Transcript: A Conversation with Karen Tumulty, Author of “The Triumph of Nancy Reagan”

MS. TUMULTY: Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here, although it feels a little odd being on this side of the interview.

MR. DUFFY: That's okay. This will be a tough interrogation, and I know you're up for it.

So, I think there are more books about Ronald Reagan's presidency than any other president in the 20th century, and yet not very many about the political partnership between the president and his wife, Nancy.

So, after a five-year investigation that you made, tell us what you think was the least understood thing about the two of them as we experienced the Reagan presidency at the time and what we now know 20--or actually 40 years later.

MS. TUMULTY: I think it was how crucial she was, both to his political rise and to the success of his presidency and really the impact that she had not just as his closest advisor, not just as, in Ronald Reagan's case, the only person in the world to whom he was truly close, but really, she had an impact on a lot of policies that really made her a complex and historic figure.

MR. DUFFY: One of the things that you come at the reader in a lot of different ways from a lot of different points in their life and their long marriage is that he was a difficult man even at times for her to get close to. Did you sense that from your research?

MS. TUMULTY: I did. He was--Ronald Reagan himself once wrote, "I've never had trouble making friends, but there's always been a part of me that I've held back." I think there's a lot of reasons for that going back to his own difficult childhood, as the son of an alcoholic who took their family from one very uncertain situation into another, but there were very few people in his life that got past that barrier, and interestingly enough, they were all strong women, starting with his mother.

MR. DUFFY: You know, the minute you dive into this book, the reader finds him- or herself back in 1930s Washington and 1940s Chicago. Anne Frances Robbins--that was her name at birth--had a tough childhood. Until, then, she didn't have a tough childhood. It was both difficult and then almost gilded. Talk a little bit about that transition in her life early on.

MS. TUMULTY: Sure. So, she was born to an ambitious actress and an unsuccessful car salesman whose marriage was effectively over by the time this very inconveniently-timed baby arrived, and her mother, as soon as this baby was out of diapers, essentially abandoned her, not on the street. She left her with relatives, but for the next six years of Anne Frances Robbins' life, she just yearned for this absent mother. And as their son Ron told me, it really left a shadow on her spirit that left her anxious and weary and always convinced that there was a trap door around the next corner, and, you know, that was actually confirmed for her, in some ways, two months into her husband's presidency when she almost loses him to an assassin's bullet.

He comes much closer to death than the country knew, than the White House wanted the country to know at the time, but it seems to confirm all of her fears of abandonment and again that just life is just one--you know, one trap door after another.

MR. DUFFY: There's a wonderful scene in the book that you recount where Nancy, now around 15 or 16, arranges to have herself adopted by her stepfather. It was more her idea than his. Well, that's not quite right. Explain the story.

MS. TUMULTY: Sure. So, what happens is Edith Luckett Davis, after leaving Nancy with relatives for six years, she meets, on a ship to Europe, a doctor, Loyal Davis. He is a neurosurgeon. Mind you, neurosurgery in the 1920s, I mean, he was a real medical pioneer. But the two of them get married. Nancy joins them in Chicago, and again, you're right. Her childhood at least on the outside looks gilded. The Great Depression is going on. They're successful and really sort of insulated from that.

But even as she meets and adores the man who would become the second most important man in her life, Loyal Davis was a sort of stern, obdurate, forbidding figure, and she is for the next--it's interesting. I had trouble pinning down the precise date of the adoption, but for the next six to eight years, she is an outsider in her own house because he doesn't adopt her, because he doesn't give her his name. She really is just trying to find this identity as she begins in the book. She always wanted to belong to someone and have someone to belong to me.

And so, at the age of 14 or thereabouts, she seeks out a neighbor who is a lawyer, and she says, "How do you go about getting adopted?" And she arranges to meet her biological father in New York, presents him with papers, relinquishing his rights to her, and then goes back and sends Loyal Davis a telegram that just says, "Hi, Dad." And he later writes that he adored this child. He wanted to adopt her, but it was his sense of proprietary that as long as she had a biological father who was alive, a biological grandmother, that he wasn't going to make the move. It was a really sort of difficult situation, but I think it speaks to the kind of determination we would see in her in so many other situations for the rest of her life.

MR. DUFFY: This wasn't just any household either. One of the things you write in the book--and I just want to read it for a minute--it says, "Boldfaced names were a regular sight in the Davis apartments. It was not uncommon to come home and find Mary Martin in the living room, Spencer Tracy reading the newspaper, or Lillian Gish curled up on the sofa." This was Edith's--many of these were Edith's friends from her days on the stage, and I think it created in Nancy an interest and some connections in the world of drama and the theater.

MS. TUMULTY: It's really interesting too because, yes, Edith Luckett Davis was modestly successful as an actress, where she was unparalleled was as a networker, and yes, she maintained all of these friends from the theater.

One secret, Spencer Tracy then perhaps, you know, the most beloved, bankable star in America has a secret, which is that he's a violent alcoholic, and when he needs to go somewhere to dry out, it is often Loyal Davis, Nancy's father, that he turns to, who finds him a private floor on a Chicago hospital where he's far away from the prying gossip columnists. This would become very important when it comes time to arrange Nancy's screen test at MGM.

But it was interesting because even as her interest in acting is awakening, she's being discouraged from doing it by--Katharine Hepburn sends her a letter saying, "You know, most people don't make it in this business," or Walter Huston, the Academy Award-winning actor from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," they're vacationing, and they put on a little play. And Walter Huston says to Nancy's mother, "She's got a little talent, but I would really discourage this."

MR. DUFFY: And yet Nancy is undeterred, goes out West to Hollywood, and gets that screen test with Tracy's help and begins to make her way as an actress.

You could read a lot of cursory Reagan and Nancy and Ron--Ronald Reagan, but obviously, they never--I think they just moved out West and made it. She had tremendous help, and then she begins, almost from the moment she arrives, to try to catch the eye of the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan.

MS. TUMULTY: That's right. That's right.

And mind you, she is an attractive woman, but, I mean, she's out there on the MGM lot at the same time people like Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner are there. So, she's not exactly setting box offices on fire, but she does notice that the newly single president of the Screen Actors Guild is somebody she would like to meet.

And interestingly enough, this is not a moment where anyone could have predicted what lay ahead for Ronald Reagan. He is at a low point in his life. His first marriage to Jane Wyman, she's walked out on him. She essentially got bored with him. His career is really scraping bottom, coming to an end. When he shows up for their supposedly blind date on her doorstep outside her apartment, he is literally a broken man. He is standing there on two canes because, in a charity baseball game, he has broken his thigh bone in six places.

And his heart, he would later write, was in a deep freeze. He would later say, "If Nancy Davis hadn't come along when she did, I would have lost my soul."

MR. DUFFY: Now, we have a picture of her in one of her films, "The Next Voice You Hear," in which she costars with James Whitmore, but who is looking very young there. Now, this was at the moment, about the moment she's meeting--her romance with Reagan is heating up, but there are lots of men in the picture. And Reagan is not as easy a catch as some of his--well, it's never as easy as it looks, but this was a romance that took a while to take hold.

MS. TUMULTY: That's right. And at one point, Reagan's mother, Nelle Reagan, meets Nancy, liked her much better than she ever liked Jane Wyman, and says to her, "I can see you're in love with him, but he's not in love with you. You are just going to have to wait. You will know when he loves you."

But that photo that you have there is interesting because in this movie, "The Next Voice You Hear," Nancy Davis is shown as a visibly pregnant woman. That was actually considered quite risqué at the time, and every single outfit, every single camera angle in that movie of her had to go through the motion picture sensors just to make sure that people wouldn't get too scandalized by seeing a pregnant woman on the screen.

MR. DUFFY: Or a woman playing a pregnant woman. She was not pregnant at the time.

MS. TUMULTY: Right. Exactly.

Ronald Reagan sees her in that movie. They go to the big Los Angeles opening. He's her date, and he turns to her and he says, "You know, I think you should unpack your bags. You're going to be in Hollywood for a while," but he says, "You know, I'd lose that wardrobe. I'd take it to the laundry and lose the ticket."

MR. DUFFY: That's a great quote, "lose the ticket."

Over the next five or six years, obviously, they get married. It's an interesting wedding. They don't invite a whole lot of family. They begin to have kids. By the end of the '50s, early part of the '60s, neither of them is making movies. Reagan has begun his circuit for General Electric, meeting people around the country, giving speeches, and as he begins to seriously consider running for office for the first time--I'm moving ahead to the 1960s, this for governor of California--his political consultants, led by Stu Spencer, realize that they have in the candidate's wife, something of a sleeper. Talk to us a little bit about her political instincts as they begin that part of their life.

MS. TUMULTY: Well, this is certainly a path that she could never have envisioned their lives would take them, but as she would say, you know, "If Ronnie had a shoe store, I'd be out there selling shoes." But she really doesn't understand politics very well. All she knows is that she needs to keep an eye on everyone around him.

At first, Stu Spencer and some of the other political advisors--first of all, back in those days, a politician's spouse was almost always a woman, and the male handlers around him thought her job was to just look good and show up and say whatever she was told to say. But Nancy is constantly giving them advice. The advice is not always welcome. She has a very difficult eight years in Sacramento as she's kind of learning the new world in which they find themselves.

But you really do begin to see her get a lot shrewder, a lot more sophisticated about how to use her power, how to make her will known, how to do it, quite frankly, without leaving fingerprints.

MR. DUFFY: You write in the years in Sacramento, she begins to take on an almost semi-official role as a kind of staff enforcer. As a lot of political spouses we have seen, they tend to be a little shrewder and more skeptical about the people around their partner than sometimes the principal, him- or herself.

MS. TUMULTY: And, in fact, it was not welcome. She makes a great ally during those years, Michael Deaver, who would later be deputy chief of what--staff in the White House, but when they assign Michael Deaver to deal with her, just to keep her out of the hair of Ed Meese, the chief of staff, this is dubbed--his portfolio is dubbed "The Mommy Watch."

MR. DUFFY: Right. And this is a role she would continue to play as they reached the White House, and we should talk about that now.

A lot of folks covering that White House at the time and covering the East Wing, as it's sometimes called, we were obsessed and often distracted by all of the controversies surrounding her clothes, her Hollywood friends, the dishes, but she was building a power center inside the White House that was second to none. And that seemed to come out most clearly, first of all, in the administration's efforts to end or at least turn a corner on the Cold War.

MS. TUMULTY: That's correct. And I opened the book, in fact, with a scene where George Shultz, relatively new as the Secretary of State, is invited over to a private dinner, two couples, in the middle of a blizzard, where he begins to understand, Ronald Reagan is really serious. Ronald Reagan for all of his anti-communist rhetoric, for all of his hardline, you know, hawkish advisors with which he surrounded himself, despite the fact that he's presiding over the biggest military, peacetime military build-up in U.S. history, that he really believes he--in his own abilities as a negotiator and that it is in fact possible to reach some sort of working relationship with Moscow.

And in that moment, George Shultz also realizes. He tells me that that invitation to dinner was not social, that Nancy really wanted him to see that, and he also begins to realize he has found a very, very valuable ally in a first lady who understands her husband as no one else in the world does. As Shultz told me, "I always thought anybody with any brains would make friends with the first lady."

The same is true with James Baker, who is the White House chief of staff, who in fact gets the job of White House chief of staff at a time when barely knows the Reagans and is in that job, in large part, because Nancy Reagan wanted him there, and he too finds that she's a very important ally. And he told me, "You know, she had incredible political instincts, better than his, in my view."

MR. DUFFY: Yeah. She emerges in all eight years of the Reagan presidency in this book as a moderating influence and a number of different touches and choke points, and just to return one minute to relations with the then Soviet Union, Shultz and Nancy formed a kind of partnership that involves another dinner in which Shultz arranges to have the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, meet her almost in private in the White House so that she can pass a kind of message.

MS. TUMULTY: It's a little reception, and at that point, Gromyko, he's this famously difficult--the foreign minister is difficult to deal with. He's known as "Grim Grom" and "Mr. Nyet."

So, Shultz arranges for Nancy to be there not at the working lunch itself but at a reception beforehand, and of course, he is--Gromyko is drawn to her. She's a world-class flirt, and at one point, he takes a glass of cranberry juice off a tray, lifts it to her, and says, "Why is it so hard to get your husband to the negotiating table?" He said, "I think you should whisper 'peace' in his ear every night," and she puts her hands on his shoulders, pulls him down, and she says, "And I will whisper it in your ear too. Peace."

And Gromyko is so taken aback. He would tell that story many, many times over the years, but Shultz told me afterwards, he went up to Nancy Reagan and said, "Congratulations, Nancy. You just won the Cold War."

MR. DUFFY: Right. And she also was not so keen about some of the hardline rhetoric that both the president and some of his more conservative allies were employing at that time, and she makes that clear as well.

MS. TUMULTY: She hates the phrase that he uses in a speech in 1982 where he describes the Soviet Union--I mean 1983 where he describes the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." She absolutely hates that phrase. Even Reagan writes about it. He said, "Nancy wants me to tone down my rhetoric, but I think it works."

So, Stu Spencer is invited to a dinner right around that time too, and he says over dinner, "The Reagans are still going at it over his use of the phrase 'evil empire.'" And so, Reagan turns to Stu Spencer and says, "Stu, what do you think?" and he says, "Well, you know, you're right. They are an evil empire, but I don't know if I would have put it that way." And at that point, Reagan cuts him off because he doesn't want Nancy to have any more ammunition in this argument.

And that's something too. I mean, this is a real married couple. I mean, they have their arguments. They have their arguments in front of other people, but she truly believes in his greatness. She also very much recognizes his vulnerabilities and his flaws, and she believes that she is there, number one, to take care of his physical well-being as his wife but also to keep an eye out and to keep an eye on his back.

MR. DUFFY: I think one of the things--we can't get into all the stuff that's in this book, but one of the--my favorite chapters are the ones on the raising of the children, Patty and Ron Jr., Ron who you talked to. The book really benefits from the reporting you have from the--directly from the family, both her son and her stepbrother, Dick, all through it. And you are able to draw really intimate pictures of what they agreed on and disagreed about often in the raising of the children, which we know is never easy.

And Ron's perspective on his experiences of living in that house were quite frank and unsparing.

MS. TUMULTY: Yeah. It's certainly--really, the collateral damage to this epic love story of Ronald and Nancy Reagan is the effect it has on the children, because these two people are so closely bound together that there's really no room for anyone else, including four children, the two that he had with Jane Wyman and the two they had themselves.

And you even hear that in Patty's incredible eulogy at her mother's funeral, where she said the two of them were just a closed circle, and everyone else just sort of floated around outside of that.

So, each of the four children suffers from that in a different way, and as Nancy Reagan herself would acknowledge, she writes at one point, "All I ever wanted was to be a good wife and a good mother, and I guess I succeeded more at one than at the other."

MR. DUFFY: Talk to us a little bit, briefly, if you can, about her role in helping the Reagan White House stop ignoring the problem of AIDS late in the second term.

MS. TUMULTY: Well, first of all, we should stipulate that the Reagan administration's failure to act in the AIDS epidemic will go down in history--it has gone down in history as one of the deepest and most enduring scars on its legacy.

But Nancy Reagan does begin earlier than her husband to understand what is going on, in part, because her son Ron, who is dancing with the Joffrey Ballet, is part of the arts world in New York City, and so the two of them start trying to talk to Ronald Reagan and sort of impressing on him what a huge crisis there is building out there.

But it really is the view of a lot of the conservatives in the Reagan administration that AIDS is not a health issue, that it is a moral issue, and that homosexuality is evil and that, you know, Pat Buchanan, who would at one point become the communications director in the White House, writes, "Homosexuals have exacted a sin on nature, and now nature is getting its revenge."

At one point, William F. Buckley proposes that people who are infected with AIDS should be tattooed on their arms if they are drug users and on their buttocks if they are gay. I mean, this is the kind of attitude that people had and that they would publicly say.

And what I found in my research, which involved digging deep, deep, deep into some of the White House files and talking to people is that it was even worse on the inside.

MR. DUFFY: I'm not surprised. Talk to us a little bit. When did Nancy realize for the first time that you can tell that her husband might have Alzheimer's?

MS. TUMULTY: She would always blame it on a fall from a horse a few months after he was out of office, but by 1992, he is beginning to slip in ways. 1993, I have a number of accounts from people who might have known Reagan for decades who talk about running into him and it's clear he has no idea who they are.

But generally, these episodes are brief. He recovers very quickly, but by early 1994, his physician, John Hutton, who was a White House physician, notices just a split-second moment during a speech where Reagan sort of loses his place. Afterwards--it's a speech in Washington--he goes back to the hotel with the Reagans, and Ronald Reagan walks into the hotel room ahead of everyone else. And he goes, "Wait, wait. I've got to stop for a moment. I'm not sure where I am," and at that point, Nancy Reagan puts her hand on Hutton's arm and says, "This is happening even at home." And by late 1994, he will write that very famous handwritten letter where he tells the country that he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

MR. DUFFY: After Reagan dies--we have just a minute left. After Reagan dies, she spends her final years actually more actively involved in politics than you might have guessed or at least contributing at the margins. A brief memory from that era, Karen?

MS. TUMULTY: Well, I think what's interesting about that era is that once her husband is incapacitated, it falls on Nancy Reagan to protect and guard and shape his legacy because he himself is not going to be able to do it, and that does require her to do some pretty bold things politically but also to build the library and make sure that her husband is remembered in a way that is true to him. And I really do believe that is her final gift to him.

MR. DUFFY: Well, you and I could talk about this all day and all night and into the next morning. So, we'll just have to do that ourselves.

MS. TUMULTY: Yes.

MR. DUFFY: But our time is up, so thank--we probably will. And thank you for joining us. It's nice to have you on the other side of the microphone.

Tomorrow at Washington Post Live, my colleague, Jonathan Capehart, will host our reporters and columnists for First Look at 9:00 a.m., and at noon, Jackie Alemany will interview Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Thank you for joining us this afternoon. Thank you, Karen, and have a good day.

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