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Nancy’s Stand
By Wil S. Hylton, September-October 2003
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Fortunately for Mrs. Reagan, pressure never got her down. On the contrary, her
persistence is legendary, and in earlier years it may even have won her husband's
heart. As Ronald Reagan remembered in a letter to her on their 29th wedding
anniversary, "Beginning in 1951, Nancy Davis, seeing the plight of a lonely
man who didn't know how lonely he really was, determined to rescue him from
a completely empty life. Refusing to be rebuffed by a certain amount of stupidity
on his part, she ignored his somewhat slow response." Perseverance, then,
was the mother of romance.
Perhaps her iron will stemmed from childhood. The only daughter of a soon-to-be-divorced
actress, she was born in the early 1920s in New York City (she claims not to
know her age) and spent the first two years of her life traveling with her mother
to small stages around the country. When the traveling became burdensome, her
mother dropped her off at an aunt's house in Maryland, where young Nancy lived
for six years, surviving a nearly fatal case of double pneumonia along the way.
When her mother finally reclaimed the child, she was engaged to Loyal Davis,
a man whom Nancy had never met. The three of them promptly set off for Chicago,
where Nancy had no friends and quickly discovered that she didn't like her stepfather
very much. (It would be another 20 years before she felt comfortable enough
to stop calling him "Dr. Loyal.") After college, Nancy moved to New
York, fooled around with stage acting a while, and wound up on a TV show called
Broken Dishes. There, she was spotted by a big shot at MGM, who arranged for
her to visit California for a screen test.
That was her big break. Before she knew it, she had found her way onto the
payroll at MGM, alongside such stars as Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth
Taylor, ritzing through the finest parties with Loretta Young and Vivien Leigh.
She had her own dressing room on the studio lot, and when she visited Radio
City Music Hall for the premiere of her first starring role, The Next Voice
You Hear, her name appeared in giant letters on the marquee over Sixth Avenue.
But when her name appeared in a local newspaper in 1949, on a list of Communist
sympathizers (thanks to another, more left-leaning actress who happened to share
her name), Nancy reached out to the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald
Reagan. He quickly invited her out on a date so they could discuss the matter.
In the following two years, he cleared her name, got her pregnant, and then
married her. She gave up acting in the early 1950s to become a full-time mother,
but let Ronnie know, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn't about to start cooking
or cleaning, which, by her own account, she never did.
Even in the 1960s, when Ronnie's taste for politics took him beyond the Screen
Actors Guild into the California governor's mansion, Nancy insisted on being
far more than a tagalong wife. As an unnamed source revealed to the author Anne
Edwards in the book The Reagans: Portrait of a Marriage (St. Martin's Press,
2003), "Nancy had her own little 'secret service' going. We called it NBI—Nancy's
Bureau of Investigation. She was always on the lookout for people who she thought
were not giving their all to Reagan, or who she thought were duplicitous, and
who she simply did not like or trust."
Later, when she arrived at the White House in 1981, she made an unmistakable
mark on those around her. It was an open secret, for example, that she helped
orchestrate the resignation of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1987,
mostly because of his hard-line approach to the Soviet Union. As Colin Powell
explained it in his autobiography, My American Journey (Ballantine, 1996), "He
still had the President's personal loyalty, but Weinberger's standing with Nancy
Reagan, never strong, had continued to slip, no small setback in this Administration.
The pragmatic first lady viewed Weinberger, with his unrelenting hostility toward
the Soviet Union, as swimming against the tide. In the chronic Weinberger-[Secretary
of State George] Shultz feud, she increasingly took Shultz's side—which pained
Weinberger. He was enough of a performer to recognize an exit line. He asked
the President to relieve him as Secretary of Defense." Similarly, according
to Bob Woodward in the book Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
(Touchstone, 2000), Mrs. Reagan almost single-handedly (and for unclear reasons)
forced the resignation of CIA Director William Casey during the Iran-Contra
scandal in 1987. And in her own memoirs, she describes her struggle, and ultimate
victory, in removing Donald Regan from the position of chief of staff a few
weeks later.
So perhaps it was predictable that, when the Minnesota laboratory announced
its success with bone-marrow stem cells, Nancy Reagan would take this latest
pressure in stride. Rather than reduce her commitment to the cause of embryonic
research, she increased her public visibility and revitalized her campaign,
having friends speak to The New York Times for an article last fall, and crafting,
this January, a heart-rending letter to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah,
describing her loneliness in the face of Mr. Reagan's memory loss and insisting
that stem cell research could lead to a cure. "Orrin, there are so many
diseases that can be cured, or at least helped, that we can't turn our back
on this," she wrote. "We've lost so much time already. I can't bear
to lose any more."
Not that Mrs. Reagan's allies are blind to the breakthrough in bone-marrow
research. On the contrary, they're enthusiastic about it, and hopeful. But,
like many scientists in the field, they would like to see all research avenues
fully explored before any are limited. Scientists should be conducting research
on all types of stem cells, they say, and on as many varieties and cell lines
as possible, so that they can develop therapies and treatments as quickly as
possible. It may turn out that adult stem cells are just as good as embryonic
stem cells—or even better—but until research proves that, Mrs. Reagan and her
supporters don't want to limit the resources available for embryonic research.
"This is the bottom line," says Jim Battey, M.D., Ph.D., head of the
stem cell taskforce of the National Institutes of Health. "We just don't
know the full range of possibility for either type of stem cell. So why limit
the options? The safe bet would be to use both types of stem cells until we
know exactly what we can do with each of them."
Even pro-life activists admit that the highly flexible, highly predictable
embryonic stem cells would still be valuable as a scientific tool, if not for
the moral concerns. "Embryonic research is tempting," says the Culture
of Life's Seyfer. "It can look like a miracle cure. But we cannot favor
the use of human embryonic stem cells, because in order to get them you have
to kill an embryo—which is wrong, period."
So as Mrs. Reagan gears up for the next battle in the stem cell war in the
face of strong opposition from some in the Senate's Republican leadership, it
is worth noting that the former first lady has helped rally a broad coalition
of those willing to help the cause, combining liberals like Tom Harkin of Iowa
and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts with staunch conservatives like Specter and
Hatch. Senators Hatch, Specter, and Harkin are pushing for legislation that
would bypass the President's ruling and expand the number of embryonic cell
lines available for federally funded research. "With the help of Nancy
Reagan, we can pass bipartisan legislation," says Kennedy. "We must
not allow misguided fears to deny patients the cures of tomorrow." And
if President Bush isn't convinced just yet, if he isn't quite ready to shelve
his moral objections and let the science go forward, well, just you wait. It
wouldn't be the first time Nancy Reagan has changed a president's mind.
Wil S. Hylton lives in Austin, Texas. He is a contributing editor for GQ.
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