CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WHO THOUGHT FOR RONNIE? HE DID – WITH NANCY”
Barely three weeks after Ronald Reagan
became the first professional actor ever elected governor of California, in
late January 1967, he gave an hour of his time to a small class of Stanford
University graduate students led by the great Prof. William Rivers.
The class first attended his weekly
news conference, then visited Reagan’s office before lunching with Lyn Nofziger
and William Clark, later to be Reagan’s White House press secretary and
national security adviser, respectively. The class only briefly encountered his
wife Nancy Reagan, who died this week.
At the time, many so-called political
experts doubted Reagan was smart enough to have masterminded his accession to
the California governor’s office, then and now recognized as one of the
half-dozen most powerful political jobs in America.
Reagan fed into that thinking at
times. He often answered complex questions with simple aphorisms. When someone
asked him whether he would give students at UC Berkeley, then staging large
protests almost daily, a voice in university policy, he responded that “You
can’t run a ship by polling the crew.” More than 23 years later, when I last
interviewed him in his post-presidential office high in the Fox Plaza
skyscraper in Los Angeles, he still spoke the same way.
That kind of answer to multiple
queries prompted the question I asked in the title of a column about that
1967 visit in the now-defunct Menlo-Atherton Recorder, then a weekly newspaper
I edited: “Who Thinks for Ronnie?”
There were several candidates. The
always-pithy Nofziger was one. So was Clark, later named by Reagan to the state
Supreme Court and still later as Secretary of the Interior. There was also
Michael Deaver, an aide who served Reagan for 30 years, most as his deputy
chief of staff. And there was Edwin Meese, chief of staff in Sacramento and
later U.S. attorney general. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon wrote that Meese “was
able to explain complex ideas to Reagan” in ways akin to Reagan’s own speaking
style.
All these men eventually dropped away;
yet, Reagan remained the same, proving none of them was the puppeteer his
political skeptics long hoped to uncover. But one figure was at his side
steadily through many of his Hollywood years, during his eight years as
governor, in his losing 1976 campaign for president, through his White House
years and then was his loving caretaker for a 10-year bout with Alzheimer’s
disease before he died in 2004. That was his wife and best friend, Nancy Davis
Reagan, who devoted herself through all those years to furthering her husband’s
interests and always called him Ronnie.
Cannon once wrote that “Reagan knew
where he wanted to go, but she had a better sense of what he needed to do to
get there.”
She was blasted by some for seeming to
feed him a line during one presidential news conference. But she knew better
than anyone what he thought about almost everything, because – and this is the
consensus of presidential historians – no White House couple was ever closer or
talked through more things.
So the skeptics who wondered if Reagan
could think for himself -- including
this one – were wrong. He could and he did. His best friend Nancy didn’t think
for him; she thought with him.
Before Mrs. Reagan died of congestive
heart disease, she had also spent her last few years maintaining the Reagan
image, personally hosting speeches at his presidential library in Simi Valley
by almost every Republican luminary.
But it’s safe to say that whether you
liked them or not, virtually all Reagan Administration concepts, from wearing down
the Soviet Union by building up American military might to levels not seen
before or since, to flexibility on issues like abortion, to his refusal to bend
to public sector union demands, had first been tested in conversation with
Nancy.
Which means if any presidential
administration was ever two-headed in substance, if not form, it was Reagan’s.
For it is now clear that all those devoted aides who pundits once speculated
might think for Reagan did not. Some contributed ideas, but he did the thinking
– and so did Nancy, who might just rank first in influence among all First
Ladies.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
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