Peggy Noonan Remembers Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan Was Everywhere

Peggy Noonan

It is well known and still true: Her power was everywhere, and personnel, in who rose and who fell; she was on the phone with McFarlane about foreign affairs, on the phone mixing and okaying trips and events, arranging to closet the president with his policy analyst or that, calling to get the speeches earlier. She was everywhere.

What did she believe? She wasn’t a liberal or a leftist or a moderate or a détentist;; she was a Galanoist, a wealthy, well-dressed woman who followed the common wisdom of her class. She didn’t worry about the effects of burdensome taxes on the individual, she worried about the effects of the deficit on her husband’s popularity; she disliked the contras because they were unattractive and dirty and probably raped people; she disliked SDI in the defense buildup because they were not popular in the polls. And when she got on an issue, she was, in Dever’s words “like a dog with a bone.”

Peggy Noonan: What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (2003)