FIGHTING BACK : Over the Course of Her Husband’s Political Career, Nancy Reagan Has Developed Her Own Mission: to Protect Ronald Reagan, No Matter What

PRESIDENT REAGAN CALLED IT “despicable fiction.” His wife, he said angrily, had not engineered the replacement of his White House chief of staff and she wasn’t involved in any government decision-making. “There is nothing to that,” he said of the headlines that called her a “power behind the throne” and “the new Edith Wilson.”

Yet the image of Nancy Reagan as a tough, savvy political infighter who jealously guards her husband’s good name surfaced years before Donald T. Regan drove out the White House gates after abruptly resigning. It has been, in fact, almost as enduring as the extraordinarily close 35-year marriage that has sustained Reagan through his rise from actor to California governor to President of the United States.

Without Nancy, friends of the couple candidly declare, Ronald Reagan would probably not be President. She has always been her husband’s best friend and closest adviser, “the one person I can trust.” To former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, she is “the indispensable factor in his political life.”

What has always been special about her, friends say, is the intensity with which she supports him--an adoration that in public moments comes across as “the gaze” upward at him, and that in his elected life has translated into a special ability to mold an environment that best promotes his political skills. “Some people you meet in your life make you stretch to reach your fullest capabilities,” she wrote of her adoptive father; it might well have also applied to her marriage.

Nancy Reagan’s is an influence that has been molded by a series of episodes that both threatened her husband’s career and presented an opportunity for her to help shape his future. They have transformed her from the backstage political wife of his Sacramento years to the far more forceful White House figure working to repair the damage from the worst scandal of his career.

“So many of the people they know have died,” a friend says of the Reagans today. “Neither of them has a lot of close friends; they’re each other’s. . . . There’s nothing that they don’t do together.”

I. THE LONELY YEARS

“I had a few rough times in the beginning.”--FROM “NANCY,” BY NANCY REAGAN WITH BILL LIBBY

JUST A FEW MONTHS after Anne Frances Robbins was born in Manhattan on July 6, 1921, her father, car dealer Kenneth Robbins, left her mother. Two years later, her mother, actress Edith Luckett, decided that the toddler was thwarting her career. Little Anne, who had been nicknamed Nancy, was sent off to live with an aunt and uncle in Bethesda, Md.

The separation was traumatic and over the years led to Nancy’s determination to be a model wife and mother. She focused on a future filled with romance and family. Nancy Reynolds, a friend of the First Lady since she was her press secretary in Sacramento, sees that same impulse still. Mrs. Reagan, she says, has “the strongest nesting instinct I’ve ever seen.”

“My aunt and uncle were very nice to me,” Nancy Reagan said in a 1982 interview with The Times, “but I missed my mother. Very much. She had to earn a living, and she couldn’t take me touring all over the country with her. And I guess somewhere I said to myself way back here”--she paused, pointing to the back of her head--” ’Boy, when I get married!’ ”

The lonely little girl would take dolls and toy dishes out to the front of the house in Maryland and give pretend parties. When she suffered a bout of pneumonia at age 4 without her mother to care for her, she decided: “If I ever have a child and she’s sick, I’ll certainly be with her.” Another time, during a visit with her natural father, Nancy and he got into an argument about her mother and he locked her in a bathroom. “I was terrified,” she wrote in “Nancy,” her autobiography, “and it seemed suddenly as if I were with strangers. Recalling the incident brings back a flood of memories I would rather forget.”

Her rescuer from those turbulent early years was Loyal Davis, the wealthy Chicago surgeon her mother married in 1929. Davis adopted her when she was 14, and he showered her with love and material comforts. There would be difficult times yet: Her 18-month courtship by a Princeton student, Frank Birney, ended in tragedy when he was struck by a train and killed; and she called off an engagement to an Amherst College student after deciding that she had simply been “swept up in the glamour of the war, wartime engagements and waiting for the boys who were away.”

But she would find a model in her mother, whom she came to see as “the ideal doctor’s wife,” expert at hosting her husband’s social affairs. She emulated her mother in another way, pursuing an acting career after she graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Between 1949 and 1956 she would make 11 films.

Although actress Nancy Davis had a keen survivor’s instinct and a certain toughness, she remained vulnerable to hurt and rejection--and yearned for love and approval. When she received her first fan letter, she was “so excited when they gave it to me that I pinned it on the front of my dress and wore it around the studio.” When a make-up artist commented that her eyes were too big, she walked around the rest of the day with her eyes half closed, and stopped only after he convinced her he’d been joking.

Once, she was fired from an acting part. “I found out how painful it is to be rejected,” she recalled years later. “I begged the director to go back to the dressing room to get my coat and purse as I did not want to face the other people in the show. . . . I left, humiliated and depressed.”

She met her second rescuer while playing in the movie “East Side, West Side.” The director introduced her to fellow Warner Bros. actor Ronald Reagan. They married a year later, on March 4, 1952. “I have never really been able to understand women who say they lost their identity when they got married,” she has said. “It seems to me to be completely the opposite. My life began when I married Ronnie.”

II. FIRST MOVES

“In Sacramento, and afterward, protecting Ronnie became a full-time job.”--LOU CANNON, IN “REAGAN”

RONALD REAGAN is in trouble. Members of his inner circle have resigned under a cloud of suspicion, and the episode is threatening to permanently mar a successful term. His Administration is in a state of shock; his longtime advisers agree that part of the problem is that he has over-delegated his responsibilities. It is the worst crisis of his political career: the so-called homosexual scandal of 1967.

Reagan, presented with allegations that two of his aides were homosexual, had quietly demanded their resignations. For the next 2 1/2 months, his governorship went into what one person called a “receivership,” as surviving aides fretted over the possibility that the incident would hit the press. When it did, in a short item in Newsweek that said a top GOP presidential candidate had a sordid scandal on his hands, Nancy Reagan stepped in.

She had always been an important adviser, but for the most part, she was depicted as a poised socialite who smiled politely, if not especially warmly, and deflected questions about her influence on the governor. “My life is homemaking . . . antiquing, things like that,” she told interviewer Nancy Skelton.

She bristled at suggestions that she took a detailed interest in her husband’s official duties. In “The Rise of Ronald Reagan,” journalist Bill Boyarsky relates the story of a reporter who had been in Reagan’s office when the phone rang. Reagan apologized, saying, “It’s my wife.” The governor had made a statement in Sacramento, only to be contradicted by his finance director. “Yes, dear,” he said several times, then: “No, dear, I don’t think he was being insubordinate.”

After Newsweek’s mention of the homosexual scandal, journalist Lou Cannon relates in his book “Reagan,” Nancy Reagan urged communications director Lyn Nofziger to get the story killed. Instead, Nofziger deliberately leaked it to five newspapers and CBS News--hoping that by giving it an airing, the issue would be forgotten long before Reagan’s presidential bid in 1968. But the plan backfired. Subsequent charges and denials created a lengthy credibility crisis for the governor.

Mrs. Reagan had never liked the frumpy Nofziger, aides said at the time. And, according to Cannon, she urged that he be fired and refused to talk with him for months when Reagan kept him.

Nofziger had made Reagan look bad, and protecting the man who had delivered her from loneliness would become Mrs. Reagan’s enduring theme. “The bottom line for my mom,” their son Ron would say years later, “is: Is this person hurting my father or helping him? And once she’s come down on one side or the other, then she’s going to be either a very powerful ally, or an enemy you don’t want to have.”

III. THE EMISSARY

“I would say she does not like dissonance in (his) life.” --FORMER REAGAN STAFFER

THE NETWORKS AND newspapers called it a “stunning upset” in January, 1980, when George Bush narrowly beat heavily favored Ronald Reagan in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Analysts faulted Reagan for having been overconfident, aloof--for having not taken seriously the first key test of the presidential race.

To make matters worse, the Reagan camp was rife with dissension. The campaign was running a deficit, and campaign manager John P. Sears III was under internal attack for poor management. Ever since Sears had succeeded in ousting longtime Reagan advisers Michael K. Deaver and Lyn Nofziger, his dealings with the candidate had been strained; he was also locked in a bitter power struggle with chief of staff Edwin Meese III, a trusted Californian. It was clear an independent outsider was needed to get the campaign back on track.

According to James Lake, the campaign’s press secretary and an ally of Sears, Nancy Reagan took the first step. At Sears’ suggestion, she contacted William P. Clark, whom Reagan, as governor, had appointed to the California Supreme Court. She asked him if he would be interested in taking over. “We knew things were deteriorating,” Lake says today. “We wanted someone who would not be seen as a Sears person.”

In “Reagan,” Lou Cannon writes that Clark asked Mrs. Reagan if the Reagan camp didn’t already have a leader. “That’s our problem,” she replied. “We’ve got two.” Though Clark was unwilling to leave the bench, this was the beginning of the end for Sears. Two weeks later, on the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Ronald Reagan called Sears, press secretary Lake and political director Charles Black to his hotel room. There, according to a participant, Reagan handed each one a press release announcing their resignations and the appointment of William Casey as campaign manager. Nancy Reagan broke the ensuing silence, turning to Sears and saying, “John?” as if asking for his acceptance of the move.

Lake says he has “very little doubt” that it was Reagan who initiated the firings and that “it wasn’t (Nancy Reagan’s) doing. People who have said she engineered the ouster of Sears are wrong.” But the episode reflected Mrs. Reagan’s increasingly active role in helping to shape the group of advisers surrounding her husband.

Some also give Nancy Reagan credit for tipping the balance at the celebrated Nashua debate the Saturday before the New Hampshire primary. The Nashua Telegraph newspaper, sponsor of the debate, had decreed that it would be limited to Bush and Reagan. But Reagan “ambushed” Bush and regained the forceful, engaged image he had lost in Iowa, by storming the stage with four other candidates and admonishing the moderator: “I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green.”

According to Peter Hannaford, then a Reagan campaign aide, an impassioned back-room debate over whether Reagan should join Bush alone on the stage, walk out in protest or bring the other candidates with him to the microphone had ended when Nancy Reagan declared: “You should all go on.”

“I don’t think I exert any influence as far as policy goes,” she would say during the next campaign, four years later. “But I may have an influence as far as people are concerned. I’m more sensitive to people who might be helpful or not helpful.”

Reagan is “so trusting and so genuine, and he likes everybody so much, that I think she often feels he is not being well-served and (is) being used,” says her former press secretary, Nancy Reynolds. “When she perceives that, naturally she is going to do what she can to correct it, as any good wife would do. She’s always been that way, going back 20 years.”

IV. HER OWN WORST ENEMY

“I’d never wear a crown. It messes up your hair.”--NANCY REAGAN, JOKING ABOUT HER “QUEEN NANCY” IMAGE

THE CRITICISM BEGAN early, almost from the day of Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural in 1981. Initially, the return of Republicans to the White House--after four years of Jimmy Carter’s Southern frugality--had been greeted by social Washington with relief bordering on celebration. Elegance and glamour were back. But in the Washington press corps, at least, the admiring glances turned to stares of disbelief as the Reagans’ wealthy friends and political supporters descended on the capital for an inaugural unmatched in cost and splendor.

“These women will wear expensive clothes, lavish jewels, gorgeous quality furs and entertain extravagantly in Washington, just as they have been doing in California,” Washington Post fashion writer Nina Hyde wrote. “They are rich, and they have no hang-ups about showing it off.” Another journalist reported that the First Lady’s inaugural handbag “cost more than the annual food-stamp allotment for a family of four.”

Sentiments soured further when Nancy Reagan’s first major project was an effort to raise nearly $1 million from private sources to redecorate the White House living quarters. She hung hand-painted, 18th-Century-style Chinese wallpaper in the presidential bedroom and ordered new White House china--trimmed in her favorite color, red--to replace the dinnerware bought during the Johnson years.

These projects hit their stride just as the nation slid into the deepest recession in decades and as budget planners for her husband’s Administration were arguing on Capitol Hill for substantial cuts in federal programs for the poor. At a press conference, the President of the United States found himself defending his wife’s dishes.

Washington Post columnist Judy Mann was one who took aim at Mrs. Reagan. “So far,” Mann wrote, “she has been someone who is far more interested in being socially chic than socially useful. We had gotten used to something more.” Sheila Tate, the First Lady’s press secretary at the time, says that only the attempted assassination of her husband in March, 1981, hurt Mrs. Reagan more than Mann’s column.

The furor did not abate during Nancy Reagan’s first trip abroad, to the wedding of Britain’s Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. The British press gleefully described the American First Lady’s huge wardrobe and her entourage of 10 Secret Service agents, a hairdresser, friend Betsy Bloomingdale and her husband, a nurse, a photographer and assorted aides. Reporters inquiring about Mrs. Reagan’s stunning matched set of diamond-and-ruby necklace, earrings and rings discovered that she had carte blanche to borrow any jewels she wanted from Bulgari, the international jewelry firm. At one polo match, Mrs. Reagan arrived with a fleet of long limousines; Queen Elizabeth drove herself in a green Vauxhall station wagon.

Rather slowly, it dawned on the White House that it had an image problem, one that could become a serious political liability to Reagan. In the euphoria over launching the Reagan Revolution, no one had given much thought to mapping out a strategy for involving the First Lady in a substantive issue or project--standard practice since Lady Bird Johnson had begun beautifying highways in the 1960s.

Mrs. Reagan told the Times that she received supportive letters and calls from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom many thought she was emulating. But times, and perceptions of women’s roles, had changed since Jackie Kennedy redecorated the White House and set fashion trends in the early 1960s. In Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem called Mrs. Reagan “the rare woman who can perform the miracle of having no interests at all.” A Wall Street Journal article theorized that Nancy Reagan was partly to blame for a dramatic exodus of women from the Republican Party.

A Gallup Poll conducted in December, 1981, showed that Mrs. Reagan had the highest disapproval rating (26%) of any modern First Lady. “It is hard to think of a First Lady who has been damaging,” political analyst William Schneider said, “but Mrs. Reagan . . . crystallizes an important criticism of this Administration: its supposed bias toward the rich. She is the image of the suburban matron who spends her time shopping and having lunch.”

Once again, someone close to the President had become a liability, and once again Mrs. Reagan felt a need to protect her husband. But this time, she herself was the problem. “She’s concerned about how things are perceived,” says a former White House aide, “and we know perception is reality in Washington.”

The turnaround came after a counterattack she engineered with the help of Michael K. Deaver, the Sacramento and campaign veteran who was now deputy White House chief of staff. In Reagan’s second year in office, the somewhat insubstantial foster-grandparents program she had championed suddenly took a back seat to the war on drug abuse. She had always planned to attack the issue, she explained, but had put it off while she “got my family settled” and during what she called the “lost year” after the assassination attempt.

Her staff objected, arguing that drug abuse was too depressing a topic to be associated with a First Lady. But she overruled them and plunged into a frantic travel schedule. (To date, her crusade has logged more than 100,000 miles of travel to 59 cities, 30 states and 7 foreign countries.) In interviews, she virtually refused to talk about anything else, deflecting all questions about dishes and fashion.

And at the annual Washington Gridiron Club dinner in 1982, she conquered the hometown audience with a deft parody performed before a formally clad crowd of Washington’s most powerful journalists, officeholders and corporate executives. She danced and sang a self-deprecating version of “Second-Hand Clothes” and, after receiving a tumultuous ovation, smashed a piece of china as an encore. “Queen Nancy” was dethroned.

In a 1982 Times interview, Nancy Reagan was asked what she would like to be remembered for after she left the White House. She sighed heavily and thought for a long time before concluding: “That I tried.” Later she added, “Nobody sets out to be a bad First Lady.”

V. HANDLING THE HANDLERS

“You know, I have been a very fortunate woman. I have had a chance to see the man I love under extreme pressure.” --NANCY REAGAN, IN AN INTERVIEW

RONALD REAGAN entered the final weeks of his 1984 reelection campaign with a commanding string of legislative victories to his credit and a lead in the polls that many thought was insurmountable. And now the man dubbed the Great Communicator for his instinctive skills in front of a television camera was about to debate, on live nationwide TV, a Democratic opponent known for his whiny voice.

But on the night of Oct. 7, only hours after leaving the Louisville stage he’d shared with Walter Mondale, Reagan knew it had been a disaster. The 73-year-old President had flubbed his lines, blurted out mind-numbing strings of statistics, borrowed old lines from his televised encounters with Jimmy Carter in 1976 and generally failed miserably in his efforts to display the famous wit that had helped make him so popular. He had acted confused, muddled. Instantly, age became the hot issue of the waning campaign.

Afterward, Reagan complained to his wife that he’d felt “brutalized” by the debate preparations. A group of White House staffers had staged a full dress rehearsal--complete with lights, cameras and other TV equipment--in a meeting room of the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. “We sat there stuffing him with information,” remembers a staffer who has continued to work with the Reagans. “The room was full, about 25 or 30 people, with everybody throwing their 2 cents in. The focus was that we didn’t want him not to know something. That was the thesis.”

David A. Stockman, Reagan’s brash young budget director, seemed to take particular delight in standing in for Mondale and jabbing his boss with one pointed question after another. “You better send me some flowers,” the President told him later, “because you’ve been nasty to me.”

Nancy Reagan was livid. Instead of flying on with Reagan to the next campaign stop, she returned to Washington with campaign chairman Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada, a Reagan confidant since the years the two men were governors of neighboring states. “She was very unhappy,” an aide recalls today, “and she voiced her unhappiness through Laxalt.” He promptly relayed the “brutalized” quote to reporters.

Deputy Chief of Staff Deaver, whom Mrs. Reagan had long used as her sounding board in the West Wing, was the first target of her wrath, aides say. “What have you done to my husband?” she raged. The President, she complained, had been overprepared to the point of paralysis. Ronald Reagan had never won a debate by spewing forth detailed facts and figures; his strength lay in his ability to articulate broader concepts and national aspirations.

“I was upset,” she said later, “because I thought they’d gone about it all wrong. And they had. They overloaded him. He knows all those things. They don’t have to overload him.”

Some aides wondered whether she was speaking only for herself. Sometimes, say those who have worked closely with both Reagans, she acts as a conduit for the unfailingly genial President, voicing his displeasure in situations where he is uncomfortable being critical.

One former White House speech writer compares the phenomenon to “what Shirley MacLaine would call channeling. He speaks and it goes through her.” She is, the speech writer says, “a very good mirror for the President.”

No more picking on Ronnie, she decreed; no more ganging up. One aide was instructed to help beef up the presidential self-esteem: “Mr. President,” he called from the rear of the room during one of the next practice sessions, “I thought that was a terrific answer.”

Aides say Mrs. Reagan also dictated that the candidate should get more sleep before the next debate, and she saw to it that the final rehearsal was held in the familiar comfort of the wooded presidential retreat at Camp David, Md.

By the second debate two weeks later, Reagan was more relaxed and combative. He dispatched the age issue with a single quip: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Nancy Reagan had almost publicly battled the White House staff to assert her notion of what was in her husband’s best interest. She was asked later if she felt she had made any changes. She fixed her calmest gaze and offered her own one-liner. “Well,” she said, “the second one was better, wasn’t it?”

VI. THE GLOVES COME OFF

“I don’t think most people associate me with leeches or how to get them off. But I know how to get them off. I’m an expert at it.” --NANCY REAGAN, SHORTLY AFTER DONALD REGAN RESIGNED

WHEN SHE leaves town without her husband, Nancy Reagan often gives him a 3-by-5 instruction card, which aides say would typically read:

Five o’clock: Take medication .

Six o’clock: Dinner.

Nine o’clock: Brush teeth.

Nine-thirty: Bedtime.

The First Lady’s own aides say with a chuckle that when she is away, the President’s daily calendar expands dramatically. Suddenly it is jammed from 7 in the morning through working dinners and on to after-dinner meetings in the White House. “He never does that when she’s here,” one aide says.

From the start of Reagan’s political ascendancy, Nancy Reagan’s three main areas of concern for her husband have been his image, his staff and his schedule. By Donald Regan’s last day at the White House, he had crossed her on all counts.

Throughout the first term and into the second, Mrs. Reagan had relied on Deaver, the one-time Los Angeles public relations executive, to exert back-channel pressure on her husband. She and Deaver spoke daily, often several times. And in the triumvirate that formed Reagan’s original inner circle (the others were Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and Counselor Edwin Meese III), Deaver had the duty of assuaging the concerns of the First Lady, a self-described constant worrier.

Deaver always insisted that Mrs. Reagan had no involvement in policy, a view that has generally been supported. “She wouldn’t know a continuing resolution from a New Year’s resolution,” he once told the Washington Post. Instead, she claimed to concentrate on personnel matters.

Often, aides say, Nancy Reagan was one of the first to sense that a controversial Administration official had become a liability. And she would muster assistance from a cadre of friends to help persuade the President--a man notoriously hesitant to fire anyone--that the official must go.

That group includes Southern California political consultant Stuart Spencer; Nancy Reynolds, now a Washington political consultant; Deaver (even after he left the White House to start a consulting firm); Mary Jane Wick, wife of U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Z. Wick; best friend Betsy Bloomingdale; former Sen. Laxalt and his wife, Carol; former Atty. Gen. William French Smith; Carol Price, wife of Ambassador to Britain Charles Price; Betty Wilson, wife of former Ambassador to the Vatican William Wilson, and journalists Mike Wallace and George Will.

When Regan arrived and Deaver left, she lost her sounding board. Regan, a former Marine and Wall Street executive, installed a kind of unofficial buffer against the East Wing by assigning an assistant, W. Dennis Thomas, to deal with Mrs. Reagan’s chief of staff. “She hasn’t had a good operative in the White House since Mike left,” a former staffer says. “The First Lady has legitimate concerns and questions that arise every day, and she needs someone over there who’s in the loop.”

One aide suspected early on that the relationship between Mrs. Reagan and Regan was headed for trouble when Regan groused about being seated next to “Julius the hairdresser or Anita the maid” on a major presidential trip. “I thought, ‘How shortsighted of him,’ ” the aide said. “They have the First Lady’s ear.”

As the Iran- contra scandal unfolded late last year and the President’s popularity dove with each sensational new disclosure, aides say Nancy Reagan launched a war of attrition against Regan. She dialed the influential friends. She fought off a news conference, insisting that Reagan had not recovered fully from prostate surgery. And she and the Regan camp engaged in a skirmish of leaks over who had hung up on whom.

Even before the critical Tower Commission report appeared, Regan had lost. The day after the report was made public, word leaked from the East Wing that former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker had been selected to replace him. Regan had barely beaten a retreat out of the White House compound when the First Lady’s office issued a statement welcoming the replacement.

VII. KEEPER OF THE LEGEND

“Obviously, I think she cares about his place in history.” --REAGAN FRIEND NANCY REYNOLDS

FRIENDS SAY Nancy Reagan had a dream. It was for her husband to be the first President since Dwight D. Eisenhower to leave office after a full eight years without a cloud of failure or scandal. Until the Iran- contra scandal came to light last year, followed by the Tower Commission report that painted a devastating picture of a hands-off presidency, her dream seemed assured.

But now, the biggest challenge of her career as the most devoted guardian of Ronald Reagan’s image--”keeper of the legend,” as one friend put it--may lie ahead, in his two lame-duck years in office. To preserve the luster, or restore it, she is likely to take up a major issue. The betting is on arms control; friends expect her to lobby for another summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Reagan will be nearly 78 when he leaves office; the First Lady, 67. Nancy Reynolds predicts that the President “will always be on the campaign trail for Republican candidates and causes and making speeches,” though an active career in politics seems unlikely. Nancy Reagan more than once has said she plans to continue her crusade against drug abuse. And both have contracts with Random House to write books. The President’s memoirs are scheduled to appear in 1991; the First Lady’s two years earlier.

“They’ll go back to what they’ve always done--entertaining friends, going to Chasen’s, traveling,” one friend predicts. Others believe they will divide their time between their hilltop ranch near Santa Barbara and the $2.5-million house in Bel-Air that was purchased for them earlier this year by 20 longtime supporters.

Though Reynolds concedes that Mrs. Reagan is concerned about her husband’s place in history, in the end, she says, the post-White House years will come down to the same romance that has been her driving force all along. Whatever the political difficulties her husband faces at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the little girl who grew up a few miles north in a house in Bethesda will not have lost the security she longed for.

“There is always some crisis,” Reynolds says, “and in the end, you see, they have each other.

“Long after they’ve left Washington; long after the bands have stopped playing, they have a relationship nobody can touch: rock-hard and soft and loving, too. And that will continue to the end of their days.”