Nancy Reagan's Solo Role

Fifteen years after Ronald Reagan’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, and five years after his death, Nancy Reagan has triumphed over loneliness, grief, and a bad fall last year. At the former First Lady’s house, in Bel Air, California, BOB COLACELLO gets her to sit down for a rare in-depth interview, covering the part she played in her husband’s White House, her dealings with the Bushes and Obamas, and her fight for stem-cell research

'I voted for McCain,” says Nancy Reagan. “But I thought Obama ran the best campaign I have ever known— disciplined, well organized, very, very good. I was very impressed.” So imagine her surprise as she watched Obama’s first press conference after his election and heard him say, in response to a question about which former presidents he would ask for advice, “I’ve spoken to all of them, those that are living.... I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any seances.” “My God,” says the former First Lady, “the phones started ringing—and the amount of e-mails!”

“As soon as I heard the words come out of his mouth,” says her son, Ron Reagan, who, along with his sister, Patti, publicly endorsed Obama, “I thought, There’s at least going to be a note written. Sure enough, that afternoon he called my mother.” When I suggest to Nancy Reagan that it was gracious of Obama to call, there is a slight edge to her reply: “It certainly was.” She doesn’t go into details about his apology, although she does say that she told him “he’d gotten me mixed up with Hillary.”

But that was last November, and since then there has been a 45-minute phone call from Michelle Obama and an invitation to dine with them in California in March, which unfortunately she had to decline. “She called me for advice, suggestions. I was very happy to talk to her. We had a nice conversation. I have a feeling that they’re going to be entertaining more than...” She stops herself, then continues: “That’s one of the things we talked about.” As a longtime practitioner of using the social to further the political, Mrs. Reagan says, “It’ll be great.” She encouraged Mrs. Obama to have lots of state dinners, advice that the previous First Couple had apparently chosen not to take. (The Reagans hosted 56 state dinners in eight years; George and Laura Bush had 6.) “It’s the easiest thing in the world,” she says about entertaining at the White House, with its large and efficient staff. “You don’t have to do anything. Just have a good time and do a little business. And that’s the way Washington works.”

Twenty years have passed since Ronald and Nancy Reagan left Washington, 15 years since the former president announced to the nation that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and 5 years since he succumbed to that horrible disease, on June 5, 2004. His widow will turn 88 on July 6, but, as her son says, “she’s a survivor, and she’s going to keep trucking along.” Last October she had a fall that left her with a fractured pelvis and sacrum, but when we had lunch at her house in Los Angeles two months later, she was eager to shuck her walker for a cane, and by late January, when I returned for a second lunch, she had done just that. She still has that great big sexy laugh, and she laughed a lot during our talks, though at times it seemed slightly forced, as if she were masking a deep-down sadness. “I miss Ronnie a lot, an awful lot,” she told me more than once. “People say it gets better. No, it does not.” Does she ever feel like giving up? “No. Ronnie wouldn’t like that.” Indeed, after nearly four months of twice-a-week physical therapy—her doctor nicknamed her Superstar—she was standing taller and walking surer than she had in years, and seemed to have developed a hearty appetite. When Bernadette, her cook and housekeeper, appeared with a cheese souffle, Nancy exclaimed, “Oh, look at that! Isn’t it beautiful!” She even asked for seconds.

We were sitting in the sunroom, an alcove off the formal dining room; both rooms are lined with pale-green Chinese wallpaper. Through sliding glass doors we could see the garden, with its blooming white camellia and hydrangea bushes, and beyond that the towers of Century City, where Ronald Reagan had a post-presidential office until his illness kept him confined at home. The 6,500-square-foot, three-bedroom ranchstyle house is set on an acre and a quarter in Bel Air, although all one sees from the road is the Secret Service post just inside the gate. “This property is deceiving, because from outside it looks so tiny, which is fine with me,” said Nancy. The interior too is deceptively modest, with two servants’ rooms tucked away above the kitchen and a wine cellar, an exercise room, a laundry, and extra closet space in the basement. While it was widely reported that nearly 20 friends of the Reagans’, including Kitchen Cabinet stalwarts Holmes Tuttle and Earle Jorgensen, had bought the house for them for $2.5 million in 1987, it is less well known that the Reagans repaid them with interest after leaving the White House and signing multimillion-dollar contracts for their memoirs.

Nancy Reagan encouraged Mrs. Obama TO HAVE LOTS OF STATE DINNERS. (The Reagans hosted 56 state dinners in eight years; GEORGE AND LAURA BUSH HAD 6.)

Nancy decorated the house with the help of Peter Schifando, a protege of her White House decorator, the late Ted Graber. The furnishings are a mix of American, English, and Chinese antiques; a Chippendale mirror hangs over the mantelpiece in the pale-yellow living room; the twin sofas upholstered in a coral print, she pointed out, had been to the White House and back. She is particularly proud of her collection of elephants, the Republican Party symbol, in everything from alabaster to crystal, as well as of her two Grandma Moses landscapes. But the first thing one sees coming through the front door is Norman Rockwell’s pen-and-ink study of Ronald Reagan striking four different expressions. The former president’s favorite Frederic Remington bronzes of cowboys on horseback are lined up along the hall that leads to the bedrooms. Throughout the house are potted yellow orchids, which Nancy grows with the help of her friend David Jones, Los Angeles’s leading florist, in a hothouse hidden below the pool.

While her husband was living and not well, only the Reagan children—Maureen and Michael, from his first marriage, to the Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman, and Patti and Ron—and a handful of friends were allowed to come to the house. The one time I visited, the perfectly appointed rooms felt empty and unused, and Nancy was a nervous wreck, worried that the napping Ronnie might wake up and be seen in his diminished state. Entertaining at home was out of the question; lunch dates were always at the nearby Hotel Bel-Air. Now she’s happy to have friends around. “I always have Christmas here at home,” she told me before reeling off last year’s guest list: Peter Schifando and his business partner, Jonathan Joseph; David Jones; her old friend Marge Everett, the former owner of the Hollywood Park racetrack; Patti; and Dennis Revell, the widower of Maureen Reagan (who died of melanoma in 2001).

Since her husband’s death, Nancy Reagan almost never gives interviews. But she agreed to let me publish parts of the most recent of the ongoing conversations we’ve been having since I wrote about the Reagans in this magazine in 1998. That article led to the first book of a two-part biography of her and her husband, which was published in 2004. Instinctively private, despite having started out as an actress, she has also always been reluctant to upstage her husband, particularly when he could not speak for himself. When I asked her if she sometimes found it difficult to watch what went on in the White House after she left and not say a word publicly, she answered, “No, it’s easy for me not to say a word. I may say it to myself.” And while there were subjects she refused to go into—Sarah Palin, abortion, gay marriage— she seemed almost eager to take the opportunity to go on the record about things that matter to her. One is the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, which embodies his legacy. Another is stem-cell research, which has become her cause.

The Presidential Library

'A friend of mine said to me a year ago, ‘You’re so lucky, Nancy, because Ronnie left you the library,’ ” she told me at our first lunch. “She said, ‘You have that to work on, and to go to, and, in a sense, to be with him.’ I had never thought of it like that, but it’s true. I go to the library or work for the library all the time, because it’s Ronnie. I’m working for Ronnie.” Located in Simi Valley, 45 minutes north of Los Angeles, the Reagan library opened in 1991, with the first President Bush and former presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter in attendance. Ronald Reagan is buried on the grounds, in the shadow of a piece of the Berlin Wall, and Nancy will be buried beside him. She has worked tirelessly to leave the library with a secure endowment—the current goal is to raise $100 million by Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, in February 2011—and to make it a political, intellectual, and cultural destination. The first and last presidential debates of the 2008 Republican primary season were held at the library, and Rudolph Giuliani announced his withdrawal from the race there just before the latter debate. The former First Lady has cultivated major donors, including Rupert Murdoch and Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, and personally enlisted big-name speakers, including Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, Ted Kennedy, and Condoleezza Rice. As Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts noted in his 2006 speech at the library, “My policy with respect to speaking engagements has been to just say no.... This was working out beautifully until I found myself seated next to Mrs. Reagan at a dinner... in Washington [and] the possibility of coming out and speaking at the library came up. I explained my very strict policy, but by the time we were finishing the entree, we were nailing down the specific date.”

"I think her embrace of STEM-CELL RESEARCH earned her a lot of credibility, ” SAYS RON REAGAN.

In 2005 she was joined by George and Laura Bush for the opening of one of the library’s most popular attractions, the Air Force One Pavilion, which houses the “flying White House” used by Reagan and six other presidents from 1973 to 2001. “I look at that little plane now and think, How in the world did we ever go to all those places in this?" she told me. “At the time, of course, I thought it was huge. And it should have been larger than it was. They had told everybody that the plane should be replaced—it was too old. But nobody would replace it, except—ta-da!—our hero.” With a laugh, she pointed to herself.

Two years later, in November 2007, the library saluted her with the exhibition “Nancy Reagan: A First Lady’s Style,” which featured some 80 outfits of hers, starting with the gray suit she wore to her 1952 wedding to Reagan and ending with the black suit she wore to his lying-in-state in the rotunda of the Capitol. The latter was designed by the California couturier James Galanos, who said in his speech at the dinner following the gala opening that he had been dressing Mrs. Reagan since 1949, when she was a young starlet, and that she hadn’t “changed one bit.” Among the designers included in the show were Adolfo, Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and Valentino. Diane von Furstenberg, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Kenneth Jay Lane, Nancy’s favorite costume jeweler, flew from New York for the occasion.

Last December, two months after Mrs. Reagan’s fall and while she was still in a wheelchair, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who had written a memoir about covering the White House, gave a speech at the library. As the library’s director, R. Duke Blackwood, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome former First Lady Mrs. Ronald Reagan,” Mitchell’s husband, Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the Federal Reserve, wheeled Nancy into the lecture hall. Mitchell, in her talk, compared Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama as “men of ideas” and talented communicators who project “hope, optimism, and confidence.” She also credited Mrs. Reagan with helping to bring about the first summit, in 1985, between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “It was Nancy Reagan, as much as any other person, who made that meeting in Geneva happen.” As always, Nancy hosted a dinner for 30 in the private quarters on the second floor of the library. What struck me that evening was how few of the Reagans’ inner circle were there. Aside from Betsy Bloomingdale; Carol Price, the wife of Reagan’s ambassador to Britain; and retired Northrop Corporation chief Tom Jones and his wife, Ruth, there was no one left.

White House Memories

The court jester of the Kitchen Cabinet, Charles Wick, who had been head of the United States Information Agency in the Reagan administration, had died that July, at the age of 90. His wife, Mary Jane, whose friendship with Nancy went back to the late 1950s, when their children attended the same private school in Bel Air, and who was the major fund-raiser for the library from its inception, was ailing when I interviewed the former First Lady. Earle Jorgensen’s widow, Marion, who had been giving Nancy birthday parties since the 1960s, had gone that June, at 96. Merv Griffin, talk-show host and creator of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, who had always escorted Nancy to library events, had died on August 12, 2007, at the age of 82. “Merv was a real upper,” Nancy said over lunch. “I don’t think he thought he was going to die—ever.” She recalled going with him and his then girlfriend, Eva Gabor, to Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Larry Fortensky, at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch. “We couldn’t hear anything because of the helicopters overhead.”

Within six days of Griffin’s death, Nancy suffered another major blow with the passing of Michael Deaver, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 69. Deaver went all the way back to Reagan’s first term as governor of California, and ever since then had always been Nancy’s closest confidant among Reagan’s aides. In his memoir, Behind the Scenes, he wrote, “I always imagined that when I died there would be a phone in my coffin, and at the other end of it would be Nancy Reagan.” A meticulous image-maker, he planned every detail of his own memorial service, which had to be moved from St. John’s Church to the National Cathedral because of his immense popularity within Clean and Sober Streets, an organization that Deaver, a recovering alcoholic, had helped start to assist addicts in Washington’s poorer black neighborhoods. James Baker III, chief of staff during Reagan’s first presidential term and a close ally of Deaver’s, said in his eulogy, “Some reporters say Mike was a ‘media maestro’ ... who ‘choreographed’ and ‘orchestrated’ the presidency and ‘manipulated’ the media with ‘photo ops.’... I call it art, the art of presidential messaging. The art of engaging the American people.”

At the lunch following the service, Nancy asked James and Susan Baker to sit at her table. When it was time to leave, he took both of her hands in his, looked her right in the eye, and asked in his patrician southern drawl, “Nancy, do you remember what I told you the last time I saw you?”

“I think so, Jim,” she answered.

“I told you that I loved you,” he said, still clasping her hands.

In a tiny voice she replied, “I love you too, Jim.”

When I asked Nancy / Reagan which White House staffers or Cabinet members she felt had done ▼ ▼ the best job for her husband, Deaver, Baker, and Secretary of State George Shultz were the three that she named. Of her relationship with Shultz, she said jokingly, “As long as I sat the visiting glamour girl next to him at state dinners, we were O.K.” Of Baker she said, “I was always fond of him and admired him, and that friendship has stayed.”

Was it a mistake, I asked, to let Baker and Donald Regan, the secretary of the Treasury, switch jobs at the end of the first term? “As I look back on it, yes,” she answered. “Jim and I were talking about it the other day. He said, ‘Well, you know, Nancy, at the time it seemed a logical thing to do.’ There didn’t seem to be any downside to it. At the time, I hated to see Jim go, but little did I realize how much I hated to see him go.”

By now it’s no secret that Nancy Reagan played the crucial role in the firing of Don Regan, two years after he took the job of chief of staff. Regan, who had been the longtime C.E.O. of Merrill Lynch, got off on the wrong foot with her almost from the moment he came to the White House. “Don Regan said that they should send all of Ronnie’s mail to him. He tried to monitor Ronnie’s phone calls. He tried to fire Kathy Osborne, who had been with Ronnie as his secretary since Ronnie was governor. He was really a terrible man,” she told me.

Matters went from bad to worse when the Iran-contra scandal broke, in November 1986. Much to Nancy’s horror, there was talk of impeachment, and on top of that, in January 1987, the president was operated on for an enlarged prostate. “It was an awful time,” she recalled. “One day [Vice President] Bush came to me and said, ‘You’ve really got to do something about Donald Regan.’ I said, ‘I’ve got to do something? What about you?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. It’s not in my job description.’ I said, ‘Well, it certainly isn’t in mine. C’mon!’ But as it happened, it landed on my watch.”

She told me that she took it upon herself to enlist former Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Strauss, a formidable Washington power broker, to help convince her husband that Regan had to go. “I wanted Ronnie to hear what he had to say. I had heard that he would be honest with Ronnie, and I knew the position that he took about Regan.” At a White House meeting, also attended by Mike Deaver and William Rogers, secretary of state under Nixon and Regan’s lawyer, she recalled, “Bob said, ‘Now, Mr. President, I know you don’t like to do this, but you’ve got to get rid of Don Regan. You have to. And the sooner the better.’ Ronnie hated the thought of firing anybody. Hated it. And he didn’t know what was going on. So he listened to Bob. And after Bob left, I gave him enough time to get home, and I called him to thank him. Nobody else was saying it—except me. He said, ‘You know, you’re the first person to ever call me and thank me.’ I was so pleased and happy that there was somebody else besides me.”

Things came to a head soon after that, when Regan and Nancy got into an argument on the telephone over how the president should respond to the Iran-contra controversy. Regan wanted him to hold a press conference. Nancy countered that her husband was still recovering from his operation, and that when the time came he should give a televised speech from the Oval Office. “He was so difficult with me,” she said. “He gave me a hard time about everything. And then he hung up on me. When Ronnie found out about that, that did it.”

"Donald Regan was so difficult with me, ” SAID NANCY REAGAN. “AND THEN he hung up on me. When Ronnie found out ABOUT THAT, THAT DID IT.”

“How did the president react to your bringing in Bob Strauss?,” I asked her.

“Oh, he didn’t like it. But he eventually saw the light.”

“Would he get angry with you if he felt you were going around him or imposing your views too strongly?”

“He never really got angry with me— ever.”

“Annoyed?”

“Annoyed maybe.”

Don Regan wasn’t the first to find out that the First Lady was, in the words of Stuart Spencer, the California political consultant who was involved in all of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns, the “personnel director” of every Reagan operation. She engineered the selection of James Baker, who had been George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager during the 1980 primaries, as White House chief of staff over her husband’s longtime top aide, Edwin Meese III, who was given the consolation prize of White House counsel and was eventually made attorney general. Another longtime insider from California, William Clark, started out as national-security adviser and ended up as secretary of the interior, after clashing with Nancy’s favorite, George Shultz, over Russian and Latin-American policy. “We didn’t really get along,” she said of Clark. “I just don’t think that he put Ronnie first and foremost.” She was against Shultz’s predecessor as secretary of state, General A1 Haig, from the beginning, but he had the strong backing of both Kitchen Cabinet power Justin Dart, the drugstore tycoon, and President Nixon, whom he had served as chief of staff. “I never liked Haig,” she said, admitting that she had problems with him. “Well, everybody did with A1 Haig.”

How did she feel about Richard Nixon? “I never knew him well enough to say if I liked him or disliked him, really. He was, as we all know, a strange man. I felt sorry for him at the end. Ronnie thought he knew a lot about foreign affairs, and he did seek his advice.”

The Reagans and the Bushes

People always ask me about Nancy Reagan’s relations with the Bushes. It is widely believed that Nancy deliberately excluded George and Barbara Bush from the A-list dinners she gave upstairs in the White House for the likes of Prince Rainier of Monaco and Prince Charles. Nancy’s California pals, on the other hand, have told me that they felt Barbara Bush, a certified old-money East Coast Wasp, looked down her nose at the Reagans. When I asked Nancy if she thought George H. W. Bush had served her husband well as vice president, she said without hesitation, “Yes, I do.” When I brought up Barbara Bush, she paused and said, “Well, I never got to know her very well.” Why was that? “Our lives just took different tracks. I was busy doing my thing with Just Say No and Foster Grandparents, and she was doing her thing. You go separate ways. People don’t realize that, but you do.”

It is a little-known fact that Nancy Reagan and George W. Bush share a birthday, July 6. Her warm feelings for him were evident the first time he appeared at the Reagan library, during the 2000 primaries. He was there to deliver his first major foreign-policy speech, and George Shultz, who was said to have helped him prepare it, was seated in the front row, next to Nancy. Later that year she attended the convention, in Philadelphia, at which he was nominated, and the following year, in Newport News, Virginia, the new president and First Lady stood in the rain as Nancy christened the nuclear-powered supercarrier the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, splashing champagne on her coat and W’s suit. In 2002, when Bush presented Nancy with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, she stayed overnight at the White House. It was her first time back since January 1989. “It really seemed odd,” she told me. “I was in the Queen’s Room, and the bed was so high that I thought they were going to have to pick me up and throw me in. They had to get a little stepladder. I was there in time for dinner, and it was just the three of us.” She thought the Bushes were “more than gracious” for providing the Reagan family with Air Force One to carry her husband’s casket to Washington and back to California, and she was extremely touched by the eulogies delivered by both Bush father and son.

That’s why she was all the more embarrassed when Ron Reagan published a lengthy diatribe titled “The Case Against George W. Bush” in Esquire three months later, in which he said Bush was a “liar” whose administration was characterized by “distortion and misdirection.” She called Barbara Bush personally to apologize. In May 2005, when Nancy was in Washington for a bipartisan tribute to her, chaired by Senators Bill Frist and Harry Reid and Representatives Dennis Hastert and Nancy Pelosi, George and Laura put her up at the White House again, and Laura hosted a lunch the following day for 30 of Nancy’s lady friends.

I asked Nancy if she had ever tried to discuss the stem-cell issue with George W., who twice vetoed bills authorizing federal funding of research using embryos. “I think once I did,” she said, “and then I didn’t anymore.”

"I said to Billy Graham, 'Just tell me IF I'M GOING TO BE WITH RONNIE AGAIN. Just tell me that and I'll be O.K.' HE SAID. 'YOU ARE.' AND I SAID, 'O.K."

Fighting for the Cause

How did she get interested in stem-cell research in the first place?

“Remember, I’m a doctor’s daughter. So obviously I’m interested in all medical things. But, also, it was pointed out to me that this might be helpful with Alzheimer’s, after Ronnie announced that he had it. It was terrible at that time, because nobody knew anything about Alzheimer’s. And if they suspected anything, they were embarrassed. Therefore, I had nobody to call, nobody to ask any questions of—at all. Now people call and ask me questions, and I’m glad they do. But, for me, I had nobody.”

She credits Douglas Wick, the filmproducer son of Charles and Mary Jane Wick, with making her aware of the potential for embryonic-stem-cell research to lead to a cure for not only Alzheimer’s but also Parkinson’s and diabetes. Wick’s eight-year-old daughter, Tessa, was diagnosed with diabetes in 1999, and two years later she testified before a panel of U.S. senators, urging them to fund this promising area. At the same time, Nancy wrote a letter to President Bush, who was in the process of formulating his position on the use of embryos for research. He soon announced a policy ruling out federal funds for almost all embryonic-stem-cell research, and she avoided any public comment. In May 2004, however, when Michael J. Fox presented her with an award at a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation fund-raiser in Beverly Hills, she took the opportunity to finally open up. Although she refrained from mentioning President Bush, her target was apparent. “Ronnie’s long journey has finally takenhim to a distant place where I can no longer reach him. Because of this, I’m determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain. I just don’t see how we can turn our backs on this.” Mrs. Reagan’s stance, Doug Wick told The New York Times, “has really changed the debate.”

A month later Ronald Reagan died, and Nancy threw herself into the cause, personally calling Republican congressmen and urging them to vote for a bill to increase funding for embryonic-stem-cell research. After the bill passed, in May 2005, by a margin of 238 to 194, with 50 Republican votes in favor, Nancy set her sights on the Senate. In a July 2006 telephone conversation, she told me, “Tomorrow is the date the Senate votes on stem-cell, so I’ve been busy working the phone all day.” I asked if it looked good. “I’m so superstitious, I don’t want to say. Ted Kennedy says we have enough votes. Bill Frist says he thinks so, too.” I suggested that she had had something to do with turning around Majority Leader Frist, a surgeon by profession. “I’ve talked to him, but I think he was already changing. I’ve talked to all of them. In fact, I’m sure some of them must say, ‘Oh, no, not her again,’ when they hear I’m on the line. You know, the polls show that 70 percent of the people are for stem-cell research. So if Bush vetoes, which he says he will, isn’t this just giving the back of his hand to 70 percent of the people? And for this to be his first veto—how terrible. He can’t say with this bill you’re killing babies. They’re embryos that are being discarded.” I asked if there was any chance of Congress’s overriding his veto. “I’m not sure that we have two-thirds. I’ve got to go back to making my calls. Keep your fingers crossed.”

@vf.com READ BOB COLACELLO'S PAST ARTICLES ABOUT THE REAGANS.

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The 63 senators who voted for the bill included 19 Republicans, among them such rock-ribbed conservatives as Trent Lott, of Mississippi, Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, and Judd Gregg, of New Hampshire. Bush vetoed it the next day, and the whole process was repeated a year later. In the 2008 campaign, however, both McCain and Obama declared their support for embryonic-stem-cell research. In fact, McCain acknowledged that Nancy Reagan had persuaded him to support the Senate bill in 2006.

In March of this year, Barack Obama officially reversed Bush’s policy, and Nancy Reagan issued a statement: “I’m very grateful that President Obama has lifted the restrictions on federal funding for embryonicstem-cell research. These new rules will now make it possible for scientists to move forward.” Privately she told me, “We’ve lost so much time. That’s the annoying part of it.”

To the surprise of many, Obama didn’t invite her to the announcement ceremony at the White House, which was attended not only by 30 members of Congress from both parties but also by several prominent advocates of unlimited stem-cell research. “I would have gone, and you know I don’t like to travel,” she told me. “Politically it would have been a good thing for him to do. Oh, well, nobody’s perfect. He called and thanked me for working on it. But he could have gotten more mileage out of it.”

'I think my mother’s embrace of the issue J. of stem-cell research earned her a lot of credibility, the way she was willing to speak up for that and cut against the grain of the Republican Party,” says Ron Reagan, who himself had outraged the Republican hierarchy by standing up at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, and giving an impassioned speech in support of the stem-cell cause. Ron, who lives in Seattle with his wife, Doria, a psychologist, calls himself an atheist and has a daily three-hour talk show on the progressive Air America radio network; but he says his liberal views do not upset his mother—and never have. “My father and I were not on the same page politically,” he told me. Explaining why he kept his views to himself while his father was in office, he said, “I was 22 when he was elected. I was a ballet dancer. Nobody really cared about my opinion as such; they cared about it in relation to him Can we make some hay out of the fact that yet another of Ronald Reagan’s children doesn’t agree with him about something? I wasn’t willing to give people that. Had I thought they were actually interested in my opinion as my opinion, maybe I’d have been more forthcoming.” He added, “I disagreed with my father’s policies, but I never doubted that he was a good man who meant the best for the country. And it was a significant presidency. I suspect, however, given the current economic climate, which seems to be at least in part the result of rampant free-market deregulation—which my father championed—his star might dim a little bit.”

It’s no secret that Nancy has had her ups and downs over the years with both her children and Reagan’s from his First marriage. Jane Wyman died at 93 in 2007, at her home in Palm Springs, silent to the end on the subject of Ronald Reagan. Their adopted son, Michael Reagan, lives in Sherman Oaks, California, and has a talk-radio show of an ultra-conservative bent. Patti Davis, who lives in Santa Monica, calls her mother every day and visits her on Sundays. She was recently interviewed on CBS News Sunday Morning about her most recent book, The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have with Their Mothers. “I apologized to my mother for whatever pain I might have caused her,” she told Leslie Stahl: “ ‘I know I did, and I want you to know I’m sorry.’” Sitting on her lap through most of the interview was her pug, Gracie, which she referred to as “my mother’s only grandchild.”

Summing Up

'I’ve had quite a life, when you stop and think about it,” Nancy told me at one of our lunches. “I’m very lucky. Especially with Ronnie—I was the happiest girl in the world when I became we. Even in the very beginning, I was always so proud of him. Everything he did. And it wasn’t that I had to force myself. I just was.”

I asked her if her husband had ever told her what he considered his greatest accomplishment. “Ronnie would never do that. He wouldn’t think in those terms—what my greatest accomplishment was.”

Was he disappointed in not being able to achieve certain goals? “First and foremost for him, I think, was doing away with nuclear weapons. It was his dream not to have any nuclear weapons.”

Picking up on what Ron had said, I asked how she felt about those who blame today’s economic crisis on Reaganomics. “Finances? Money? Deal me out. I really don’t know anything about it. I don’t think Ronnie led us into anything that wasn’t good.”

It seemed as if every time we spoke, another friend of hers had passed away. Lee Annenberg, the widow of the publishing billionaire Walter Annenberg, died in March at 91, and Nancy went to the private service at Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, with George and Charlotte Shultz. In April, it was Justin Dart’s widow, Jane, who was 90. “She was a darling girl,” said Nancy. Mary Jane Wick went in May, at age 84.

I asked her if she goes to church. “I haven’t been to church in a long time. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have any feelings. I do.”

Does she believe in life after death?

“Billy Graham said it. I said to him, ‘Just tell me if I’m going to be with Ronnie again. Just tell me that and I’ll be O.K.’ He said, ‘You are.’ And I said, ‘O.K.’”

After a pause she said, “It sounds strange, but ...I see Ronnie. At nighttime, if I wake up, I think Ronnie’s there, and I start to talk to him. It’s not important what I say. But the fact is, I do think he’s there. And I see him.”