I hope my friends in Berkeley won't be
shocked, but I think Nancy Reagan, who died on Sunday, was a very good First
Lady.
Yes, she got off to a rocky start
in the first term, what with those designer gowns; the expensive new White
House China; and the fancy lunches at Le Cirque with her pals Babe Paley, Betsy
Bloomingdale and Jerry "The Social Moth" Zipkin.
Her handlers tried to turn her into
an Eleanor Roosevelt-style First Lady by finding a cause for her to promote,
and they chose the anti-drug "Just Say No" campaign, which only
embarrassed her further when she proclaimed, "Drugs are such a
downer," not knowing that "downer" was a word from the drug
culture, meaning sedative.
She wasn't Eleanor Roosevelt, and
they never should have tried to make her one. Dandling Third World babies on
her knee just wasn't her style.
What she did well - and she did it
extremely well - was being Ronald Reagan's loyal partner. And during the second
term, that partnership helped change the world for the better.
Her devotion to him trumped
everything, even ideology. She had been a lifelong conservative; in fact, it
was she and her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, who converted Ronnie from a New
Deal Democrat to a Goldwater Republican.
But her devotion to conservatism
was nothing compared the only thing she ever really cared about: What was good
for Ronnie?
And in the mid-1980s, when Mikhail
Gorbachev's rise to power in the Soviet Union seemed to present an opportunity
to make a serious deal, she decided that what would be good for Ronnie would be
to go down in history as a peacemaker.
So, operating hand-in-hand with her
mole in the West Wing, Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver, she engineered the
ouster of Deaver's nominal boss, the belligerent Donald Regan (who retaliated
by writing some really nasty things about her in his memoirs), and his
replacement by the more pragmatic Howard Baker. She also made sure Secretary of
State Alexander Haig got the heave-ho and was succeeded by the less doctrinaire
George Schultz.
She urged Ronnie to hold summit
conferences with Gorbachev and establish a personal friendship. This meant
overcoming not only her own anti-Communist background, but also her intense
dislike of Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, whom she found absolutely insufferable.
And Ronnie listened to her because
he knew she was the only person in the world whose sole agenda was his best
interests.
The new Reagan-Gorbachev relationship resulted in the 1987
INF Treaty, the first step in the process that led to the peaceful end of the
Cold War - and on our terms, too.
After they left the White House she
took loving care of him during his long battle with Alzheimer's, and she defied
Republican orthodoxy by championing stem cell research.
That was because of Ronnie, too. If
stem cells could help him or others suffering from that terrible disease, then
orthodoxy be damned. Ditto for AIDS, which she convinced him to speak out about
after her friend Rock Hudson died.
I don't think she set out to change
the world. What she did, she did for love. But she changed the world all the
same.
Thank you, Nancy.
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