by Nancy Reagan
I’d never known this kind of public or civic life before, and I was learning so much! Many of the interests I eventually pursued when Ronnie became president started then—the seeds were planted, and I was getting some training in civic life, which I was very grateful for later on.
Ronnie and I now had new and different things to talk about every night at dinner. And yet, for us as a couple, the heart of our life had not changed, and in fact it never did; nor did our private time together. We’d come so far, lived through so much together: parenthood and home building, career reversals, life choices and changes. But in so many ways, we were the same. I still hated it when Ronnie left the room—and he didn’t much like it when I did, either. We still shared everything. We spent as much time together as we possibly could. I just loved everything about this man!
Our fifteenth year of marriage coincided with Ronnie’s first year in the governor’s office, and the anniversary seemed to both of us like a particular milestone. I even wrote Ronnie a letter for it, which I found the other day in his desk drawer. Here are our letters to each other:
RONALD REAGAN
March 4 1967
My Darling First Lady
I’m looking at you as you lie here beside me on this fifteenth anniversary and wondering why everyone has only just discovered you are the First Lady. You’ve been the First—in fact the only—to me for fifteen years.
That sounds so strange—“fifteen years.” It still seems like minutes, they’ve gone by so swiftly. If I have any regret it is only for the days we’ve been apart and I’ve had to awaken without watching you. Someday, you’ll have to explain how you can be five years old when you sleep and for fifteen years yet. But then maybe it has something to do with my only being fifteen—because I wasn’t living before I began watching you.
Thank you for all my life and living and for happiness as complete as one can have on this earth.
I love you so much and so much more each day.
Your Husband
My darling husband,
You beat me to it this morning ’cause I was going to write you—
I can never say what I really feel in my heart to you ’cause I get puddled up—and you always say everything so much better. But I too can’t believe it’s fifteen (16!) years. In another way tho’ it seems like forever—I really can’t even remember a life before you now. Everything began with you. My whole life—so you’d better be careful and take care of yourself because there’d be nothing and I’d be no one without you—
I love you so much—I never thought I could love you more than the day we were married but I do—and I’m so proud of you—every day—I could pop—It just keeps getting bigger and bigger—those poor other mommies—they don’t have a you—but I do—and I hope you’ll always have a me.
xxx
And when separations arose, we still took them very, very badly.
Dear Mommie,
The Gov. slept here—but not well. We have to stop this silly business. In fact I may buy a tent, load the jeep, take you away from all your friends & go live on our mountain. Then we’ll only talk to each other.
I love you & I’ll see you Sunday.
The Travelling, Non Sleeping
Guv.
In Sacramento, Ronnie and I still looked after each other the way we always had. For me as a wife this meant, first and foremost, making a comfortable home for Ronnie and the family. For me as first lady, it also meant making the California governor’s office a comfortable place to work.
It was far from that when Ronnie first moved into his office. In fact, the only thing Pat Brown had left behind was a tomahawk hanging on a wall. The carpeting was full of holes. Some of them had been patched—but not in the same color. It all looked awful!
I think that if you have pleasant surroundings, you can work better. I wanted to redecorate Ronnie’s office and get it done for his birthday, on February 6, 1967. Somehow, with a lot of help, I did. Then I redid the conference room next door. Then I redid the outer office, where the secretaries worked. (Once you started fixing up one room, the others looked so terrible by comparison!) Then I fixed up the hallways. In storage, I found wonderful old pictures of Sacramento, and I lined the halls with them so schoolchildren could learn about the city when they came through to visit the governor’s office.
I really enjoyed myself doing this, and Ronnie was just delighted. So was everyone else who worked in the office. They laughed when, as a finishing touch, I took a huge jar of jelly beans that a friend had sent to Ronnie and put it on his desk. But I also noticed that it was the first thing people went for when they came into the office to meet with him.
RONALD REAGAN
Dearest Mommie
When a fellow is in love he’ll do the silliest things. — Like breaking promises and everything.
Anyway an Ermine cape seemed sort of impractical so please accept this substitute.
There is no substitute for how much I love you and want you to have the most wonderful Christmas “In the whole wide world.”
I love you
Poppa
Everyone at San Onofre: Patti, me, Ronnie, Mike, Maureen, and Ron.
Ronnie’s tenure as governor came at a very difficult time in California. The campuses were aflame. Someone even tried to firebomb our house in Sacramento. We were in bed and heard a gunshot. Smart girl that I am, I immediately ran out on the balcony to see what was going on, making myself a perfect target. The police came running into our bedroom and said, “Put your robes on and come downstairs, and above all, stay away from the windows!” Downstairs, they found an unexploded firebomb made out of a champagne bottle. “Only in California,” Ronnie said, referring to the fact that it was a champagne bottle.
I had seen Ronnie’s sense of humor get him through a lot of difficult moments, but none more than when he met with enraged college students. They showed up to meet him disheveled, to say the least, and they were often very rude. Once, they greeted Ronnie outside a Board of Regents meeting by lining up on both sides of the sidewalk and giving him the silent treatment. Ronnie slowly walked the gauntlet in silence and then, when he reached the end, he turned around, smiled at them, put his finger up to his lips, and said, “Shhh!”
Another time, a student accused him of being out of touch. “You grew up in a different world,” the student said. “Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers . . .”
“You’re right,” Ronnie answered. “It’s true that we didn’t have those things when we were young.We invented them.”
The student rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s was difficult for all parents, and we were no exception.
Ronnie never got truly angry—not at Patti or at Ron, Maureen, and Michael, or at me. It simply wasn’t in his nature. At the White House, aides said the only way they knew he was really mad was when he took his glasses off and threw them on his desk. That’s about as bad as things ever got.
At home, Ronnie and I disagreed so rarely that when we did it was a major event. As Ronnie says in the following letter, it kept him up half the night afterward.
RONALD REAGAN
Dear Mrs. Reagan
And you are Mrs. Reagan because Mr. Reagan loves you with all his heart. Every time Mr. Reagan sees the evening star or blows out the birthday candles or gets the big end of the wishbone he thinks the same wish—a prayer really—that so much happiness will go on and somehow be deserved by him.
It is true sometimes that Mr. Reagan loses his temper and slams a door but that’s because he can’t cry or stamp his foot—(he isn’t really the type.) But mad or glad Mr. Reagan is head over heels in love with Mrs. Reagan and can’t even imagine a world without her—
He loves her
Mr. Reagan
P.S. Mr. Reagan had to get up and take a sleeping pill halfway through the night.
We tried never to go to bed angry. And we never let things smolder. We talked it out, and that was that.
RONALD REAGAN
PACIFIC PALISADES
DearWife,
A few days ago you told me I was angry with you. I tried to explain I was frustrated with myself. But later on I realized that my frustration might have been a touch of self-pity because I’d been going around feeling that you are frequently angry with me.
No more.We are so much “one” that you are as vital to me as my own heart—with one exception; you could never be replaced with a transplant.
Whatever I treasure and enjoy—this home, our ranch, the sight of the sea—all would be without meaning if I didn’t have you. I live in a permanent Christmas because God gave me you. As I write this, you are hurrying by—back and forth doing those things only you can do and I get a feeling of warm happiness just watching you. That’s why I can’t pass you or let you pass me without reaching to touch you. (Except now or you would see what I’m doing.)
I’ll write no more because I’m going to catch up with you wherever you are and hold you for a moment.
Merry Christmas Darling—I love you with all my heart.
Your Husband
Like any other couple, we didn’t agree on everything, of course. But we never really argued.We worked on things. And I think that’s why, beyond our love for each other, our marriage has always been so happy.What we felt was right out there, just as it is in the letters.
I tried to explain this once in a letter to a woman in Washington, D.C., who was about to get married and had written to me in Sacramento to ask if I had any tips for building a good marriage. “I’m very flattered that you wrote me, and I wish I thought I had a surefire formula for a successful marriage,” I wrote back. Then I wrote,
I’ve been very lucky. However, I don’t ever remember once sitting down and mapping out a blueprint. It just became “we” instead of “I” very naturally and easily. And you live as you never have before, despite problems, separations and conflicts. I suppose mainly you have to be willing to want to give.
It’s not always 50–50. Sometimes one partner gives 90 percent but then sometimes the other one does, so it all evens out. It’s not always easy, it’s something you have to work at, and I don’t think many young people realize that today. But the rewards are so great. I can’t remember what my life was like before, and I can’t imagine not being married to Ronnie.When two people really love each other they help each other stay alive and grow. There’s nothing more fulfilling than to become a complete person for the first time. I suppose it boils down to being willing to try to understand, to give of yourself, to be supportive and not to let the sun go down on an argument.
I hope that yours will be a happy road ahead. I’m afraid I’ve rambled a bit, and of course, I can only speak for myself. However, when I married, my life took on an added meaning and depth and truly began. I’m sure yours will too.
I knew it was very important for Ronnie, at the end of each day, to be able to put politics behind him and come home to his peaceful life with the children and me. He didn’t like to go out after work, to stop off at Frank Fat’s—the place everyone else in government went to for a drink. It had been the same way when he was in pictures—he never stayed around and had a drink with the fellows in the dressing room. He just came home. And in Sacramento, he wanted to close the door of his office and walk away. I think this helped keep him sane in the turbulent years of the sixties and early seventies, when the world seemed to go crazy. I think it also gave him a chance to think calmly, to sort out problems while he puttered around at home.
(“Jess Plain Jess” in this letter is Jesse Unruh, a California state legislator and Ronnie’s Democratic opponent in the 1970 gubernatorial election.)
EXECUTIVE MANSION
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
March 4–70
My Darling
Sometimes it must seem as if the world is made up of Jess Plain Jess, Campus Slobs and Legislators—but that is only the outer layer.
Underneath is the place where I think about you round the clock and across the calendar—I spend most of my time there. I may get mixed up about March 2nd but never March 4—for 18 years it has been March 4 every day. Only this March 4 I’m 18 times as much in love as on that first one when I was really born.
I’m as grateful as I am in love.
Guv
Even though Ronnie’s political career uprooted us to Sacramento, as it eventually would to Washington, our sense of having a solid home together never changed.We didn’t feel the rootlessness that many politicians and their families say they experience. So long as we had each other, we were home. That feeling of home was something very special and necessary to Ronnie and is, I think, what he refers to when he calls himself “the most married man in the world” in the next letter. Our home was his base, a source of comfort and strength. It was the same way for me.
Ronnie’s letter on our eighteenth wedding anniversary.
A Valentine and a doodle.
He wrote me this letter to celebrate our nineteen years of marriage (“some say 20,” Ronnie wrote, referring to the fact that in the year before our wedding, we were together so much that we might as well have been married).
STAT E OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNOR’S OFFICE
[March 4, 1971]
Dear Mrs. Reagan
Your loving, faithful devotion has been observed these 19 (some say 20) years. There are no words to describe the happiness you have brought to the Gov. It is no secret that he is the most married man in the world and would be totally lost and desolate without you.
It seemed to me you should know this and be aware of how essential you are in this man’s life. By his own admission, he is completely in love with you and happier than even a Gov. deserves.
With Love & Appreciation
—Your In Luv Guv.
Being together made both of us feel whole, which had been true for Ronnie and me right from the start. It was why our lives had merged together so very naturally at first and why, after just a matter of months, it had seemed like we’d been together for years. It was also why, by the 1970s, when we were measuring our time together in decades rather than years, it was almost impossible to believe that we’d ever had separate lives.
(Birthdays became unbelievable for other reasons. “I don’t care what the number is,” Ronnie once wrote, diplomatically. “It only means more and more and more. I love you infinitely much.” )
STATE OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNOR’S OFFICE
[March 4, 1972]
My Darling Wife
This note is to warn you of a diabolical plot entered into by some of our so-called friends—(ha) calendar makers and even our own children. These and others would have you believe we’ve been married 20 years.
20 minutes maybe—but never 20 years. In the first place it is a known fact that a human cannot sustain the high level of happiness I feel for more than a few minutes—and my happiness keeps on increasing.
I will confess to one puzzlement but I’m sure it is just some trick perpetrated by our friends—(Ha Again!) I cant remember ever being without you and I know I was born more than 20 min’s ago.
Oh well—that isn’t important The important thing is I don’t want to be without you for the next 20 years, or 40, or however many there are. I’ve gotten very used to being happy and I love you very much indeed.
Your Husband of 20 something or other.
Twentieth-anniversary letter.
I’ve always said that my life began when I met Ronald Reagan. Ronnie often said the same thing about me. (“Thanks to you, I’m just eight years old today,” he wrote on our eighth anniversary.) In the years preceding our marriage, he said, he’d felt lost. He hadn’t been able to recognize himself as he made the nightclub circuit, dating starlets and enjoying being Hollywood’s “most eligible” bachelor. He’d felt like he was wandering in the dark.
(He started calling me Senator, as he does in the next letter, after somebody kidded about my running for the Sena
te. It became a joke for everyone, and Ronnie jumped right on the bandwagon.)
RONALD REAGAN
My Darling Sen.
Two thirds of my life was spent in a holding pattern awaiting the happiest landing ever made: Now it is twenty-one years later—twenty-one years so wonderful I’d do it over and over again if each flight led to you. But I still wouldn’t be able to tell you how much you mean to me.
I just want to start each day by opening my eyes and seeing you and end each day seeing you before I close them. In between times, I’ll just look in my heart.You are always there.
There are no secrets in politics—it’s a well-known fact that the Guv is very much that way about the Sen.
Very much in love—
The Guv
Ronnie always put special thought into his holiday messages. He could write mini-sonnets into the margins of greeting cards. And he never let a holiday go by without a card—or cards.
I’d find them waiting for me in the morning. I’d read and reread them. And, of course, I kept them all. A Thanksgiving card: “To the Woman of My Life—You Saved My Soul.” A Christmas gift card: “If this were diamonds it still wouldn’t pay the interest on the debt of love I owe you.” A birthday greeting: “Life began for me when you were born. . . You are the light of my life and I never want you to go out.” And a beautiful description of our marriage, one Mother’s Day: “It is still like an adolescent’s dream.”
Valentine’s Day always brought a particularly lovely letter.
Feb. 14—1960
Darling Mommie Poo
Feb. 14 may be the date they observe and call Valentine’s day but that is for people of only ordinary luck.
I happen to have a “Valentine Life” which started on March 4 1952 and will continue as long as I have you.