The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty

Author:Karen Tumulty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rehabilitating her image was not the only challenge that Nancy was grappling with as Ronnie’s presidency moved into its second year and beyond. Though most of the Reagan offspring were not around much, they continued to be a source of drama, stress, and awkwardness.

Where Ronnie’s recent predecessors had small children and adolescents living with them in the White House, the four Reagan kids were grown and trying to forge lives and identities of their own. Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron had little in common. Their temperaments and personal histories had taken them in different directions, and their connections to each other were tenuous. But each was struggling with a paradox that nearly all children of celebrated parents face: along with suffocating scrutiny comes a bounty of opportunities that they did nothing to earn. Expectations are thrust upon them that they will never be able to meet.

“There is a secret thought that the offspring of famous people keep tucked away,” Patti once wrote. “It becomes the focal point of our lives, although it takes years to see that. It’s what makes us run from who we are, rage against the huge shadow we feel dwarfed by, sabotage ourselves again and again. We vilify anyone who suggests we have a legacy to live up to, shoes to fill, a torch to carry. Because underneath it all, deep inside us, we think they’re right.”

For Nancy, the belated arrival of Loyal Davis in her life had salvaged her childhood. Claiming his name as hers gave her stability, a sense of belonging, an identity that finally seemed complete and whole. For Ronnie’s children, having a towering figure at the center of their existence had the opposite effect. It increased the gravitational pull of their own self-doubts and fueled their inner suspicions that they were no more than faint copies of an epic original.

In this particular family, there was also the off-balance dynamic of a husband and his second wife so closely bound together that his progeny—only two of whom were also hers—felt shut out. It was hard to miss the disconnect between Ronnie’s idealized view of American life and the impossibility for any flesh-and-blood family to live as though they were in a Norman Rockwell painting. “During Ronnie’s presidency, our family and its problems were written about constantly,” Nancy recalled. “Ronnie had run for office on a platform of traditional family values, which both of us believe in and try to practice. But I always felt hurt when people said we were hypocrites because our own family sometimes fell short of those values.”

Even Ron, his parents’ favorite, tested them. Ronnie and Nancy had been publicly supportive of Ron’s unconventional choice of a dance career in 1976. Their misgivings were evident, however. Ron had been dancing for more than four years before his parents attended one of his performances, at a benefit gala for the Joffrey Ballet in March 1981 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. The Reagans watched through binoculars from a center parterre box hung with a presidential seal.

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