I Love You, Ronnie

by Nancy Reagan

  You be careful. Dont talk to any strangers & try to think kindly of me because I love you mucher than anything.

  1st Poppa

  The assassination attempt made us realize how very precious our lives were. It made us all the more devoted to each other. I think this comes through very strongly in Ronnie’s Christmas letter of 1981, written nine months after the shooting.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  Dec. 25 1981

  Dear Mrs. R.

  I still don’t feel right about your opening an envelope instead of a gift package.

  There are several much beloved women in my life and on Christmas I should be giving them gold, precious stones, perfume, furs and lace. I know that even the best of these would still fall far short of expressing how much these several women mean to me and how empty my life would be without them.

  There is of course my “First Lady.” She brings so much grace and charm to whatever she does that even stuffy, formal functions sparkle and turn into fun times. Everything is done with class. All I have to do is wash up and show up.

  There is another woman in my life who does things I don’t always get to see but I hear about them and sometimes see photos of her doing them.She takes an abandoned child in her arms on a hospital visit. The look on her face only the Madonna could match. The look on the child’s face is one of adoration. I know because I adore her too.

  She bends over a wheelchair or bed to touch an elderly invalid with tenderness and compassion just as she fills my life with warmth and love.

  There is another gal I love who is a nest builder. If she were stuck three days in a hotel room she’d manage to make it home sweet home. She moves things around—looks at it—straightens this and that and you wonder why it wasn’t that way in the first place.

  I’m also crazy about the girl who goes to the ranch with me. If we’re tidying up the woods she’s a peewee power house at pushing over dead trees. She’s a wonderful person to sit by the fire with, or to ride with or just to be with when the sun goes down or the stars come out. If she ever stopped going to the ranch I’d stop too because I’d see her in every beauty spot there is and I couldn’t stand that.

  Then there is a sentimental lady I love whose eyes fill up so easily. On the other hand she loves to laugh and her laugh is like tinkling bells. I hear those bells and feel good all over even if I tell a joke she’s heard before.

  Fortunately all these women in my life are you—fortunately for me that is, for there could be no life for me without you. Browning asked; “How do I love thee—let me count the ways?” For me there is no way to count. I love the whole gang of you—Mommie, first lady, the sentimental you, the fun you and the peewee power house you.

  Ronnie’s Christmas letter, 1981.

  And oh yes, one other very special you—the little girl who takes a “nana” to bed in case she gets hungry in the night. I couldn’t & don’t sleep well if she isn’t there—so please always be there.

  Merry Christmas you all—with all my love.

  Lucky me.

  —

  The first week of March 1983 was stressful, to say the very least. The queen of England had come to California for a rare state visit, and pretty much everything had gone wrong. The coast was drenched in torrential rains. The queen was supposed to come visit us on our ranch in Santa Barbara, but as the days leading up to her visit passed and the rain continued to fall, this looked more and more unlikely. The road leading up to the ranch was a very winding one. There was no visibility at all. When you were in the house, you couldn’t even see out to the fences up front.

  We didn’t think she would make it, and we were very disappointed, because she and Ronnie had talked about their riding at the ranch during a weekend we’d spent at Windsor Castle. But the queen was determined. She got a Land Rover and some boots and she came right up. We kept apologizing to her—we’d never seen rain like this before in California!—and she just said, “Don’t apologize. This is an adventure.”

  We had lunch at the ranch and then navigated our way back down the hill, and Ronnie had to leave for a meeting in Sacramento. I was supposed to take the queen for a cruise of the California coastline. The whole thing had been planned so that the Britannia would sail into San Francisco harbor as the bridge came up and horns played to welcome her. Of course, none of that took place.

  At the ranch in Santa Barbara.

  We ended up having to stay in a hotel, which the queen almost never does. Everything had to be rearranged. But sometimes, I think, maybe things that aren’t planned come off better than things that are. The visit was very spontaneous and relaxed, in its own way. I remember at one point sitting on a couch after dinner on the Britannia with the queen, talking the way any two mothers would talk about their children. That’s not something you get to do every day.

  A note from Air Force One.

  Things were less pleasant for Ronnie. That week, new labor statistics had come out showing that despite his first administration’s best efforts, unemployment was holding steady at over 10 percent. While I accompanied the queen to San Francisco, he had toured flooded areas of the Southern California coast. Then, on March 4, our thirty-first anniversary, he rushed north to join the royal couple and me for dinner aboard the Britannia in San Francisco Bay.

  He must have been completely exhausted. But by the time he walked off the plane, he had this letter ready and waiting. With so much weighing on his mind, it might seem odd that he’d use his few precious minutes of downtime to write to me. But that’s Ronnie!

  ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE

  March 4 1983

  Dear First Lady

  I know tradition has it that on this morning I place cards—Happy Anniversary cards on your breakfast tray. But things are somewhat mixed up. I substituted a gift & delivered it a few weeks ago.

  Still this is the day, the day that marks 31 years of such happiness as comes to few men. I told you once it was like an adolescent’s dream of what marriage should be like. That hasn’t changed.

  You know I love the ranch—but these last two days made it plain I only love it when you are there. Come to think of it that’s true of every place & every time. When you aren’t there I’m no place, just lost in time & space.

  I more than love you, I’m not whole without you. You are life itself to me. When you are gone I’m waiting for you to return so I can start living again.

  Happy Anniversary & thank you for 31 wonderful years.

  I love you

  Your Grateful Husband

  The queen and Prince Philip gave us an engraved silver cigarette box as an anniversary present. I still have it—we had to buy it, of course, when we left the White House. And I still remember Ronnie’s toast during dinner: “I know that I promised Nancy everything in the world when we married, but I don’t know how I could ever top this!”

  —

  As far as he was concerned, Ronnie always was my husband first, Mr. President second. He never took himself too seriously. His letters, once signed “Your Ranch Hand,” now were signed “Prexy.” In his second term, he started signing off as my “roommate,” too. This grew out of one of my funnier public mistakes.

  We’d had to call off the January 1985 inaugural parade because of bad weather. It was so cold in Washington that year that the doctors said if the marching bands had tried to play their wind instruments, the metal would have stuck to their lips. We felt so bad for all the kids who had saved their money to come to Washington to play that we found a place to have them perform indoors instead.

  I was supposed to say a few words to start the festivities off. I said my piece, welcomed the bands, then went back to my seat and sat down. After a moment, Ronnie leaned over and said, “I think you forgot to introduce me.” Oops!

  If I was going away on a trip without him, Ronnie would set out my vitamin pills in advance and remind me on which days to take them.

  I went back up to the podium and said, “I’d like to introd
uce . . . my husband . . . my roommate,who also happens to be the president of the United States.” The crowd loved it. Ronnie loved it too, and afterward, the nickname stuck.

  I can never get enough of kissing you. You are the light of my life. I just worship my Roommate—

  Your husband

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  Dear Glamour Puss

  Welcome home! I missed you. I won’t be home til 5:20 and we go to the Nat.Air & Space Museum at 8 P.M. This film will be on the 5 story high screen I’ve told you about. It will be sensational—you wait and see. We’ll be home at 9:10 PM.

  I love you mucher and mucher every day.

  Your Roommate.

  If Ronnie and I hadn’t been so close, I don’t know how we would have weathered the many sad and frightening experiences we had during the White House years. They run through my mind now—the shooting, the deaths of my father and mother, my breast cancer, Ronnie’s colon and prostate cancer, the Challenger explosion, the marine-barracks bombing in Lebanon and, of course, Iran-contra. Or the other side of the coin, of course, we had the last Russian summit and the signing of the INF Treaty.

  No matter how much power you have as president, there is so much you can’t control. Ronnie’s last years in office really taught him that. People who were supposedly under his command were off doing things he knew nothing about, and no one ever saw fit to tell him. He was badly served by the people who were supposed to aid and advise him.

  In 1987, when the pope came to California.

  Despite all the challenges, we were sad to leave the White House when Ronnie’s second term came to an end in 1989. We’d both been happy there. We’d become very attached to the White House, the ushers, and the staff—everyone. They didn’t care about what party you were with; they just loved the White House, and they’d been thrilled by all the work we’d done to fix things up and give the place back its former grandeur. I’ll never forget how, right after the renovations were done, one of the butlers who had been there a long, long time looked down the hall and said, “This is how the White House should look.” That was one of my proudest moments as first lady. It was my Oscar.

  I also had such wonderful memories of our state dinners, which we tried to hold every month or two. Whenever possible, I’d have them outside, directly under the night sky. That was really magical. I’d put little white lights in the trees around the Rose Garden, and if we were lucky, there was moonlight, and starlight, then the lights of the White House and of the Jefferson Memorial. It was beautiful, just beautiful. And on great occasions, like the state dinner for the Gorbachevs that followed the Washington summit meeting of December 1987, it was very, very moving, too.

  —

  Our last few weeks in Washington were filled with good-byes, many of them very difficult. We hated to leave our new friends. They’d done so much to welcome us eight years earlier—and they gave us such a gracious send-off, too. I’ll never forget, for example, the last time we went to the Kennedy Center. After the show, Walter Cronkite came out onstage and said, “For eight years, two people have sat up there in that box alongside our honorees. The years have gone swiftly by, but, President and Mrs. Reagan, we’d like to detain you long enough to say thank you.”

  Then everybody came out onstage—all the stagehands and all the people connected to the Kennedy Center. All the ushers came down the aisles, and they and everyone in the audience turned around, faced us, and started to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” That’s a song that does me in under any circumstance. And, of course, I started to cry.

  Valentine's Day card.

  Ronnie waited until everyone had finished singing. Then he shouted down to Cronkite, “It beats getting an Oscar!”

  In the hammock at the ranch, 1980s.

  On our last morning in the White House, Ronnie had gone over to the Oval Office to have a last look. I have a picture that we took then—all of his papers were gone and the office looked so bare. Then, all too quickly, it was ten o’clock and the Bushes were there. It was time for us to leave. As we were leaving the White House for the last time and walking to the plane, Ronnie turned to me with his wonderful grin and said, “Well, it’s been a wonderful eight years. All in all, not bad—not bad at all.”

  As our helicopter took off, the pilots circled over the White House so we could see it once more. “Look, honey,” Ronnie said. “There’s our little bungalow.”

  —

  Air Force One took us back to California. When we landed in Los Angeles, there was a band at the airport and our old friends were there to meet us. Fortunately, our new home in Bel Air was all ready.

  Ronnie had only visited the new house once before. I’d been in charge of house hunting and had been told about this one by a friend and had made a trip to California to visit it. I’d liked it, but obviously, I wasn’t going to buy a house without Ronnie’s seeing it. Getting a president to make a discreet house visit, though, isn’t an easy thing. I had to find a way for him to see it without the press catching on and making a big fuss. I didn’t think that was the best way to make friends with the neighbors, either.

  So one time when we’d gone to California, I’d decided to smuggle him in. We left our hotel and I persuaded him to get down on the floor of the car, out of sight. “You have to stay there,” I said. We got up to the house, and I took him through it so fast that I’m sure he didn’t really get a good look. He said, “I like it,” and then we got back into the car and we left, with the president of the United States on the car floor!

  Now, when we walked in, there were boxes everywhere. I had a sinking feeling. It wasn’t a very big house (“I’ve already lived in a big house,” I’d told the realtors), but there still was so much to do. I got very sad when Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service man who’d been shot with Ronnie, had to leave. I started to cry, and said, “I don’t want you to go.”

  I’ve often heard people say that it’s a trauma to leave the White House and adjust to life after the presidency. For Ronnie and me it was an adjustment, certainly. But a trauma? No. Ronnie never had a problem changing from one phase of life to the other. I think that’s because no matter what he’s doing or where he is in the world, he is always the same. And as far as I was concerned, everything was always fine as long as he was there.

  We ended up loving our new home. Ronnie said that of all the houses we’d lived in, it was his favorite, which of course made me happy. We planned to split our time between Bel Air and our ranch, writing our memoirs, speaking out for the causes we believed in, riding horses, seeing friends and traveling. And at first that was the life that we had. We traveled some, toured the inland waterways of Alaska with friends, and just generally resumed our life together. We had fun. We had so many things to look back on together and enjoy.

  A Christmas card.

  On one anniversary, looking ahead to a happy day together in 2002, Ronnie wrote:

  To the One Woman in my Life

  Fifty years isn’t enough. Let’s carry on

  Your happy happy husband.

  Our life was to change soon, though, and to change irrevocably—and neither of us saw it coming.

  Christmas 1998, with Maureen and Dennis.

  In July 1989, Ronnie and I went down to Mexico to visit our friends Betty and Bill Wilson at their ranch. I remember that on one of our first days there, Ronnie looked up in the sky and saw a helicopter overhead. “What’s that?” he said.

  “It’s the Secret Service,” I answered. “They’re trying to figure out where they could land a plane if they had to.”

  Thank goodness they did.

  A few days later, Ronnie went out riding. I was working on my memoir, My Turn, and decided to stay behind. I was sitting in the house when all of a sudden the Secret Service men came running toward me. As if by instinct, I found myself running, too.

  Ronnie had been thrown off his horse. He was riding with some other men, going up an incline, when one of the ranch hands had hit something
that made a loud noise and spooked Ronnie’s horse.

  The horse reared once, and Ronnie stayed on. It reared a second time, and Ronnie stayed on again. Two Secret Service men tried to move in and calm the horse, but they couldn’t do it. The horse reared a third time, bucking so hard that Ronnie fell off and hit his head on the ground, miraculously missing the jagged rocks all around.

  We got him on a plane and immediately took him to a hospital in Tucson, Arizona. He should really have stayed there, but it was my birthday and the Wilsons had planned a celebration, and Ronnie was determined to go back to the ranch. We went back—but at my insistence, we took a doctor with us.

  The day after my birthday, we flew home. I was very uneasy and kept at Ronnie until he agreed to get his head X-rayed. We went to the Mayo Clinic, where we’d gone every year for our checkups. It turned out that Ronnie had a concussion and a subdural hematoma. He needed to be operated on right away. It all happened so quickly that I think, once again, I was in shock. It shows up in the picture that appeared in the press at the time: Ronnie leaving the hospital, taking his hat off to salute the crowd, and me dashing forward trying to cover his partially shaven head with my hand. He didn’t care that he had no hair on one side—but I did!

  I’ve always had the feeling that the severe blow to his head in 1989 hastened the onset of Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s. The doctors think so, too. In the years leading up to the diagnosis of the disease, in August 1994, he had not shown symptoms of the illness. I didn’t suspect that Ronnie was ill when we went back to the Mayo Clinic that summer for our regular checkup. When the doctors told us they’d found symptoms of Alzheimer’s, I was dumbfounded. Ronnie’s fall from the horse had worried me terribly, of course, and I’d had to urge him to take time out to recover after his operation. But I had seen no signs of anything else.

  I also didn’t realize at the time what an Alzheimer’s diagnosis really meant. It’s a disease that people are still not terribly knowledgeable about, and a few years ago, they were even less so. Families treated it like a dark secret, so people—the patients and their families—suffered in isolation. It’s only recently that people have started to speak out and to treat it as a disease like any other.