Travel, Appearances Closely Supervised : No Surprises in First Lady’s Public Life

Just as it is for her husband, life in public is for Nancy Reagan a preordained venture, in which surprises are singularly unwelcome.

On a sightseeing tour at the 1987 economic summit meeting in Venice, an aide makes an “X” in masking tape on a cobblestone to mark where Nancy Reagan should stop for photographers. There are no similar marks for the mayor of Venice or the wife of Italy’s prime minister.

When she goes to Harpers Ferry, W. Va., to welcome a trainload of make-believe comic-strip characters campaigning against drugs, a six-person advance team, similar to the President’s but smaller, precedes her by four days.

Her traveling party on trips abroad includes her personal assistant, hairdresser, personal secretary, photographer, medic, protocol officer and Secret Service agents.

She flies on an Air Force plane, designated Executive Foxtrot One. On a side trip from Venice to Sweden, it was an Air Force Boeing 707 outfitted to accommodate the First Lady and 40 to 44 other passengers as well as the pilots, stewards and military communications personnel. On other trips, it is a smaller plane.

“Security doesn’t really allow her to fly commercial,” Elaine Crispen, Mrs. Reagan’s press secretary, said.

By contrast, Bess Truman and her daughter, Margaret, used to go from Washington to Independence, Mo., by train, paying for their own first-class compartment. Lady Bird Johnson rode the Eastern Airlines shuttle on shopping trips to New York. By the Richard M. Nixon Administration, however, the presidential family was flying on government planes.

Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet leader, also gets some perks. Her clothes, hats, furs, shoes and accouterments are something the average Soviet woman can only dream about. And, although such information is not disclosed in the Soviet Union, it is doubtful that she pays for them. It is known that she received gifts from Paris couturiers during the couple’s official visit to France in 1985. She has also worn creations of Soviet designer Slava Zaitsev.

A scene during Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 reelection campaign illustrates the difference in treatment of political spouses in England and the United States.

After the Thatchers, flying aboard a plane hired by the Conservative Party, arrived at the packed Manchester Airport, the prime minister plunged into the crowd, but her husband, Denis, became separated from her and spent about 10 minutes wandering around the fringes by himself. It would not have happened to Nancy Reagan.