Deaver gives Nancy the credit he says is due

President Bush had decided to place strict limits on research using embryo stem cells, dousing the hopes of patients who believed research using the embryonic cells could help cure Parkinson’s disease or mend a severed spinal cord.

With Congress about to discuss the issue in 2002, an icon in Republican circles -- former First Lady Nancy Reagan -- began privately lobbying against the president, urging Congress to fund the research.

Michael K. Deaver, the media maestro who was at the Reagans’ side in the governor’s mansion and in the White House, says in a new book that Mrs. Reagan’s private lobbying prompted a call from an outraged Republican congressman, complaining to Deaver that Ronald Reagan would never have endorsed the use of stem cells from human embryos for medical research. Deaver told him, “Ronald Reagan didn’t have to take care of Ronald Reagan for the last 10 years, either.”

Deaver’s book is called “Nancy,” and it is never more evocative than when it tells the story of her role as guardian of Ronald Reagan’s legacy and physical dignity during the years when Alzheimer’s disease has threatened to rob him of both.

She makes sure there are balloons in his room on his birthday, though it is doubtful he knows the date’s significance. She told him his daughter Maureen died of melanoma, doubting his mind would absorb the information, hoping his heart might. She sometimes finds herself saying, “Do you remember ...,” before stopping in midsentence, realizing that he cannot.

The book is an attempt to warm the frost off Nancy Reagan’s ice maiden image, to explain the motives that led to so many public relations fiascos -- the abandonment of the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, the spending of $1 million in private donations on new china and redecorating the White House living quarters, the look of adoration she trained on Reagan.

But what comes clear in this sentimental paean to Nancy is how often Deaver failed to soften her image when she so needed a boost in public opinion.

When the Saturday Evening Post ridiculed the new California governor’s wife for giving up her acting career for a role as best supporting wife, Deaver, then serving as Gov. Reagan’s staff liaison to Mrs. Reagan, did nothing. When the Sacramento press corps assailed her for calling the mansion a firetrap, Deaver did nothing to counter the impression that she was overreacting.

And it was Deaver who told incoming chief of staff Donald T. Regan of the first lady’s predilection for consulting an astrologer, a disclosure that Regan later used, after being forced to resign, to exact revenge.

In an interview, Deaver was asked to explain how the man credited with all but inventing the presidential backdrop could reconcile his admitted lapses on behalf of the president’s wife

“Until maybe Year Two in the White House, none of us paid any attention to what was happening to Nancy,” Deaver said. “There was a whole battery of people who worked on protecting him. I can’t tell you why we didn’t spend time on her. I don’t think first ladies had public relations people then.”

He says there was little he could do anyway. She was caught in the whirlwind of feminism. “Here was a woman who adored her husband,” and that was not fashionable at the time, he said. While her husband was called the Teflon president because controversies never stuck, Deaver suggests that Nancy Reagan could have been called the “flypaper first lady,” because everything did.

Beyond that, there are stories in the book that flesh out the person, if not soften the image. Her mother, Edie, an aspiring Broadway actress, asked her sister to raise Nancy from age 2 and parked her in a leafy Bethesda neighborhood not far from the Washington society she would one day dominate.

After Edie married Dr. Loyal Davis, Nancy was reunited with her mother and came to adore her stepfather. When a reporter for Look magazine asked the 1968 presidential campaign for the identity of her “real” father, Nancy Reagan snapped, “My father is Loyal Davis.”

Deaver portrays her as the more pragmatic of the couple, not the more ambitious. After the GOP convention in 1964, at which Reagan’s speech for nominee Barry Goldwater made him a star on the Republican speaking circuit, Reagan drove up and down the California coast in his maroon Lincoln for engagements, until Nancy stepped in as his scheduler. It was a role Deaver later sought, in Sacramento and again in Washington, working often with the first lady.

“When you own the body, you own the biggest piece of real estate in politics,” Deaver explained. “Knowing Nancy’s interest in all of that made our partnership work.”

After the assassination attempt on President Reagan a few months into his presidency, Nancy began consulting an astrologer to chart her husband’s schedule. An astrologer told her that March 30, 1981, had been star-crossed from the beginning. She was determined not to let the fates intervene again.

Deaver said he was happy for the calendar consultations but also told her when an event or trip “simply could not be moved, and that would be the end of it. The consultations were never a burden -- far from it, they were a comfort to Nancy during a very hard time. Contrary to press reports, the astrologer had no impact on Reagan’s policies or his politics. Nada. Zero. Zilch.”

Her style, he says, often intimidated others. “Nancy’s style can frighten people,” he writes. “She’s quick, to the point, and direct in her feelings.”

For Deaver, her candor was a career enhancer. She coached him on how to handle the Gipper. “Never use blatant, crass politics” as a motivator, she advised. Tell him instead that his support or attendance would help or hurt a cause. “Few of even his closest aides in the early years saw Reagan in this light,” Deaver writes. He speculates that it is because Nancy, like her husband, knew what it took to move “an inherently stubborn” person.

In the book if not at the time, he defends her stance on the governor’s mansion, pointing out that when the building was later converted to a museum, visitors were not allowed upstairs because it was unsafe.

He defends her too for enjoying clothes and appreciating the demands of her position on her appearance. “She pays attention to how she looks. That’s who she is,” he writes. He defends her against charges of superficiality -- noting that when Reagan was governor she hosted dinners for POWs returning from Vietnam and visited veterans hospitals and encouraged such causes as Foster Grandparents.

When Reagan was president, she trumpeted the virtues of a “just say no” approach to drugs. Deaver quotes Joseph A. Califano Jr., U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter administration, as saying, “Without question, she made a difference.”

Deaver recounts the controversy over Nancy Reagan’s decision to raise private funds to buy a new set of china for state dinners, because a history of guests carting off dishes as souvenirs forced the White House staff to cobble together a china set from different administrations in different motifs. She was widely derided for the move, and press coverage improved only when she appeared in a self-mocking skit at the Gridiron Club, parodying her love of clothes and finery in a bag-lady outfit while singing mock lyrics to “Second Hand Rose.”

He reports that in 1997, when Nancy Reagan attended Colin L. Powell’s summit on volunteerism in Philadelphia, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton approached to thank her for the dishes and turned to an aide with instructions to invite Mrs. Reagan to the White House. The Clintons never did, Deaver says.

He also reports that at the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington in 1998, President Clinton approached Nancy Reagan and told her, “Hillary and I pray for you every day.... We love you.” According to Deaver, “Nancy looked as if a mugger had embraced her.”

Deaver believes that since her husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, Nancy Reagan has come into her own, assuming some of the speaking engagements.

For the most part, Deaver said, Nancy Reagan is more serene these days, more forgiving, more patient. “She was always reluctant about being out front,” he said. “But protecting Ronnie is her No. 1 priority. Now there’s nobody there to protect him and his image and his legacy. She has reluctantly stepped up.”

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Book signing and lecture

Where: Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda.

When: March 30, 10:30 a.m.

Price: $8

Contact: (714) 993-5075

Also

Where: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley.

When: March 31; book signing 4:30 p.m., lecture 6 p.m.

Price: $35 for lecture and dinner.

Contact: (805) 522-2977