I Love You, Ronnie
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By now you must have figured out that I’m hinting, I love you more than anything in the whole, wide world. I’m running for re-election as your own totally dedicated husband.
I love you
Your husband.
P.S. I’m the fellow who sent the roses.
Campaigning consumes all your energy—mentally and physically. My memory of the 1980 campaign is just a big blur. I remember sinking into bed at night, absolutely exhausted. Ronnie would be so tired that he’d fall asleep right away. I usually would read for a while. Then I’d be hungry, and I wouldn’t know what to eat. I didn’t want to eat apples, because I was afraid that the crunching would wake Ronnie. So I’d eat bananas, which were soft and which, I figured, Ronnie couldn’t hear. So then it got to be a joke between us. When we traveled, Ronnie would put bananas by my side of the bed.
I remember how I used to have fun with the press, too. On the campaign plane, I would take an orange and roll it down the aisle, and if it could get to the end of the aisle where the reporters were, I’d have won a great big victory. It got to be a routine, and then the press started putting up blocks—roadblocks—to stop my oranges. You can have a good time campaigning, and there can be camaraderie with the press—that is to say, as much as you want there to be.
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On election night, in November 1980, we were at home in Pacific Palisades. I was in the bathtub, and Ronnie was in the shower. Ronnie loved to take long, long showers; he would think about his speeches and then write down his thoughts on 3 × 5 cards afterward. I had turned the TV up loud before I got in the tub so we could hear it better. Suddenly, I heard John Chancellor saying that Ronnie had won the election. I banged on the shower door, and Ronnie came out. We stood before the set wrapped in our towels and listened.
“I don’t think this is the way it’s supposed to happen,” I said. It wasn’t the way I’d envisioned it, at least. Next thing we knew the phone rang, and it was President Carter calling to concede and to congratulate Ronnie. We turned to each other in surprise. It was unusual for a president to call before the polls had closed. We couldn’t quite believe it.
Yet, there it was—we were on our way to the White House.
The first inaugural ball, 1981.
Becoming president didn’t change Ronnie at all. In the White House, he went on being the same man he’d always been—in Hollywood, in Sacramento, at home with me. Of course, his responsibilities were huge—and he felt them. But we kept up our private routines as much as we could. In Ronnie’s rare moments alone, he still jotted off little notes to me, to say “Hello,” “Where are you?” “I miss you,” “I need you.”
THE WHITE HOUSE
Dear Mommie, Poo Pants, 1st Lady, Nancy,
(How did I get so many wives?) Never mind. I love them each and every one. I know it’s Feb. 4th—not Feb. 14th and not March 4th—but I can’t stand it any longer. Happy Valentine’s day!! Happy Anniversary!!
I love you,
Poppa, Poo Pants, 1st Guy, Ronnie
I found this message on a Thanksgiving card on my breakfast tray at the White House.
To Mrs. Reagan (That sounds beautiful to me),
I’ll be happy every minute I love you as my wife.
Your Husband—Your Happy Husband!
RONALD REAGAN
Welcome home little “Poopchin.”
I’ve missed you and can’t wait to get home tonight.
The song was sent to us by a lady who thought it was very appropriate for us. Of course she’s right.
The cups and saucers on your desk were another gift.
I miss you, I love you, I miss you, I love you etc. etc. etc. Well, I’ll be with you soon and if I haven’t made it clear I really do love you.
Your Husband
On special occasions, I’d go over to his office and have lunch with him and we’d exchange our usual cards. I’d still get my beautiful Christmas letter and, though we always celebrated Christmas in Washington so that our Secret Service agents wouldn’t have to leave their families, Ronnie still called my friends in California just before the holidays to find out what to buy me as a present. And no matter how busy he was with his duties as president, he always remembered our anniversary.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
March 4, 1981
Dear First Lady
As Pres. of the U.S., it is my honor & privilege to cite you for service above & beyond the call of duty in that you have made one man (me) the most happy man in the world for 29 years.
Beginning in 1951, Nancy Davis, seeing the plight of a lonely man who didn’t know how lonely he really was, determined to rescue him from a completely empty life. Refusing to be rebuffed by a certain amount of stupidity on his part she ignored his somewhat slow response. With patience & tenderness she gradually brought the light of understanding to his darkened, obtuse mind and he discovered the joy of loving someone with all his heart.
Nancy Davis then went on to bring him happiness for the next 29 years as Nancy Davis Reagan for which she has received & will continue to receive his undying devotion forever & ever.
She has done this in spite of the fact that he still can’t find the words to tell her how lost he would be without her. He sits in the Oval office from which he can see (if he scrooches down) her window and feels warm all over just knowing she is there.
The above is the statement of the man who benefited from her act of heroism.
The below is his signature.
Ronald Reagan—Pres. of the U.S.
P.S. He—I mean I, love and adore you.
A Christmas greeting and a doodle.
I had this note framed and keep it on my desk today.
While we were in the White House we spent as much time as we could together. Whenever we could, we made weekend trips to Camp David. Camp David! When I think about it now, it seems like another life—which, I guess, it was. It was such a wonderful place. I had heard so much about it and was so anxious to see it, and was happy to find it was all I had hoped for. Jimmy Carter had at one point considered selling it—he hadn’t, thank God (he discovered that he liked it). But when we first started going out there, it needed some work. I did some gardening and some work on the cabins, which I really enjoyed. And Ronnie enjoyed himself in his own usual ways—being outside and riding, in particular. The Secret Service didn’t want him going too far at first, but as time went by, he’d suggest adding a little more to the trail and then a bit more and a bit more, until, by the end, he had the kind of substantial ride he was used to.
Sometimes, just the two of us went to Camp David (that is to say, the two of us plus the Secret Service, the White House doctor, someone from the press office, and other White House staff—that’s solitude during the presidency). Sometimes Ron and his new wife, Doria, would come, or a couple of close friends, like Charles and Mary Jane Wick and their children. But we never made a big social event out of it. What we really enjoyed doing there was relaxing, wearing blue jeans, reading, riding horses, watching movies—just generally doing the kinds of things that we’d always done on the ranch back home.
I think that’s largely why we didn’t find Washington strange or lonely the way many people who move there from other places say they do. We were still together all the time, and we were still us—with Ronnie on the left side of the bed and me on the right, waking up with our breakfast trays and our King Charles spaniel, Rex, a gift from Pat and Bill Buckley, jumping into bed between us. We added many new people to our lives who are still friends. Of course, living in the White House, if we wanted to make new friends, we had to reach out—just as anyone who moved to a new city has to do.
Making these new friends and bringing them home to Ronnie was part of the fun for me, and a big part of what I saw my job to be as first lady. There was also the work I’d begun in California: the Foster Grandparents and the drug program. The drug program, now on a national scale, took a lot of time. But it was also particularly rewarding.
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Its best-remembered slogan, “Just Say No,” had actually come into being during a visit to a school in Oakland. I was talking to a class of fifth graders when a little girl raised her hand and said, “Mrs. Reagan, what do you do when somebody offers you drugs?”
“Well,” I had said, “just say no.”
Somehow that caught on. I’m sure people thought it was a PR strategy that we’d worked out in the White House, but it really came about by accident. Obviously, it wasn’t the whole answer to the drug problem, but it was useful and effective. It became a rallying point. You saw it on milk cartons and billboards, and you still hear it used today. I’ve always been proud of that, and of the work we did.
At the top of my list of duties as first lady, though, was taking care of Ronnie. I still considered that to be my most important job, as it had always been. For that matter, I do believe that taking care of the president is the most important thing a first lady can do—the essential thing, in fact, that she must do—because she is the person in the White House who knows him best. There are other people around who are supposed to take care of everything else—his scheduling, his briefings, his cabinet, his relations with the press. But the first lady is the only one who can really take care of the president’s personal needs. She’s the only one who really knows what’s needed—at least, I think she should be.
Sometimes, though, at the most important moments in the president’s life, you just can’t be there. Try as you might, you can’t always protect him from the outside world.
I’m getting off the horse at Camp David, in the way Ronnie liked.
March 30, 1981, began like a perfectly normal day. Around noon, I went to a luncheon in an art gallery in Washington. When it came time for dessert, I suddenly had a strong feeling that I wanted to get back to the White House. I’d never felt anything like that before—and I haven’t since—so I made my excuses and left. When I got back to the White House, I went up to the third floor, where we were in the midst of renovations. I was talking in the solarium with Rex Scouten, the chief usher, and Ted Graber, our decorator, when I saw George Opfer, the head of my Secret Service detail, standing at the bottom of a ramp that had been installed for President Roosevelt. He gestured to me to come down.
That’s funny. I thought. Why doesn’t he come up?
I went down.
“There’s been a shooting,” he said. “But the president’s all right.”
I was already headed for the elevator.
“He wasn’t hit,” he kept saying. “He’s all right.”
“George,” I said, as we went downstairs. “I’m going to the hospital.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “He’s all right.”
“George,” I said. “I’m going to the hospital, and you either get me a car or I’ll walk.”
It seemed to take forever to get to the hospital. Word of the shooting was out by that time, and the traffic had gotten very bad. When we finally made it there, Mike Deaver was waiting for me. “He’s been hit,” he told me. He suggested that we go into a little room and wait, which we did.
“Let me see him,” I said.
“You can’t see him now. They’re working on him,” he answered. “But he’s all right.”
The obvious question then was: “Well, if he’s all right, why can’t I see him?”
“You just can’t,” was the answer. “Not yet. They’ll let you know when it’s the right time.”
“Mike,” I said. “You’ve got to get me in. He’s got to know I’m here. They don’t know how it is with us.”
Mike said he’d see what he could do.
I was terrified. I was also feeling like this couldn’t be happening. John Simpson, a good friend, who was head of the Secret Service at the time, and Mike Deaver stayed with me. Outside the room, there seemed to be policemen everywhere, and they were yelling, “Get these people out of here!” There was so much noise. I kept wondering if this was what it had been like when President Kennedy was shot.
Finally, they came and told me that I could see Ronnie. I went into the emergency room and he was lying there with an oxygen mask over his face. When he saw me, he lifted it up and said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” He was the color of paper—just as white as a sheet, with dried blood around his mouth. I held back my tears and said, “Please don’t try to talk. I love you.” I wasn’t allowed to stay for long, and I couldn’t hold Ronnie’s hand or get very close.
At Camp David with Rex.
When it came time to take Ronnie to the operating room, I walked with him and held his hand while he lay on the gurney. Jim Brady was on a gurney just behind him. It was the first time I’d ever seen anybody who’d been shot in the head, and it was a terrible sight; his head was so swollen. I was taken upstairs to a larger room, where there were a lot of people and the television sets were on, and they asked me if I wanted to go to the chapel. I said yes. In the chapel, I saw Sarah Brady. It was the first time that I’d ever met her, you have to remember. We’d only been in the White House for three months, and I hadn’t yet had a chance to meet everybody. She said to me, “They’re strong men. They’ll get through this.” It was obvious that she hadn’t seen Jim. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her.
I said, “Yes.” We prayed together, and then I went upstairs.
As we waited, I looked out the window and saw how, in the buildings all around the hospital, people had thrown sheets out the window saying things like GET WELL, MR. PRESIDENT and WE LOVE YOU, MR. PRESIDENT. Every now and then, a nurse would come and report to me on Ronnie’s progress. At first, the doctors were having trouble finding the bullet, which was a devastator bullet, the kind that explodes inside. One time, the nurse came and said, “We just can’t seem to get it out. We may just have to leave it in.” Well, that didn’t sound so good to me. And then another time, she said, “They’ve found it, but the doctor is having a hard time removing it—it keeps slipping from his fingers.” Finally, she came back and told me that the doctor had gotten it out; but I almost lost him then. The bullet had been lodged an inch from Ronnie’s heart.
We were lucky—we didn’t realize how lucky, in fact—because when Ronnie had arrived, all the doctors were in the hospital for a meeting. No one had to be called in. Everyone Ronnie needed was right on hand, and there was no waiting.
When Ronnie woke up, Ron and Doria were with me. Ron had been out touring with the Joffrey Ballet when he’d heard the news, and a plane was sent for them right away. The other children would arrive in the middle of the night, after the White House sent a military plane to pick them up.
When we walked into the recovery room, Ronnie had a tube down his throat. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. He gestured to us, and wrote a note saying, “I can’t breathe.” I panicked and ran over to the doctors and nurses, saying, “He can’t breathe!” But Ron just went over to him and calmly said, “Dad, it’s okay. It’s like when I went scuba diving. A machine takes over for you and does the breathing for you. It’s okay.”
But it was very frightening for all of us, including Ronnie.
I stayed at the hospital until the doctors said that Ronnie needed to sleep and that I should leave. I wanted to stay there all night, but the feeling was that it would be better for the country if I left and went back to sleep at the White House. Otherwise, people would have assumed the worst and there would have been panic. As it was, Ronnie’s aides had to do all they could to calm the country down. The briefings made to the press were partial, to say the least. The assassination attempt was really a much closer call than people were led to believe at the time. Everyone was trying not to frighten the people in the country, but the fact was, Ronnie almost died. It was a miracle that he didn’t. And I knew all along how serious things really were.
Looking back, I realize that when I went back to the White House, I was in shock. You never think your husband might be shot—you think that he might get sick, maybe, but not shot. And to me, even after it happened, it simply s
eemed unimaginable. That night, I slept on Ronnie’s side of the bed. It made me feel closer to him somehow. And it kept me from reaching out and touching an empty space.
After Ronnie was shot, my desire to protect him just increased. His aides wanted to get him out there talking again as soon as he could. I kept saying he should be treated like any other patient and given time to recover. After all, we had almost lost him. He was a strong man and he was mending well, but he wasn’t superhuman.
A birthday greeting.
An incident like that makes you feel very fragile. The shooting only took two seconds. And you suddenly realize that two seconds is all it takes for your life to change entirely. Our security tightened after the assassination attempt, as it had to. Oddly enough, death threats increase after a shooting—it seems there’s always somebody out there saying to himself, “Well, he didn’t get him, but I will.”
Needless to say, I was terrified.After the shooting, every time Ronnie walked out the door to make a public appearance, my heart would stop—and it wouldn’t start again until he came back home safely. Ronnie knew how scared I was. But if he was frightened too, he never let me know it. As always, he was cheerful and optimistic. God had spared him, he believed; there had to be a reason why. By making jokes—as in this letter—he tried to take the edge off my fear.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Dear First Mommie
I’m in Wyoming, Montana,—or Nevada depending on what time you read this.
But I’ll be at Camp David at 9:15 P.M Fri. Night. I’ll be so glad to see you. I miss you—even when I’m asleep. This is a very lonesome place when you are someplace else.
Now I don’t want this to come as a shock to you—but—well—well—I’ll just come right out with it—I’m in love with you. There I’ve said it & I’m glad.
A note before we were to meet each other at Camp David.