by Sheila Tate
When Nancy Reagan heard the news, she told her press office to call the press and tell them that “Nancy Reagan loves the Beach Boys.” She had real affection for the California-based band.
At this time Barbara was engaged to a man named Jim, so when a receptionist announced that Jim was on the phone, Barbara answered, “Hello, honey!” Wrong Jim.
It was Jim Watt—a very nervous Jim Watt—who wanted to know if Nancy did in fact have a special relationship with the Beach Boys. Barbara gave him a definitive yes and the short-lived Beach Boys ban was quickly rescinded.
Barbara remembers that after the Beach Boys played the July 4th event, Nancy invited them to a return engagement on the South Lawn in honor of the Special Olympics.
Barbara recalls that “the next time I answered a call involving the Beach Boys was in December 1983, when Dennis Wilson accidentally drowned off the California coast and his family wanted to honor his wish to be buried at sea. They had learned that only Coast Guard and Navy veterans had that right and were asking Nancy to intercede. Dennis Wilson was buried at sea.”
Barbara, as Nancy’s press advance person, had to be quick on her feet and able to professionally represent the First Lady’s interests as she worked her way through competing interests and large egos.
Here is her account of one particularly sensitive assignment:
During the 1980s, one of the largest Republican contributors was Ross Perot, the founder of EDS (Electronic Data Systems) in Dallas, Texas. He was a forceful presence.
By February 1982, Mrs. Reagan was traveling extensively to focus on the devastating effects of drugs on young people. She was meeting with a wide selection of people and hearing firsthand experiences. Dallas was one of the stops. Several weeks prior, I traveled to Texas to visit various groups, including several recommended by Ross Perot. I thought a knowledgeable group called Richardson (Texas) Families in Action was perfect. They would give Mrs. Reagan useful insight into the war on drugs from a grassroots level. Little did I realize this was not the organization Mr. Perot had in mind. It seems he had already made promises to others. He had also made promises for interviews with local media without consulting the press office, let alone Nancy Reagan.
He invited me over to EDS headquarters to explain my choice and told me I was dead wrong. Finally, in his Texas drawl he said, “Little lady, you go over there in a private office and call the White House. You let them know they will meet with my group.”
Stunned, I slowly dialed my office wondering how to deal with this powerful fellow. As I was speaking to Sheila Tate, she told me that Ross Perot was on another phone speaking directly to Nancy Reagan about the matter. I thought this was the end but Nancy Reagan stood by me telling Perot she trusted the judgment of her staff. This took real courage.
Barbara also tells a funny story about protecting Nancy and the president from poisoned food:
Every president travels with a personal aide who oversees all food preparation before the president is allowed to eat it. President Reagan was no exception. We were staying at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and I decided to make a quick run through the presidential suite before their arrival. Much to my surprise, the doors were wide open and a Century Plaza bellman was inside holding an overflowing food basket from a place called Mrs. Beasley’s Bakery. The bellman explained a stranger hurried up to him in the lobby and paid him to take the basket to the president’s suite. The card read: “Loved seeing you on TV this morning. Ray and Fran.” Names I did not recognize.
Some of this made sense since Mrs. Reagan had been on Good Morning America that morning, but visions of a crazy person sending something dangerous to eat passed through my mind. So I took the basket away and placed it in the staff office, never giving it another thought. The food turned out to be fine since no staffers got sick.
Several weeks later, back at the White House, Elaine Crispin, Nancy’s personal secretary, came into my office asking if I’d seen any gifts from the famous LA producer Ray Stark (West Side Story, Funny Girl, Steel Magnolias, Annie) and his wife, Fran. Sheepishly, I explained my bungled attempt at protection. Mrs. Reagan laughed when she heard what happened and quickly sent a thank-you note to the senders for the food that her staff had devoured.
MARY ANNE FACKELMAN, OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER
Mary Anne, a career government employee/photographer, was assigned to First Lady Rosalynn Carter and pivoted to cover Nancy after the 1980 election. She was a real pro.
Maf had an uncanny ability to snap a picture without anyone being aware of her presence; she also had an incredible eye. She caught every emotion. Nancy didn’t need to see many of her photos before she knew she wanted Maf, as we came to call her, as part of our team.
One of Mary Anne’s many memories was how Nancy handled photo approval. We all used to laugh about it. If for any reason Nancy did not like a picture, she tore off the top right corner.
Here are some of Mary Anne’s observations:
She always photographed so beautifully and was at ease in front of the cameras. This made life so much easier and enabled me to focus on trying to get the shots that I knew we would need for “thank you’s” or for general release.
I watched her deal with people who were excited to meet her and simultaneously intimidated by the experience. She put them at ease with a touch or a smile or a question.
I was with her in a number of intimate, emotional moments. When we flew west, she always stopped to visit her mother in Arizona. In the early days, I noticed that Mrs. Reagan appeared almost in awe of her mother and solicitous to her. She brought her flowers and laughed at her many jokes. As her mother failed, Mrs. Reagan was quiet and observant during her visits. When her mother died, I will never forget the cry of anguish I heard when Mrs. Reagan saw her at the mortuary for the first time. Her pain was palpable and deep.
When Patti was getting married, Mrs. Reagan helped her plan a grand wedding. I was cautious about photography before and during the wedding because I was aware of Patti’s preference for privacy. One example: I recall being in the cottage at the hotel and came upon Mrs. Reagan sitting on the side of the bed talking quietly with Patti before either of them got dressed. It was so clear that she was taking that special moment to talk to her daughter privately. I took a photo as quietly as I could but it has never been released out of respect for their privacy.
My time during the Reagan years was filled with more official state visits than I can count and days that were packed with arrival ceremonies on the South Lawn. Most of the time I would be working with a reciprocal photographer from the visiting head of state; I had to remember to gesture when language was a barrier as well as working around and behind interpreters.
One moment sticks out in my memory. I was teaching a new photographer named Susan what the drill was for taking pictures during the “handshake line.” The new photographer was moving in too closely, which I knew Mrs. R would not appreciate, so I attempted to stage-whisper “Susan, take a step back.” No problem except that our guest that evening was Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and his wife, Susan. She heard my instructions and promptly took several steps back.
And to make matters worse, our new photographer was removing film from her camera to reload when the film flipped out of her hands and flew under Mrs. Reagan’s gown. I tiptoed up to Nancy and said, “Excuse me while I remove a roll of film that is on the floor under your gown.” I got “the look.”
The excitement surrounding the dinner for Prince Charles and Princess Diana was not to be believed. Pete Souza and I were the two photographers who covered this historic visit. After the dinner, of course, dancing began. Pete got the best photo of Diana and John Travolta as they danced. What a night!
At the last minute, Mrs. Gorbachev decided to accompany her husband to New York for UN meetings involving President Reagan. That meant I needed to be there to photograph the ladies. M
rs. Gorbachev kept asking me to take one picture after another, which was prolonging our visit.
I was in the midst of planning my wedding and was under the gun to get to Toledo in time to meet the Ohio obligation to spend three days in residence before obtaining a marriage license.
Mrs. Reagan knew it and came to my rescue. She took my arm and announced, “This girl is getting married and must leave now,” whereupon all conversation and photo requests stopped and I was sent on my way in a New York City police car with a local Secret Service agent accompanying me to get me through the lines and onto my plane.
How could you not love a woman who would do that for you?
Thanks to Nancy, Mary Anne became Mary Anne Fackelman-Miner and lives happily in Hawaii with her husband, Ray.
She reflected on her years:
Working as the First Lady’s photographer was a great honor. I was able to travel the world with her. I recorded her visit with the emperor of Japan; the wedding of Charles and Diana; the wedding of Andrew and Sarah; the king of Thailand; the pope; the funeral of Princess Grace; trips to Singapore, Stockholm, Bali. And on and on. Nancy Reagan always represented our country beautifully.
I also saw the great vulnerability in her that she worked hard to mask from the public. The last night she and the president stayed in the White House, she called the photo office and asked me and Pete Souza to come up to the residence to say goodbye.
Last-minute packing was going on. We talked and exchanged personal recollections of favorite times and we finally got up to leave her to finish her packing. Our final hug from her was one that brought me to tears and a huge lump in my throat. She was crying too.
FRED FIELDING, WHITE HOUSE LEGAL COUNSEL
We called upon the White House Counsel’s office regularly. Not that we wanted to. But when problems arose, Fred Fielding was the lawyer you wanted in your camp. Here are his memories:
Nancy Reagan could be a demanding and formidable force, but she was not “the Dragon Lady” as she was sometimes portrayed. She was opinionated to be sure, but more realistically, she was an elegant and thoughtful person whose sole purpose was to be the First Lady to her beloved president—and I came to truly believe all she did and said was in allegiance to that purpose.
As counsel to the president, my office served not only the president but also the constituent groups within the White House staff. Not the least of these was the East Wing, which was the domain of the First Lady and her staff. And, during the Reagan years, there was a wonderful assemblage of bright energized staffers that Nancy had handpicked, and it was, indeed, a very demanding and active “client” of my office.
Nancy was very engaged with the tasks and activities of her staff, and her demand for perfection to the slightest details made our work for her staff demanding as well. However, after a few false starts, I deployed a very handsome, soft-spoken senior associate counsel to be the East Wing staff’s primary day-to-day contact, and things went fairly smoothly thereafter with the East Wing. My primary responsibility was the direct dealings with the First Lady.
Aside from the day-to-day tasks of the East Wing, and First Lady responsibilities, it became obvious to me early on that she had a slight blind spot when it came to scrupulous adherence to gift rules as they applied to her by law and by custom. One of my first assignments in early 1981 in that regard was a meeting with Mrs. Reagan in the residence, arranged and accompanied by Jim Baker and Ed Meese. The purpose, I was told, was for me to brief the First Lady, as she didn’t understand my directions to the White House staff on the acceptance of gifts. That meeting was a painful half hour as she vehemently insisted that personal gifts to her and Ronnie would not possibly be covered by such rules. After the meeting, as we descended in the elevator from the living quarters, Jim and Ed were convulsed in laughter at my initiation into the “world of Nancy Reagan.” Later we also had the press flap over the “acceptance” of designer clothes (“gown-gate”), until it was announced that she had only borrowed them and they would be returned or turned over to the Smithsonian. At that time she also made her singing debut at the Gridiron Dinner belting out “Second Hand Clothes” like a pro. But the persistent pressing issue was over gifts from close friends—she would say “but that wasn’t a gift to the First Lady—it was personal to me from our friend Frank, etc.” So, much to her annoyance, we had an annual trip to the residence to search and locate the “private gifts.”
But it also became obvious to me from the start that Nancy’s primary focus was the protection of “Ronnie.” It was behind every inquiry and every request. And there were many. Sometimes they came up in a meeting with her in the residence. More often, it came in a phone call, which usually started with her slowly saying “Fred…” Sometimes it was a double “Fred…Fred…” A triple “Fred” call was reserved for the toughest issues, not a complaint over a policy or proposed activity, but her concern about someone in the government who was acting improperly, or in her mind, was taking advantage of “Ronnie” or who should be fired because they were hurting “Ronnie.” These calls became the source of some amusement in my office, especially in the first two years, since I was trying to stop smoking and often I would relapse during or after a call from the East Wing. But, in fairness to Nancy, she was usually right in her assessment of a situation and often had seen the problem before anyone else. She could be very harsh in her candid assessments of people, but her motive was never a petty or personal one—it was always to protect the president.
And it should not be forgotten that she could also be very kind and thoughtful. To illustrate, by early 1986, I had heavily depleted our personal savings and was ready to resign. I met with the president and told him of my plans and he was very gracious. The next day, however, I was summoned to the residence and met by an angry First Lady who said she couldn’t understand how I could desert Ronnie, just like Bill Smith, Bill Clark…and she named a string of others she felt had deserted the president. I explained my situation, but she didn’t let up on me, and I left the meeting feeling depressed that in her eyes I had failed to be loyal to the president.
The next morning she telephoned me in my office; I braced for a rerun. But to my surprise, she was soft-spoken and she told me she was calling to apologize for yelling at me. She had talked to Ronnie the previous evening and he had told her I had been the only one of all the original assistants to the president that had still remained on the staff, and that he was grateful I had given him so much time. She said she was just frustrated the day before, and now understood. And, for years after, at events with the president or events after his death, she was always gracious to me and my wife, including us in the events, and in conversations.
As I stated at the beginning, she was not “the Dragon Lady” but instead was a grand and gracious lady, who wanted only to protect her president—which she did in every way she could.
CAROL MCCAIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE VISITORS OFFICE
Carol McCain loved Nancy. Carol and her husband at the time, Senator John McCain, knew Nancy from her involvement in the POW issues. She hosted many dinners for them in Sacramento and in Los Angeles.
Like many people who fell under Nancy’s spell, Carol ended up joining the Reagan political campaigns and working for them. During the 1980 campaign, she was one of only two women on the staff of about twenty people managed by John Sears.
Carol described herself as a “Jack of all trades” doing whatever Nancy needed done. She laughs remembering an appearance at a Little League baseball game in Florida. Nancy sat down on the bench. Carol looked down and noticed Nancy had on one blue shoe and one black shoe. Nancy realized her fashion faux pas at the same time. They smiled at each other and pretended not to notice.
Carol also functioned as Nancy’s press secretary during the campaign. And once, during the New Hampshire primary, Nancy complained about one particular well-worn dress that she kept having to wear. Ronald
Reagan overheard and suggested, “Give it to Carol. She’d look good in it.” Nancy stopped complaining; Carol did not get the dress. But it’s fun to imagine the press reaction when they’d inevitably notice Carol was wearing a dress they’d photographed numerous times on Nancy out on the campaign trail.
MONA CHAREN, SPEECHWRITER
The First Lady’s office was in desperate need of a full-time speechwriter. We had borrowed talent from the president’s team for years and felt we needed someone who did nothing but work with the East Wing. And along came Mona!
Early in 1984 I was interviewed for the job of speechwriter for Nancy Reagan by Michael Deaver. His office was gorgeous. His desk was pristine. Not a paper in sight. Just carefully arranged blotter and pen holders and paperweights. Beautiful photos of the Reagans behind him. He told me that in all his years of working for the Reagans, he’d never been criticized by Ron, only by Nancy. He stressed how tough she could be, what a demanding boss and so forth, and asked whether I was ready for that.
I had worked at National Review from 1979 to 1981. I left to spend a year in Israel and then go to law school. I’d done a good deal of writing for National Review and Bill and Priscilla Buckley recommended me to the White House after I graduated from law school.
I was just out of law school and was overwhelmed to be sitting in the West Wing of the White House. If Mike Deaver had said, “Listen you can have this job but we ask that you submit to waterboarding first,” I would have said, “Sign me up.”
The next step was meeting Mrs. Reagan. Because of what Mike Deaver had said, I was expecting a Dragon Lady. Instead, this diminutive, very polite lady met me at the elevator and escorted me to the sunroom. I don’t know how old she was then, maybe in her sixties? But I was struck by two things: she was girlish and gracious at the same time. I don’t remember what we talked about. I do remember that she offered me chocolates and I thought to myself, She doesn’t look like she ever indulges in chocolates!