Says She Lost Freedom of Speech as First Lady : Nancy Reagan’s Room at the Top: ‘Attic’

Very often when she was in the White House, former First Lady Nancy Reagan said here Saturday, she was reminded of her first stage role in which she played a character who was kidnaped “and kept up in the attic.” Only once, in Act II, did she speak, “just one line, and then back to the attic.”

With such intense public scrutiny and strictures on what she could say and do, “there were times when I felt I was in that attic,” she said.

She came to Washington in 1981 expecting a “tremendous platform,” Mrs. Reagan said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress, “but ironically, a First Lady loses her freedom of speech.” She sighed and added: “I was very, very naive.”

‘It Was Very Frustrating’

As the featured speaker in a seminar on “White House Memoirs: A First Lady’s Perspective,” Mrs. Reagan said “there were things I longed to say for those eight years” in the White House. “I don’t mind telling you it was very frustrating.”

While acknowledging a certain “dignity in silence,” Mrs. Reagan will break that silence this fall when her autobiography, “My Turn,” is published by Random House. The publisher--co-sponsor of the seminar with the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book--has scheduled a 350,000 first-run printing of the book, co-written by Bill Novak. Novak also was the collaborator on biographies of Chrysler Chairman Lee A. Iacocca, former House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. and Sydney Biddle Barrows, the “Mayflower Madam.” The former First Lady’s visit was timed to coincide with this weekend’s convention here of the American Booksellers Assn.

In her book, Mrs. Reagan said, she addresses such issues as criticism of her order for new White House dinner china, her controversial wardrobe lent by top designers, her alleged influence on her husband’s political and diplomatic decisions, her interest in astrology and her relationships with her children, with former White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan and with Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mrs. Reagan said she spent three years working on the book, based largely on the daily diary she kept throughout her White House years.

She described the happiest day of her years in the White House as “the day my husband came home from the hospital” after the 1981 attempt on his life just weeks after President Reagan took office. The hardest part of her experience as First Lady, she related, was learning to steel herself against the unkind things that were sometimes said about her.

‘You Stop Being Surprised’

“You never stop being hurt by such stories,” Mrs. Reagan said. “But you do stop being surprised.”

The “hardest thing” she had to refrain from responding to as First Lady, Mrs. Reagan said, was “I suppose the whole Don Regan relationship. That, and the part about my family.” While the Reagans were in Washington, the relationship between them and their two children, Patti Davis and Ron Reagan, was often the subject of press speculation.

Although she did not mention any book by name, she decried what she called the “kiss-and-tell” or “National Enquirer-type” political memoirs and biographies that seem to be flooding out of every Administration. Still, she said, she felt compelled to write a book to respond to charges leveled at her.

“If I was going to write this book, then I had to write about the things that had been written about me,” Mrs. Reagan said. “Yet I am disturbed about the National Enquirer-level of books that have come out. I think it is too bad, and I hope that is coming to an end.”

Museum on Accomplishments

Speaking from note cards that persistently fell out of order, Mrs. Reagan looked fit and relaxed. She said she expected to be involved “as much as they will let me be” in setting up the new Ronald Reagan presidential library near Simi Valley. “There will be a museum on my husband’s accomplishments, and on mine,” she said.

She discounted any interest in returning to show business, remarking that “they might not even want me, anyway,” but said she would continue to make public service television and radio spots related to the crusade against drug abuse that she chose as her focus as First Lady.

Mrs. Reagan lamented the recent difficulty surrounding the location of the proposed Nancy Reagan drug abuse treatment center in the Lake View Terrace area in the northeast San Fernando Valley. After complaints from neighborhood residents, the center has been forced to consider another location.

And while echoing her husband’s support of a repeal of the 22nd Amendment, limiting a President to two terms, Mrs. Reagan said she was not sure that her husband would have sought a third term if he could have.

Advice: Don’t Wear Rings

As her advice to future first ladies, Mrs. Reagan offered the caveat that “when you are standing in a receiving line, you never, ever, wear a ring on your right hand.” Crushing handshakes tended to come from “little old ladies,” she said. “Sometimes it hurt so much it took you down to your knees.”

Although she and Reagan left Washington “under the very best of circumstances,” Mrs. Reagan said it was nonetheless “a wrenching experience” to depart from the capital. On their last official day as Washington residents, Jan. 20, when George Bush was sworn into office, Mrs. Reagan said their helicopter pilot made a nostalgic swing over the Capitol and the White House.

“Oh look, dear, there’s our bungalow,” the outgoing President told Mrs. Reagan.