Nancy Reagan remembered for her forceful, private style

Published 9:54 am Monday, March 7, 2016

NEW YORK — Unlike other presidential wives, Nancy Reagan didn’t testify before Congress about health care, celebrate controversial Supreme Court decisions or sit in on Cabinet meetings.

“She never emerged as a political player in her own right. Nor did she seek to,” says historian David Greenberg, the author of “Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.”

“On the other hand, neither did she confine herself to the domestic sphere. And by taking an active role in her husband’s business, she helped to reconcile conservatism to the reality of women’s changing roles. Her views may have been conservative, but her political involvement implied that it wasn’t improper for women to participate in what conservatives considered the man’s sphere.”

Email newsletter signup

Reagan, who died Sunday at 94, wasn’t out to break the rules of being first lady. But she knew well how to work within them. Ronald Reagan had promised to champion conservative values when elected in 1980, and NancyReagan was in some ways a throwback to a more old-fashioned approach. Her immediate predecessor, Rosalynn Carter, had attended Cabinet meetings. Betty Ford had spoken candidly about gun control, premarital sex and her surgery for breast cancer and praised the ruling of Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to abortion, as “the best thing in the world.” In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton would try (and fail) to overhaul the country’s health care system.

Nancy Reagan’s most public issue was more in line with expectations for first ladies: her “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which she launched after a schoolgirl asked what to do if someone offered her drugs. The effectiveness of “Just Say No” remains in dispute, but it became a catchphrase (and punchline) for the 1980s and part of an effort that included drug-free zones and “zero tolerance” policies in schools. Reagan herself gave speeches and even made a cameo appearance on the NBC sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes.”

Reagan had other causes and in her post-Washington years openly broke with conservatives by advocating (and allying herself with the liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy) for embryonic stem cell research for Alzheimer’s, the disease which afflicted her husband. But while first lady, she stated most of her opinions in private. Often in tandem with such White House moderates as Chief of Staff James Baker and longtime adviser Michael Deaver, she favored better relations with the Soviet Union, opposed high military spending and urged the president to speak openly about AIDS.