Speaker 1: He absolutely could not have been president without her, in
Speaker 1: part because I mean he had a vision, he had
Speaker 1: political gifts, He could connect with the country in a
Speaker 1: way that I think we hadn't seen anybody do in
Speaker 1: a very long time. But he was a solitary figure,
Speaker 1: and she was really the one who built the network,
Speaker 1: the scaffolding of his rise. Ronald Reagan always knew where
Speaker 1: he wanted to go, but Nancy Reagan had a better
Speaker 1: idea of what it was going to take to get there.
Speaker 1: That was author Karen Tumulti talking about Nancy Reagan, one
Speaker 1: of the most controversial and underestimated first ladies this country
Speaker 1: has ever had. I'm a Land Bervier and this is
Speaker 1: Seneca's on women to hear. We are bringing you one
Speaker 1: hundred of the world's most inspiring and history making women.
Speaker 1: You need to hear. Nancy Reagan's time as First Lady
Speaker 1: was marked by both admiration and criticism. She brought elegance
Speaker 1: and sophistication to the White House. She drew attention for
Speaker 1: her anti drug campaign I'll just Say No, and she
Speaker 1: was attacked for purchasing a new set of presidential china
Speaker 1: that costs more than two hundred thousand dollars, but she
Speaker 1: was so much more. Karen Tumulty, an award winning journalist
Speaker 1: and columnist for The Washington Post, has written a must
Speaker 1: read book about Nancy Reagan that reveals her in all
Speaker 1: her complexity and shows why she's considered a uniquely influential
Speaker 1: first Lady. Listen to Karen Tumulty and learn why Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan is one of Seneca's One Women to hear. I'm
Speaker 1: here today with Karen Tumulty, award winning journalist and author
Speaker 1: of a new book about Nancy Reagan. Aaron, welcome. It's
Speaker 1: delightful to be with you. Oh Milan, It's wonderful to
Speaker 1: be with you as well. Thank you. Your book is
Speaker 1: called The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. Why that title? What
Speaker 1: was the triumph? Um? I think that it explores her influence, uh,
Speaker 1: both in the rise of Ronald Reagan, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, in
Speaker 1: the success of his presidency and ultimately in the shaping
Speaker 1: of his legacy. But it also does not flinch from, uh,
Speaker 1: the many traumas that she experienced in her life, her flaws,
Speaker 1: her demons, and you know, it also goes through the
Speaker 1: difficulties of the political environment in which she lived and
Speaker 1: the really turbulent times in the country. Karen, You've had
Speaker 1: such a distinguished career as a political reporter and now
Speaker 1: you're a call missed for the Washington Post. What got
Speaker 1: you interested in doing a book about Mrs Reagan? After all,
Speaker 1: you've covered other first ladies, You've had a wealth of
Speaker 1: possibilities and what you might take up in a book.
Speaker 1: But why Nancy Reagan? Well, this was actually an idea
Speaker 1: that Simon and Schuster, my publisher, came up with, and
Speaker 1: they came to me in the fall of sixteen and
Speaker 1: said they this was just months after after Nancy Reagan
Speaker 1: had died, and said they were interested in a biography
Speaker 1: of her. And honestly, you know, I thought she might
Speaker 1: be sort of an interesting and you know, multi layered
Speaker 1: subject to write my first book about. But it really
Speaker 1: was I worked on this book for four and a
Speaker 1: half years, and it really wasn't until I was at
Speaker 1: least two years into the research that I began to
Speaker 1: sort of put together all the many strands of her story.
Speaker 1: And the most important of that was the incredible influence
Speaker 1: that she wielded in the Reagan White House, not just
Speaker 1: as you know, the closest adviser to a really unique
Speaker 1: president who really was close to only one person in
Speaker 1: the world and he married her. Um, but also in
Speaker 1: the shaping of of policy. I ended up writing a
Speaker 1: lot more in this book than I anticipated, for instance,
Speaker 1: about foreign policy, about her role in the you know,
Speaker 1: in the warming of relations between the United States and
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union that led up to the end of
Speaker 1: the Cold War. And I think the heart of the
Speaker 1: book is the chapter on the Iran contrast scandal, where
Speaker 1: Nancy Reagan really almost singlehandedly ran the effort that rescued
Speaker 1: her husband's presidency. You know, it really is a fascinating
Speaker 1: biography because, as as you said so well, she is
Speaker 1: multi layered, and I think many of the layers that
Speaker 1: you tell us a great deal more about um in
Speaker 1: the book are not very well known. In fact, I
Speaker 1: would imagine UM it's one of the amazing revelations of
Speaker 1: the book, because we've had activists, first, ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: We've had trend setters like Jackie Kennedy, women who changed
Speaker 1: the national conversation like Brave Betty Ford. What do you
Speaker 1: think Nancy's legacy will be well. First of all, you
Speaker 1: have to understand what Ronald Reagan was. He, for all
Speaker 1: of his political gifts, was very conflict a verse. He
Speaker 1: was a an eternal optimist, and he really really needed
Speaker 1: a troubleshooter, somebody who could watch his back, somebody who
Speaker 1: was actually a better judge sometimes the people around him
Speaker 1: than he was. As James Baker, the first White House
Speaker 1: Chief of Staff in the the Reagan administration, told me,
Speaker 1: she had amazing instincts, and in fact, her instincts were
Speaker 1: better than his. And if she had any ideology, it
Speaker 1: was one thing, the success and well being of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: And so her legacy really will be I think his legacy,
Speaker 1: which would have been very, very different, I think had
Speaker 1: he decided to marry just about anyone else. And again
Speaker 1: this is not I mean she had. She was a
Speaker 1: very controversial first lady. She seemed like a throwback to
Speaker 1: the mid twenty century. Feminists scorned her, and she made
Speaker 1: a lot of mistakes. She brought a lot of trouble
Speaker 1: upon herself, but when it came to what was good
Speaker 1: for her husband, she was almost unerring. And the men
Speaker 1: in his administration who didn't recognize that. Who didn't realize
Speaker 1: what a valuable ally she could be. Who got on
Speaker 1: her bad side tended not to last for very long.
Speaker 1: And there were some men in the administration who fell
Speaker 1: into that category. And there were others, I'm sure who
Speaker 1: saw her as a tremendous ally. There were, and I
Speaker 1: think chief among them would have been, uh, Michael Deaver.
Speaker 1: Her closest sort of associate was the White House Deputy
Speaker 1: chief of Staff, and together the two of them really
Speaker 1: managed Reagan's image. But the other two people who were
Speaker 1: really shrewd about both her power and how valuable she
Speaker 1: could be were White House Chief of Staff James Baker
Speaker 1: and Secretary of State George Schultz. And often those two
Speaker 1: would find themselves aligned against the more ideological members of
Speaker 1: the administration. Those three actually, and um, it was often,
Speaker 1: as Baker told me, if you could convince the first
Speaker 1: lady that something was in Ronald Reagan's best interest, you
Speaker 1: had a pretty good shot of getting him on board too.
Speaker 1: And they, of course, the two of them were so
Speaker 1: instrumental in Reagan's foreign policy. Uh. And certainly that period
Speaker 1: with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the possibilities
Speaker 1: that that now represented for the United States in the world.
Speaker 1: So I don't think many of us, if many at all,
Speaker 1: understood what an influential role she played in all of that.
Speaker 1: That's really correct. I opened the book on something George Schultz.
Speaker 1: I interviewed him. He was nineties seven years old, and
Speaker 1: he told me about a dinner that Nancy Reagan invited
Speaker 1: him over to when he didn't know the Reagan's very well.
Speaker 1: It was just two couples in the White House where
Speaker 1: he first began to realize how anxious Ronald Reagan was. Now,
Speaker 1: now the dissolution of the Soviet Union looks like it
Speaker 1: was almost inevitable, But at the time, uh Reagan was
Speaker 1: a president who had decades of anti communist rhetoric. He
Speaker 1: was presiding over the biggest peacetime military build up in history,
Speaker 1: and most of the people in his administration were hardline
Speaker 1: hawks who really thought there could never be any such
Speaker 1: thing as a working relationship with Moscow. But it was
Speaker 1: at that dinner, at that private dinner, that George Schultz
Speaker 1: began to realize that the Ronald Reagan was not who
Speaker 1: he thought he was on this issue, and that that
Speaker 1: was in fact the entire reason Nancy Reagan had set
Speaker 1: up that dinner so that so that he could see
Speaker 1: something about her husband that really had the potential to
Speaker 1: change history. That's really fascinating. So in any ways, she
Speaker 1: was underestimated, because when I think back at the headlines
Speaker 1: that she got during some of those years, the headlines
Speaker 1: were about the fancy wardrobe and the china and things
Speaker 1: that really were not substantive at all and didn't really
Speaker 1: cast well on her, as you've already said, So it
Speaker 1: seems like she she was tremendously underestimated, and particularly the
Speaker 1: role that she played for her husband. Do you think
Speaker 1: he would have made it to the White House without her?
Speaker 1: I asked that question of people over and over, people
Speaker 1: like James Baker, people like Stuart Spencer, who was his
Speaker 1: campaign manager going back to his first race for governor,
Speaker 1: his closest political advisor. They were unanimous. He absolutely could
Speaker 1: not have been president without her. Uh, in part because
Speaker 1: I mean he had a vision, he had political gifts.
Speaker 1: He could connect with the country in a way that
Speaker 1: I think we hadn't seen anybody do in a very
Speaker 1: long time. I mean, this is a president who won
Speaker 1: forty nine states, but um, he he was a solitary figure,
Speaker 1: and she was really the one who built the network,
Speaker 1: the staff holding of his rise. As Luke Cannon wrote
Speaker 1: in one of his biographies of Reagan, Ronald Reagan always
Speaker 1: knew where he wanted to go, but Nancy Reagan had
Speaker 1: a better idea of what it was going to take
Speaker 1: to get there. So interesting, Well, I know you've covered
Speaker 1: many a first lady in your time, and it's a
Speaker 1: very peculiar job in many ways, because there is no
Speaker 1: job description, and one is only there by virtue of
Speaker 1: with whom she is married, to whom she is married.
Speaker 1: And given how much we now know thanks to you
Speaker 1: in this book, what do you think the public reaction
Speaker 1: would have been had there been greater knowledge of Mrs
Speaker 1: Reagan's political involvement, as you said, all the way from
Speaker 1: shaping foreign policy to political decisions about personnel, it would
Speaker 1: not have been good. As you said, every first lady
Speaker 1: has to sort of invent this job for herself, and
Speaker 1: she has. It's a product of her own interests, the
Speaker 1: product of her times, a product of her spouses needs,
Speaker 1: his strengths, his weaknesses. But one thing that a number
Speaker 1: of them have learned the hard way that would include
Speaker 1: eleanor Roosevelt. That would include your old boss, Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: Is that when the word powerful is applied to a
Speaker 1: first lady, it is usually not intended as a compliment.
Speaker 1: And while it was very you know, in the first term,
Speaker 1: I think people really wrote Nancy Reagan off as a shallow,
Speaker 1: dilettante socialite when the extent of her power became clear
Speaker 1: during Iran Contra, when among other things, she engineers the
Speaker 1: firing of the White House Chief of Staff and then
Speaker 1: White House Chief of Staff Don Reagan. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: a lot of the traditional conservatives in the press turned
Speaker 1: on her. William Staffire Uh, Scottie Restin in the New
Speaker 1: York Times, Uh Sapphire comparator to Edith Wilson, unelected figure
Speaker 1: trying to run the country. I forgot whether it was
Speaker 1: Sapphire or Restin, but one of them actually referred to
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan in one of his columns as impact by Yeah,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be good, Uh if it came out as
Speaker 1: the idea under a person's biography, Right, that's correct, senecas
Speaker 1: one hundred women to hear will be back after the
Speaker 1: short break. Well, you know, these first ladies are truly
Speaker 1: fascinating in their own right, and they're often caricatured, and
Speaker 1: we don't really understand them, I think because of the
Speaker 1: situations in which they find them, so they're sort of
Speaker 1: divorced from their own biographies. What was it about Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan's background and growing up that made her into the
Speaker 1: woman she became, Her incredible nose for danger, her her instincts.
Speaker 1: I think we're shaped by what was a very anxious
Speaker 1: personality that that I traced back to the childhood trauma.
Speaker 1: She was at one point abandoned by her actress mother
Speaker 1: and sent to live with relatives for six years. Um
Speaker 1: she ultimately, you know, her mother gets remarried and she
Speaker 1: worships her adoptive father, but she actually has to engineer
Speaker 1: the adoption herself. And so I think she grew up
Speaker 1: and her son, as her son Ron told me, you know,
Speaker 1: with sort of a shadow on her spirit, this since
Speaker 1: this fear of abandonment, that no matter this idea that
Speaker 1: no matter how well things are going, the bottom could
Speaker 1: dropout at any moment. That seems to be confirmed two
Speaker 1: months in her husband's into her husband's presidency, when she
Speaker 1: almost loses him to would be assassin's bullet, and it
Speaker 1: really does leave her anxious and wary and convinced that
Speaker 1: there there is a trap waiting around every corner. Was
Speaker 1: it at that point that she consulted with astrologers and
Speaker 1: was trying to take that advice and have the president's
Speaker 1: staff schedule him accordingly. That is one of the weirder
Speaker 1: things that we have ever heard of any first lady doing.
Speaker 1: And I one thing I do is I try to
Speaker 1: take the reader, almost minute by minute by the day
Speaker 1: of the day in March of when Reagan was shot.
Speaker 1: Reagan was a deeply, deeply religious person, an optimistic person.
Speaker 1: He comes out of that experience thinking God preserved him
Speaker 1: for a reason, He's got a purpose. It's you know,
Speaker 1: everything's going to work out fine. Nancy Reagan did not
Speaker 1: really have that kind of grounding in religious faith, and
Speaker 1: so she is so anxious and weary. She is desperate
Speaker 1: for anything that can give her a sense of control,
Speaker 1: no matter how uh you, no matter how wacky it
Speaker 1: might sound. And one day, shortly after the assassination attempt,
Speaker 1: her friend Merv Griffin, the entertainment executive who shares a
Speaker 1: July six birthday with her and an interest in astrology,
Speaker 1: tells her, will you know there was there's this woman
Speaker 1: in San Francisco who knew that March was going to
Speaker 1: be a bad day for your husband. And that's the
Speaker 1: point at which she begins consulting this woman. And when
Speaker 1: it is revealed by in a book by Don Reagan,
Speaker 1: the White House chief of staff, that she had fired, um,
Speaker 1: it become was just one of the biggest embarrassments I
Speaker 1: think any White House has had in our lifetime. It's
Speaker 1: really always surprising, I think when things like this can happen.
Speaker 1: It's clear that that it has been quite a feat.
Speaker 1: As you sort of alluded to earlier in our conversation
Speaker 1: about the time you spent working on this book and
Speaker 1: the amount of research and interviewing you did, and I wonder,
Speaker 1: given this fascinating portrait of Nancy Reagan, and in many
Speaker 1: ways one that most of us didn't know about her
Speaker 1: or only new very tiny indications, what was the most
Speaker 1: challenging part of writing this book for you? Maybe what
Speaker 1: surprised you along the way, either in your interviewing or
Speaker 1: in some of the research you did, it really was
Speaker 1: some of the impact that she had at on policy
Speaker 1: at crucial moments, uh during a rand Contra. When her
Speaker 1: husband is finally going to give his first speech on AIDS,
Speaker 1: she would not trust the West Wing to do the
Speaker 1: speech writing. She would actually go out and get her
Speaker 1: own outside speech writer to do the job. Um. The
Speaker 1: other thing that I think is really important in the
Speaker 1: book is the post presidential years after he leaves office.
Speaker 1: Very shortly after he leaves office, he has diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1: He begins a long, you know, a decade of his
Speaker 1: life where he is essentially incapacitated. And it really does
Speaker 1: fall on Nancy Reagan's shoulders to to shape and mold
Speaker 1: his legacy. She she puts a lot of energy into
Speaker 1: getting the library off the ground. She makes sure that
Speaker 1: his his diaries are published, his letters are published, so
Speaker 1: that people can see in his own handwriting, Um, what
Speaker 1: kind of thinker he was. She was also very suspicious
Speaker 1: of people on the right who would sort of seek
Speaker 1: to appropriate her husband's name and his image for things
Speaker 1: that maybe Ronald Reagan wouldn't have agreed with. UM. One
Speaker 1: thing that for instance, in the ninety nineties, after Republicans
Speaker 1: took over the House, one of the things they wanted
Speaker 1: to do was kick Franklin Delano Roosevelt off the dime,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt who they didn't like, and replace his image with
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan. And Nancy Reagan actually stands up and says,
Speaker 1: I do not support putting my husband on the dime.
Speaker 1: As she said, he admired Franklin Roosevelt more than any
Speaker 1: other president. He would not support this. So she really,
Speaker 1: you know, she she was careful and wary of people
Speaker 1: from both sides who would try to turn Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: into in someone in some cases something he wasn't or
Speaker 1: something that really wasn't true to what he believed. You know,
Speaker 1: when when people talk about her dedication to him, that
Speaker 1: dedication went beyond the love they had for each other
Speaker 1: to to this kind of interest in ensuring that his
Speaker 1: place in history and his and the characterization of him
Speaker 1: was what she thought he would have wanted, and she
Speaker 1: wanted to help him ensure that that happened. If over
Speaker 1: and over people would tell me, in some ways she
Speaker 1: was more interested in that than he was. She at
Speaker 1: one point goes out and picks Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer
Speaker 1: Prize winning biographer, and gives him incredible access to Reagan
Speaker 1: and the White House at the book turns out to
Speaker 1: be a disappointment to her. But as Edmund Morris told me,
Speaker 1: you know, Ronald Reagan, could it cared less who wrote
Speaker 1: his biography? Uh, And and she just in some ways,
Speaker 1: I mean, she really did want history to see him
Speaker 1: as a great man. And that really, more than anything else,
Speaker 1: I think, drove her instincts on pushing him to reach
Speaker 1: out to the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. She didn't
Speaker 1: want him to go down in history as a warmonger.
Speaker 1: She wanted him to go down in history. And she
Speaker 1: believed also that this was truer to his own beliefs,
Speaker 1: as you know, somebody who was capable of pulling the
Speaker 1: world back from the nuclear abyss, even though his image
Speaker 1: was as kind of a you know, quick on the
Speaker 1: trigger trigger cowboy from the West. Yeah, and you mentioned access.
Speaker 1: I guess enough time had elapsed in there not being
Speaker 1: on the national stage. It sounds like many many people
Speaker 1: agreed to speak with you m very frankly about the
Speaker 1: as times. That is so true. Um, as I mentioned
Speaker 1: George Schultz was when I talked to him. Uh. Nancy
Speaker 1: Reagan's stepbrother, who has recently died, was in his mid nineties.
Speaker 1: I do think that some people told me these stories,
Speaker 1: and they were not all flattering stories, but they were
Speaker 1: telling me these stories in part because they knew that
Speaker 1: if they didn't tell them now, they would never be told.
Speaker 1: And so you benefited from that, and we as readers
Speaker 1: of this book that truly get to benefit from that
Speaker 1: and understand this period in history. You really created an
Speaker 1: extraordinary read Karen, and I hope lots of our listeners will.
Speaker 1: We'll get the book and be as fascinated by it
Speaker 1: and learn a great deal about this period that we
Speaker 1: thought we knew well, but clearly we didn't know at
Speaker 1: least this aspect of it as well as we might have. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, Milan. It's it's really been my my,
Speaker 1: my pleasure. I don't want to let you go because
Speaker 1: I want to take advantage of this minute or so
Speaker 1: that we have left um to take advantage of the
Speaker 1: fact that you're one of the most seasoned and astute
Speaker 1: political commentators on the national landscape today. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you, certainly in light of the book and
Speaker 1: the period you were writing about, and what's happened to us.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously it's a time of terrible political partisanship
Speaker 1: and polarization that's dividing us and and and really under
Speaker 1: under mining even sort of a modicum of bipartisanship. And
Speaker 1: I I remember thinking about the story we all do
Speaker 1: know and and still here quoted about how a president
Speaker 1: Reagan and the speaker O'Neil would certainly disagree on the issues, uh,
Speaker 1: but they would get together in evenings and play cards
Speaker 1: and get along amiably and uh and really respect each other.
Speaker 1: And we seem to have lost that. I wonder in
Speaker 1: writing the book and in covering politics today, and you
Speaker 1: write in your column very cogently about the issues, what
Speaker 1: you think it will take for us to get back there,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure our listeners also wring their hands wondering
Speaker 1: about the fact that we all just need to get along.
Speaker 1: You're correct. And what I came to Washington in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, and you know, as I mentioned, Reagan won
Speaker 1: re election with forty nine states. I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: any politician who could do that today. But it always
Speaker 1: seemed that the the goal in the eighties was to
Speaker 1: get things done, whether it was tax reform, which required
Speaker 1: by partisanship, whether it was immigration, a huge rewriter the
Speaker 1: immigration laws. Again it required by partisanship, But politicians then
Speaker 1: seemed to believe that voters would put wish them if
Speaker 1: they didn't get things done. Now it sometimes seems that
Speaker 1: they believe that voters send them to Washington to stop
Speaker 1: things from getting done. And and I don't know what
Speaker 1: the answer to this is. I mean, part of it
Speaker 1: is everybody gets to crawl into their own media silo
Speaker 1: and only here people who are already agree with them.
Speaker 1: But I do think, you know, every time I think
Speaker 1: it can't get any worse, something happens and it does.
Speaker 1: And not until voters start punishing elected officials instead of
Speaker 1: rewarding them for the kind of behavior that we see,
Speaker 1: is anything really going to change. Well, I do hope
Speaker 1: things get better, as I'm sure all of us do.
Speaker 1: And on that note, I just want to thank you
Speaker 1: again for writing this book. I want to tell our
Speaker 1: listeners that it's a wonderful read. Go out and get
Speaker 1: a copy of The Try of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty.
Speaker 1: It's not just fun to read it, it really is
Speaker 1: a great learning experience. So thank you Karen for writing it,
Speaker 1: and thank you for all you do and for your
Speaker 1: great columns as well. Thanks again, Gwen. What a fascinating
Speaker 1: life Karen Tumulty has revealed so much we never knew
Speaker 1: about Nancy Reagan. Here are three things I took away
Speaker 1: from that conversation. First, as Nancy Reagan's experience shows, being
Speaker 1: first lady is harder than most of us can imagine.
Speaker 1: There's no job description. Each first lady has to set
Speaker 1: her own priorities and she will always be judged and criticized. Second,
Speaker 1: like so many women, Nancy Reagan was tremendously underestimated. In
Speaker 1: her research, Karen Tumulty discovered a woman of sharp instincts,
Speaker 1: fierce loyalty, and an iron will that propelled Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: into the White House and kept him there when he
Speaker 1: suffered a presidential crisis. Finally, we have Nancy Reagan to
Speaker 1: thank for some of the international progress made during the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. It was she who pushed her husband to
Speaker 1: reach out to the Soviet Union during a time of
Speaker 1: historic change, so that Ronald Reagan would be seen as
Speaker 1: a peacemaker and be sure to get a copy of
Speaker 1: Karen's book, The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. It is a
Speaker 1: great read. Tune in next Thursday to hear about our
Speaker 1: next featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's
Speaker 1: Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is
Speaker 1: a collaboration between the Seneca Women podcast Network and I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, with support from founding partner Pung. Have a
Speaker 1: Great Day.