A more perfect union
Marriage was the happiest part of Reagan's private life
By John Lang
Scripps Howard News Service
The clan: This 1985 photo is on display at the Statue of Liberty. Front row, from left: Bess Reagan, Neil Reagan, Colleen Reagan (holding daughter Ashley), Cameron Reagan, the president, Mrs. Reagan, Doria Reagan, Anne Davis and Patricia Davis. Back row: Maureen Reagan, Dennis Revell, Michael Reagan, Patti Davis, Ron Reagan, Geoffrey Davis and Dr. Richard Davis.
President and first lady, those were roles they were ideally cast to play.
Act One, Take One: It is 1980 and Ronald Reagan is campaigning at a country club on Long Island, N.Y. As he speaks, his wife Nancy sits beside him, gazing up at him adoringly. At one point he stumbles over a phrase, and his wife's eyes widen in alarm, and her breath catches, but then he recovers, and she smiles and places a hand over her heart in relief, and she resumes looking at him, admiringly.
Act One, Take Two: It is one hour later and Reagan is appearing at another country club. He is making the very same speech, and Nancy is staring up in adoration. Now he stumbles over the same words, and she gasps just as she did before, and he recovers just like he did earlier, and she smiles, puts her hand over her heart and resumes gazing at him, in rapture.
Sometimes, Ronald and Nancy Reagan could be seen living a script.
But the supporting cast, those children - why couldn't they hit their marks and get their lines straight?
If Ronald and Nancy seemed to be wonderfully matched partners, publicly appearing in one of the great love stories in American politics, The Reagan Family could have been the title of a soap opera.
It was a great irony of the 1980s. The couple most prominent in advocating family values, indeed the pair who shaped it as a political agenda, appeared to have a sadly dysfunctional family themselves.
Ron Jr., then a ballet dancer (to his parents' silent discomfort), once appeared on "Saturday Night Live" wearing a tutu.
Patti, a sometime actress, would appear nude in Playboy and write no less than three books dumping on her parents. She would do one loving memoir of her father and follow that with a book titled "Bondage."
Maureen, daughter from Reagan's first marriage to actress Jane Wyman, had political ambitions herself but publicly clashed with her father by supporting abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1982, when she ran for the U.S. Senate in California, her father refused to endorse her, claiming he could not take sides in a GOP contest.
Michael, the adopted son from Reagan's first marriage, once gave Reagan a painful recounting of being molested as a child by a camp counselor. He was a grown man before he felt he could confide it. And when he did, he said, his father only "gazed into the distance."
Nancy, as the nation's First Mom, didn't see one of her grandchildren until the baby was 18 months old.
Then there was Dad. He made the commencement speech at son Michael's high school graduation and afterward was asked to shake hands with some of the grads. Michael remembered standing proudly before him in cap and gown, and his father stuck out his hand and said, not recognizing him, "My name is Ronald Reagan. What's yours?"
This baffles. Of all the presidents of modern times, Reagan was the one seen by the American people as the warmest, the most accessible, and genuine, and simple, and good, the one who was maybe the most like themselves.
Yet according to his biographer Lou Cannon, in his book "The Role of a Lifetime," every one of his children lamented his distance. Michael said his father was "completely oblivious" to others. Maureen wrote of her parents' inability to "go below the surface." Patti wrote, "I never knew who he was, I could never get through to him." Ron Jr. said, "... there is something he holds back. You get just so far, and then the curtain drops, and you don't go any farther."
Cannon hypothesized that Reagan, himself the child of a hapless alcoholic, built emotional walls around himself in reaction and likely had trouble understanding a role that his own father never fulfilled and that a lifetime as an actor could not prepare him.
While Reagan plainly and publicly adored his wife, she, too, in her book "My Turn," wrote, "He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel the barrier."
Her children have complained of her, too, putting up walls. Ron and Michael both have reportedly gone years without speaking to her. Patti's memoir claimed her mother was hooked on tranquilizers and struck her "every day for a while." Patti told an interviewer, "Yes, there was abuse in this family. There was emotional abuse. There was substance abuse." Patti said that when she told her father about the beatings, "He said I was lying and he said I was crazy."
After her book was published, Reagan dismissed it as "interesting fiction."
Now the plot twist: If Reagan as president was distant with his family, the family seemed to come closer together after he left the White House, after he got Alzheimer's and after he began to forget even who they were. If strains remain, they did reach out to one another.
Nancy recalled an awkward reconciliation with Patti, while still angry with her over posing for Playboy. "I don't want to look at a perfume ad in Vogue and see a naked body," Nancy huffed. Patty retorted, "Well, I do." There was silence. Then both women burst out laughing.
Nancy and Maureen both became spokeswomen for the Alzheimer's association when Reagan began to fade.
Maureen talked poignantly of trying to keep a connection with her father that forced a role reversal before she died of melanoma in 2001.
"He and I do jigsaw puzzles together," she once told a gathering of activists for Alzheimer's research. "When I was a little girl, he used to tell me, ÔDo the border first.' Now I sit there and say, ÔDad, the border first.'"
The public and the media never much warmed to Nancy as first lady. She was labeled the "Iron Butterfly" and described as "glacial." Yet, in time, there came respect for her devotion to her husband.
Longtime Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger, whose own disagreements with Nancy are a matter of record, tips his hat to her. "She was not a co-president at all. He was her career. He loved her dearly. Believe me, she put him first and he put her first and there's no question about that. She was the first person he talked to in the morning and the last person he talked to at night."
More than that, as his doctor said, she was the last person that he would recognize. There's not much wonder in it. As long as he would live, she herself said, they would share the same bed and hold each other through the night.
In their last days together, she would sit and read at the end of a couch, and he would sit beside her in a wing back chair, there, and gone. She called this "the long goodbye."
Husband and wife, theirs was one class act, and, it seems so clear, no act at all.
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