Regan Calls Nancy’s Book ‘Inadvertent Confession’

Donald T. Regan got in his licks today in his feud with Nancy Reagan, reviewing the book by his former boss’s wife and declaring it to be “a classic of inadvertent confession.”

In what may or may not be the last word in their ink-splattered battle over which one of them hurt President Ronald Reagan more, the former White House chief of staff said Mrs. Reagan “seems incapable of understanding how her words and deeds might seem selfish, hypocritical and, indeed, even frightening to those on the outside.”

She and her ghostwriter, William Novak, “have produced a classic of inadvertent confession,” Regan wrote in a Washingtonian magazine review of “My Turn,” Mrs. Reagan’s memoirs.

“Very sadly, and most of all, this book gives aid and comfort to those who still believe that Ronald Reagan never should have been elected President in the first place,” Regan said.

In May, 1988, Regan, having been fired 13 months earlier, published his memoirs. They pictured Mrs. Reagan as a scheming, “shadowy, distaff presidency” and disclosed her use of astrologer Joan Quigley.

Last month in “My Turn,” Mrs. Reagan got even. She wrote that Regan had often “acted as if he were President” and deserved to be fired because the Iran-Contra affair occurred “on his watch.”

She acknowledged turning to Quigley for advice, but she accused Regan of having “betrayed” a confidential relationship with the astrologer.

Taking his turn, Regan said astrology played a bigger role than Mrs. Reagan was willing to admit.

“I wrote about astrology because it was an essential truth about the way the Reagans operated,” Regan wrote. “It was a daily, sometimes hourly, factor in every decision affecting the President’s schedule. . . . He--or in this case she--who controls the President’s schedule controls the workings of the presidency.”

As for the larger question, Regan asserted that Mrs. Reagan--in acidly criticizing many of Ronald Reagan’s closest advisers, including Edwin Meese III, James A. Baker III, David Stockman, Alexander M. Haig, William P. Clark and William J. Casey--”damages her husband and his presidency,” Regan said.

“After all,” he wrote, “these were Ronald Reagan’s choices, made after close consultation with his financial and political supporters and friends in California; he must have thought that they met his own standards.”