's eye - he was sitting next to him - and smiled at her. Later on, when we went upstairs after dinner, I asked her whether he'd noticed the pretty girl and explained why I'd been trying to catch her eye.

"You've got to be kidding," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"By that time," Nancy said, "he had already kissed her hand twice."

On October 19, 1987, the stock market, after a record upward run, had the largest one-day collapse of prices since 1914 (over 508 points). It was in many ways a crisis for the country. But I confess this was a period of time in which I was more concerned about the possibility of an even greater tragedy in my own life than I was about the stock market.

On a Monday afternoon earlier that month, Dr. John Hutton of the White House medical staff came to the Oval Office and told me he wanted to give me some news about Nancy. During one of her regular mammogram checkups at Bethesda, doctors had detected what appeared to be a possible tumor in her left breast; a biopsy was necessary to determine if it was malignant. If it was malignant, she would have to have an operation. Afterward, John told Nancy I reacted to the news with an expression that he would never forget. "I think the president," he told her, "has always believed that nothing would ever happen to you."

He was right.

When I came up to the family quarters, I kissed Nancy and felt a tension in her body that I knew from long experience indicated she was very worried. "I wish I could erase the worry which she feels," I wrote that night in my diary. This was another one of those instances that reminded me of human limitations: For all the powers of the president of the United States, there are some situations that made me feel helpless and very humble.

All I could do was pray--and I did a lot of praying for Nancy during the next few weeks. The next ten days may have been the longest ten days of our lives. Nancy continued her full schedule of responsibilities, refusing to cancel commitments in her campaign against drugs and the foster grandparent program that were dear to her heart. While we waited it out, I had to battle Congress for approval of my nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, and then the stock market turned unusually volatile, prompting this comment in my diary October 16: "I'm concerned about the money supply. Has Fed been too tight? Alan [Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve] doesn't agree and believes this is only an overdue correction." (In hindsight, I think the stock market crashed principally because it was simply overpriced; investors suddenly realized the prices were too high.)

The same night, I flew with Nancy to Bethesda, where she was bedded down on the eve of her surgery. I returned to the White House, but was restless much of the night. I got up at six the next morning to fly to the hospital, but heavy fog made it unsafe for the helicopter. We had to drive instead and I was late. I got there only in time to kiss Nancy and watch her being wheeled on a gurney down the hallway into the operating room.

Nancy's brother, Dick, had come from Philadelphia to be with us, and the two of us tried to busy ourselves with newspapers to make the time pass, but it didn't work. Then, with no news, we adjourned to a small dining area and were eating breakfast when I looked up and saw John Hutton and Dr. Ollie Beahrs of the Mayo Clinic approach us.

Their faces telegraphed the news that they were about to give me: Nancy had a malignancy and she and her doctors decided on a mastectomy.

I know how desperately Nancy had hoped this would not be the case and I couldn't reply to them. I just dropped my head and cried. After they left, I remained at the table, motionless and unable to speak. Then I felt an arm around my shoulders and heard a few quiet, comforting words. They were spoken by Paula Trivette, one of the four military nurses assigned to the White House and, like all of them, a warm and wonderful human being. With her words and her arm on my shoulder she was trying to comfort me. I learned later that John Hutton had suggested she do it; she stepped in and was truly an angel of mercy. I can't recall her exact words but they lifted me from the pit I was in and kept me out of it.

In the early afternoon, I was able to visit Nancy in the recovery room. She was asleep when Dick and I got there. Suddenly, as we were standing by her bed, there was a little movement of her body. Her eyes didn't open, but I heard a tiny voice say, "My breast is gone." Barely conscious because of her anesthesia, Nancy somehow had sensed we were there. She was devastated by the loss of her breast--not because she was worried about herself, but because she was worried about me and how I would feel about her as a woman. "It doesn't matter," I said. "I love you." Then I leaned over and kissed her softly, and repeated that it made no difference to me. But seeing that sadness in her eyes, it was all I could do to avoid breaking up again.

Thousands of letters and calls to the White House indicated that she was in the hearts and minds of many Americans during that period. As ever, Nancy had been a brave woman. The doctors had told her that she had two choices for the removal of the tumor: She could have a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. After listening to them, she chose a mastectomy because she realized she wouldn't be able to perform her duties as first lady if she had to undergo the radiation that would be required after a lumpectomy, and, at her age, she thought it was best.

Very soon thereafter, we learned Nancy would have to plumb the depths of her courage again. I had just finished an interview with five foreign television reporters on October 26 when my secretary, Kathy Osborne, came into the office and said she had just been told by Elaine Crispen, Nancy's press secretary, that Nancy's mother, Edith Davis, had died in Phoenix. I canceled the rest of my schedule and took the elevator upstairs to see Nancy on what I knew would be a heartbreaking mission. Although she was making a good recovery, Nancy was still bedridden and weak from her surgery. On my way up to the family quarters, I saw Dr. Hutton and told him what had happened, and he went with me so he would be there when I broke the news to Nancy. She was talking to Ron when I came in but put the phone down when she saw us. Perhaps she had feared the worst.

It was extremely difficult for her because I have never known any family with such a close bond between mother and child as there was in Nancy's family. Nancy worshipped her mother and seldom a day passed when they did not talk on the phone. I worshipped her, too. Like Nancy, she lit up a room when she walked into it. Deede was a remarkable, warm, and loving woman. From the time I met her, I could never tell another mother-in-law joke. As I knew she would, Nancy took the news very hard.

After landing in Arizona, we drove first to the mortuary. Seeing her mother was too much for Nancy. She broke down sobbing and began speaking to her mother, telling her how much she loved her and how much she meant to her. I had never seen Nancy in such pain. I held her and said that her mother knew how she felt but that she was no longer with her body. While I am sure I comforted Nancy a little, nothing I could say or do could bring Deede back. Once again I felt helpless against the limitations imposed on all men: I was president of the United States but there was nothing I could do to bring happiness to my wife at a time when she desperately needed it. All I could do was stand beside her, hold her, pray, and try to soak up some of the pain she was feeling.

Everyone in the family came to the funeral in Phoenix except Patti. Her absence added to the hurt Nancy felt during this month of almost nonstop pain. Although Nancy would never get over the loss of her mother, the funeral went a long way toward helping her deal with her grief - she saw how much so many people loved Deede, and I think she realized Deede had joined her husband in heaven.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster