Lady in Red

by Sheila Tate

  The relative privacy of the ranch was like a balm for the Reagans. I have a handwritten note from Nancy from July 13, 1994, in which she mentioned, “We’re at the ranch at the moment where it’s lovely—Had a beautiful ride this morning—Does all this sound familiar?”

  * * *

  The president’s closest friends until the end were the two men who’d worked for him for years. Dennis LeBlanc and Barney Barnett. Barney died before I had the chance to talk with him. Barney was devoted to Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan considered Barney indispensable. He lived at the ranch and cared for every detail of its management.

  Dennis LeBlanc worked as part of the Reagan team for twenty-six years. No one knew Ronald and Nancy Reagan better than he did. Their relationship began in 1971 when he was assigned by the Highway Patrol as security for Governor Ronald Reagan. He then served in many tours and advance capacities for Reagan, on and off, until he won the presidency.

  In 1980, the ranch became the new president’s official residence and the president turned to Dennis for help. Dennis acted as his liaison with the government agencies responsible for bringing massive communications and physical security apparatus to the ranch. President Reagan’s only guidance to Dennis was that nothing was to disturb the tranquility of the ranch.

  Dennis was always at the ranch when the Reagans visited. “When we weren’t building or repairing fences, we were clearing riding trails,” explained Dennis. He said that in all that time, the president never cut down a living tree. Only if they were diseased or fallen did they make it into the woodpile. The only limbs cut were those that blocked passage along the trails. Every piece of wood they cut was used for firewood.

  The Reagans, Dennis, and Barney had breakfast together at 7:15 a.m. daily. The fellows would move to the tack room about 9:00 a.m. where they would get the horses ready to ride. President Reagan always tacked up his own horse. When the horses were ready, President Reagan rang the bell outside the tack room to call Nancy to join them. They generally rode for two hours. Back by 11:00 a.m.

  The president would ring the bell at the house at noon for Dennis and Barney to come to their forty-five-minute lunch. And then from one to four or four thirty in the afternoon, the president, Dennis, and Barney would clear the trails and chop wood.

  Dennis said the ranch was where both the Reagans felt completely relaxed. The president read his daily briefings and handled his paperwork from the White House in mornings and evenings, but in between there was never any talk of business. The trail-clearing team told jokes and talked about day-to-day things.

  And then, according to Dennis, they were called in for dinner, which was from 6:15 to 7:00 p.m. Promptly at 7:00 p.m. they watched Murder She Wrote and another show. Bedtime was exactly at 9:00 p.m. Sometimes, especially in the winter, the Reagans were in their nightclothes during dinner and TV viewing.

  Dennis remembers that Nancy loved to talk through meals. President Reagan would secretly turn off his hearing aids during dinner and nudge Dennis with his foot as a signal that they were off; if Nancy directed a question to her husband, Dennis would use his own foot to nudge President Reagan. President Reagan would then say, “Darn it, Nancy, what did you say? These hearing aids aren’t working right.”

  * * *

  The president was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the Mayo Clinic in August 1994, a month after her note to me. Family and friends had been noticing changes in 1993.

  In November 1994, he wrote his powerful public letter telling America of his disease. Immediately, I heard speculation that he probably didn’t write that letter himself. In fact, I jumped all over a female member of Congress when she said that in my presence. I hope I made her feel like a creep because that was my intent. She didn’t even know him. Everyone who knew him knew better. No one but Ronald Reagan could have written that letter.

  His last visit to the ranch was in August 1995.

  The ranch was later sold to the Young Americas Foundation, which has preserved it. Dennis said the decision to sell was a difficult one for Nancy. But once the president could no longer ride, it made no sense to hold on to it. Dennis spent two weekends there with Nancy so that they could go through every book on the shelves to remove any inscriptions. He said Nancy, the protector in chief, did not want anyone buying the ranch to profit from those personally inscribed items. The ranch was being sold as-is, so the books themselves would have to stay.

  Dennis had almost the exact same view of Nancy’s feelings for the ranch as Agent John Barletta. “She went to the ranch because he loved it. She warmed to it for its peace and quiet.” Privacy.

  21

  Staff Memories

  Most Reagan White House staffers, like me, have many memories and stories from their years of service. I knew I needed to talk to as many of them as possible for this book. Our conversations became trips down memory lane and I am so glad for readers to be able to share in those trips.

  It seemed only appropriate to begin a chapter of “Staff Memories” by hearing from our first chief of staff.

  JIM BAKER, CHIEF OF STAFF, 1981–85

  Jim Baker came to his job in a very roundabout way. During the last month of the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan operatives Stu Spencer and Mike Deaver began to consider what a Reagan White House staff should look like and the name James A. Baker III kept coming up. The same James Baker had been Gerald Ford’s delegate chairman during the last contested Republican convention in 1976 against Ronald Reagan. The convention had been a real cliffhanger and Ford prevailed. So did bitter memories. Four years later Baker reappeared, again as a member of the opposition’s team, chairing George H.W. Bush’s campaign against Reagan for the presidency. It would be highly unusual to bring such an ardent opponent into the Reagan camp, let alone make him chief of staff.

  Secretary Baker credits his appointment to a fortuitous last-minute trip to the men’s room before a 1980 Republican primary debate. In the basement of the debate site, Jim Baker crossed paths with Nancy Reagan, who was on her way to the ladies’ room. He stopped and introduced himself since they had never met before and he definitely made a good impression.

  When Stu Spencer and Mike Deaver raised Jim Baker’s name to the president-elect as a prospective chief of staff, Nancy was intrigued. Stu and Mike invited Jim on the president-elect’s airplane a few times during the transition to give the Reagans a chance to feel him out. Jim became the linchpin of the first-term Reagan White House. We all admired and respected him for both his organizational wizardry and his good judgment.

  Secretary Baker knew Nancy Reagan as someone who always operated as Ronald Reagan’s protector. She was Ronald Reagan’s eyes and ears. He says that she was pragmatic, with great instincts regarding personnel and public relations.

  Secretary Baker described Ronald Reagan to me as a “wonderful, beautiful human being,” his voice softening when he spoke those words. “Ronald Reagan was someone who would not swat a fly and really needed Nancy’s insights. He could not bring himself to fire anyone.”

  The chief of staff vividly recalls the first time President Reagan debated Walter Mondale in 1984. President Reagan performed poorly and Nancy was, to say the least, upset. Stu Spencer, Mike Deaver, and Paul Laxalt all wanted Baker to fire Dick Darman, whom they blamed with stuffing President Reagan full of far too much detail. Secretary Baker told me “Dick Darman was not to blame and I refused to fire him.” With a smile in his voice he remembered that he noticed a bit of “coolness” from Nancy for a while after that.

  Secretary Baker has come to believe that the chief of staff job should have a two-year expiration date. He said he was “bone tired” when Don Regan proposed they swap jobs, with Baker becoming Treasury secretary after he’d been on the job more than four years. Both the Reagans and Mike Deaver took the suggestion without much argument. The swap took place.

  The retirement years have not arrived f
or Secretary Baker who still practices law and a little politics at his Houston law firm. He said that he never went to California without stopping to see the Reagans and, after President Reagan’s death, to visit with Nancy. When I asked him what he missed since she died, he said he really misses talking to her. So say we all.

  KEN DUBERSTEIN, CHIEF OF STAFF, 1988

  Ken Duberstein joined the Reagan White House Legislative Affairs shop in 1981 and helped lead Ronald Reagan’s stellar legislative program. And as the campaign for reelection began to organize, Ken informed Chief of Staff Jim Baker that he was going to leave to work on the 1984 reelection campaign, coordinating congressional support on behalf of the president.

  Jim told him that he needed to tell Nancy. Mike Deaver reinforced Jim’s advice, telling Ken he needed to write Nancy a note explaining his reasons. Nancy hated losing staffers with whom she had become close. She never made it easy.

  After about a week of silence, Ken described how he approached Nancy in a receiving line and she told him that while she accepted his decision she did not like the idea because he would be “too far away.”

  In February 1987, when Howard Baker assumed the chief of staff position, in the midst of the Iran-Contra controversy, Ken returned as his deputy, ultimately moving up to become chief of staff during the last year of the Reagan presidency. When I asked him how he was recruited to return to the White House, Ken says that to this day he still doesn’t know who planted the idea of bringing him back because both Bob Strauss and Stu Spencer claim credit for planting the idea with Nancy Reagan whose “eyes lit up” at the prospect.

  Ken was in the middle of a speech at the Capitol Hill Club when someone handed him a note to please call Kathy Osbourne, the president’s secretary, immediately. He was asked to come to the Oval Office that afternoon to see the president.

  When he got there, the president was alone in the Oval Office. The president looked at Ken and said, “I know all the reasons you gave Howard for why you can’t come back but I want you to know that Nancy and I both want you back here for our last two years.” And later, after the news broke that Ken was returning to the White House, Nancy called him and said, “Welcome home, Ken.”

  Nancy usually called Ken each weekday morning, often telling him what seemed to be on the president’s mind.

  Duberstein said Nancy’s calls were always insightful and he welcomed them. He said her calls came when she had questions or sometimes with a suggestion to offer. Never to demand or dictate anything. Ken’s observation was that both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan were at their best when the other was involved.

  When Nancy had breast cancer surgery and was recovering at the White House, she got the painful message that her mother had died. She told Ken they needed to leave for Phoenix the next Monday, just a few days later.

  Ken explained that the president was speaking on Tuesday at West Point and that they would change the schedule to get them to Phoenix Tuesday evening after his speech and in time for the funeral. Changing the president’s schedule is something akin to moving mountains, but Ken went to work and made all the adjustments.

  As they lifted off on Marine One, with Nancy holding hands with the president, she turned to Ken with tears in her eyes and quietly said, “Thank you.” She knew what a gargantuan effort it took to rearrange everything in such short order.

  Once Ken was back in the White House, Nancy went to “work” on him. He became one of her “projects” as we used to say. She introduced him to friends, like Kay Graham. And thanks to her introduction, Ken became close with composer/entertainer Marvin Hamlisch. She called Marvin and Ken her “two Jewish sons.”

  Marvin invited both the Dubersteins and the Reagans to his wedding in New York one Memorial Day weekend. Nancy was not able to get to New York in time for the wedding but did arrive later that day. As usual, she stayed at the Carlyle Hotel. So Ken and Marvin paraded Marvin’s new bride, Terri, down Park Avenue to the hotel, carrying her train behind her.

  Ken remembers when Don Regan’s book hit the shelves and, in addition to the disclosure about astrology, Regan wrote that Nancy was still accepting designer clothes. Ken walked into the Oval Office to alert the president so that he could tell his wife. The president looked at Ken and said, “Why don’t you tell her?” That sounded more than a little familiar to me.

  Anyway, Ken did his duty. Later that evening, around 11:00 p.m., Nancy called him and said with a tinge of exasperation in her voice, “I am going through my entire closet and cataloging every single one of them.”

  During the last months of the administration, whenever the Reagans were in town and available on Friday evenings, Ken organized a “family film festival” complete with popcorn and showings of old films for an audience of friends and fellow staffers. Hellcats of the Navy and Bedtime for Bonzo were two of the films Ken remembers being shown in the family theater. Before each movie the president stood up and spent a few minutes telling the audience about how the film was shot and other anecdotes. When they showed Hellcats of the Navy, President Reagan got up at the beginning and explained that this was the only movie he and Nancy made together and the first time he actually kissed her. They then proceeded to reenact it for their delighted guests.

  NANCY REYNOLDS, TRANSITION DIRECTOR FOR NANCY REAGAN

  Nancy Reynolds’s relationship with the Reagans goes back to the 1960s, when she was coanchoring the CBS News in San Francisco as a political reporter. It is no surprise the Reagans loved her; she actually interviewed Ronald Reagan on horseback. When Ronald Reagan won his campaign for governor, she accepted the job of assistant press secretary for radio and television and moved to Sacramento.

  Within her first month on the job, Nancy Reynolds met Nancy Reagan. Reynolds had been sent to the airport by Lyn Nofziger, press secretary, to get on a plane with Nancy and travel with her to Los Angeles. They boarded the plane and were seated up front. Within minutes, two men seated behind them started criticizing Ronald Reagan’s budget. The quiet First Lady of California, as Nancy Reynolds described her, came “alive.” She stood up, looked these guys in the eye, and started in. “That’s my husband you’re talking about!” And then she went on to point out that, with regards to the budget, they “didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  “That’s when I knew Nancy Reagan was a woman to be reckoned with,” said Nancy Reynolds.

  When Ronald Reagan made his first run for the presidency in 1976, Nancy Reynolds joined the staff as an “advance man” for the campaign, primarily in charge of advance work for Nancy Reagan. She remembers all the small towns and hard-to-reach places she visited with the candidate’s wife. One of her favorites: Banner Elk, North Carolina, where the Republican ladies outdid themselves. They seemed to have found every Republican woman in the mountains of North Carolina and invited them to tea with Nancy. During their never-ending travels, these two women became friends. From that time forward, Nancy Reagan considered Nancy Reynolds indispensable.

  Governor Ronald Reagan and Nancy wanted to welcome home the prisoners of war returning from Vietnam following the US pullout. Nancy enlisted help from Nancy Reynolds to help her organize five different events—celebratory dinners, three in Los Angeles and two in Sacramento.

  The Justin Darts, close personal friends of the Reagans, opened their spacious home for the three welcome-home events in Los Angeles. Nancy Reynolds remembers when Everett Alvarez gave Nancy Reagan his tin cup that he brought home from his years of imprisonment. It was the only thing he was allowed to keep in his cell.

  Many of the returnees required hospitalization. Nancy visited every area hospital treating Vietnam casualties, spending a lot of time with each patient. She never failed to ask about their families and how to reach them. She always followed up, talked to the families, and gave them details about her visit and the young man’s health.

  During that bloody war, ma
ny Americans at home wore “bracelets” with the name of one of the Americans imprisoned by the North Vietnamese.

  It was at one of those welcome-home dinners that Governor Reagan first met John McCain whose bracelet he’d worn during all of John’s years in captivity.

  Nancy Reynolds was the daughter of Democratic congressman and senator D. Worth Clark from Idaho. She was familiar with the ways of Washington. She knew everyone and everyone knew—and liked—her. She literally lived in Blair House for months during the transition while helping the incoming First Lady find and hire staff. Between Nancy and Tish Baldridge, who had been Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary, Nancy had the help to assemble a first-rate team. They even recommended me!

  During the transition, it is customary for the outgoing First Lady to take the incoming First Lady on a tour of the private quarters so she could begin to plan their move. Mike Deaver insisted that Nancy Reynolds accompany him, Lyn Nofziger, and Nancy Reagan on the tour followed by a tea. Nancy Reynolds said Rosalynn seemed “frosty” as she showed them all the rooms—except one. Nancy Reagan asked about the room they hadn’t seen and Rosalynn was obviously reluctant to show it to them. The incoming First Lady asked which room it was and Rosalynn said it was the master bedroom. Nancy insisted she really needed to see it and Rosalynn opened it with great reluctance. Apparently, there were moving boxes stacked up around that room and she didn’t want to show it to anyone.

  Later, Paul Costello, Rosalynn’s White House press secretary, would mention to me that the election loss was very hard on Rosalynn and this tour was personally painful for her.

  Nancy Reynolds has a million stories but none more interesting than having been at the White House with the First Lady when Donald Regan hung up on her. As Nancy Reynolds left the White House that day she ran into Chris Wallace out on Pennsylvania Avenue. She told him what had just happened. Chris made a beeline back to the TV studio and the country heard about the infamous hang-up within hours.