Welcome back to another deep dive. Today, we
are opening up a file that I think is, well,
it's arguably one of the most misunderstood in
American political history. I'd agree with that.
If you lived through the 1980s, you lived through
this. If you've studied history, even casually,
you've seen the photos. Yeah. We are talking
about Nancy Reagan. Nancy Reagan, a figure who
is somehow... Both incredibly visible. I mean,
you can probably picture that specific shade
of red dress right now. Oh, absolutely. And yet
for a long time, she remained, you know, totally
opaque to the public. Exactly. I feel like culturally
we have these two cardboard cutouts of her and
they just don't seem to fit together. Right.
On one side, you have the adoring wife. You know
the look. It actually has a name. The Gaze. The
Gaze. Yes. Staring up at Ronald Reagan like he's
the only person in the universe. Totally submissive.
Just happy to be there. Right. The devoted helpmate.
The traditionalist who just wanted to bake cookies,
though she probably didn't actually bake them
herself. Probably not. And support her man. That
was the image she projected. And then on the
other side, you have the caricature that the
media and her critics built. Queen Nancy, the
woman with a $200 ,000 chana, the designer gowns,
the just say no finger wagging, and the woman
who supposedly ran the White House with an iron
fist. And the astrologer. We can never. ever
forget the astrologer how could we i mean that
is the plot twist to end all plot twists it really
is but here's the thing when we actually went
through the stack of biographies the memoirs
from staff the declassified schedules those caricatures
just fall apart they do or at least they turn
out to be masks for something much more interesting
and much more complex. What you find when you
dig into the archives is that she wasn't just
a wife and she wasn't just a socialite. She was,
in many practical ways, a co -president. And
I don't use that term lightly. It is a heavy
term. Yeah. But looking at the evidence firing
chiefs of staff, dictating the president's schedule
down to the minute, reshaping foreign policy
toward the Soviet Union. I mean, it's hard to
argue against it. Exactly. So that is our mission
for this deep dive. We want to move past the
caricature and really unpack the psychology of
Nancy Reagan. We're talking about a woman driven
by a fierce, almost terrifying need for security
and control. And we need to understand how that
specific psychological need shaped the American
presidency in the 1980s. To understand that,
though, we can't start in the White House. We
can't even start in Hollywood. We have to go
back to a very unstable childhood that, well,
it effectively created the Nancy Reagan we know.
Because she wasn't born into power. No, not at
all. And this is the part that usually surprises
people who only know the Queen Nancy era. She
was born Anne Frances Robbins in New York City,
July 6th, 1921. Though in classic Hollywood style,
she often told people she was born in 1923. A
little resume editing right from the start. I
love it. Exactly. Control the narrative from
day one. But the key event here isn't the date.
It's the family dynamic. Her father, Ken Robbins,
was a used car salesman. And her mother, Edith
Luckett, was an actress. They split up pretty
much immediately after she was born. And the
father. He just removed himself from the picture.
Vanished. So abandonment number one. Right. But
then comes the second, perhaps more significant
blow. Her mother, Edith. is a working actress
in the 1920s that doesn't mean glamorous trailers
and movie sets that means the vaudeville circuit
that means touring the road it's a grind it's
a grind and you can't take a toddler on the road
in those conditions so for six years nancy or
anne as she was technically named is left with
an aunt in bethesda maryland that's a long time
for a child to be separated from their mother
right especially in those developmental years
we're talking ages Two to seven or eight. Exactly.
It's an eternity in kid time. She would travel
to New York occasionally to see her mother on
stage, and she talks about watching her from
the wings. Wow. There's this really poignant
image she describes in her memoirs of watching
her mother putting on makeup, transforming into
someone else. And little Nancy would pretend
to be an actress herself. Of course. She was
emulating the mother she couldn't live with.
It sounds like she was trying to become the person
her mother would want to be with. Or maybe trying
to speak her language. Or trying to enter her
mother's world the only way she knew how. You
know, historians and psychologists who have analyzed
her life point to this unstable environment as
the root of her lifelong craving for security.
It makes sense. She learned early on that people
leave, that security is fragile, and that you
have to work very hard, you have to perform effectively
to keep the people you love close to you. But
then her fortune changes. I mean, dramatically.
It's like a plot twist in a movie where the orphan
suddenly finds out their royalty. It really is.
In 1929, her mother remarries. And not just to
anyone. She marries Loyal Davis, a very wealthy,
very prominent neurosurgeon in Chicago. Talk
about a status upgrade. Massive. They move to
Chicago. And suddenly, Nancy isn't the Onandan
kid in Maryland anymore. She's living in high
society. She's attending the girls' Latin school.
She's living in a luxury apartment on Lakeshore
Drive. Yeah, and she gets a new father figure.
Loyal Davis. And the name Loyal is almost too
perfect, isn't it? A little on the nose. He was
a man of extreme discipline, arch -conservative
values, and rigidity. He was the establishment.
And Nancy didn't rebel against him. She worshipped
him. She wanted to be his daughter. Desperately.
At age 14, Loyal Davis formally adopts her. She
becomes Nancy Davis. She effectively erases Anne
Frances Robbins. A completely new identity. She
gains the security, the status, and the ideology
that would define the rest of her life. It's
fascinating because usually when a stepparent
comes in with strict rules, the teenager rebels.
But she leaned in. She leaned in because he offered
safety. He offered a world that wasn't going
to disappear. And he imprinted his conservative
political views on her very, very deeply. It's
interesting, though, because she still had that
connection to the acting world through her mother.
I read that her godmother was Alan Nazimova.
Which is a huge deal. Alan Asimov was a legend
of the silent film era. She was eccentric. She
was famous. She was wealthy. And because of her
mother's connections, young Nancy is hanging
out with people like Spencer Tracy and Walter
Houston. So it wasn't just a fantasy. It wasn't
just a fantasy. It was her social circle. She
was straddling these two worlds, the rigid conservative
wealth of Chicago and the glamorous artistic
chaos of the theater elite. So it makes sense
that she heads to Hollywood. She goes to Smith
College first, studies drama, and then heads
west. But she wasn't exactly a superstar, was
she? She was. Solid. She signed with MGM in 1949.
But if you look at her filmography, she was almost
immediately typecast. She played the loyal wife
and mother. Which is foreshadowing at its finest.
It really is. She was in movies like The Next
Voice You Hear. where she plays a pregnant housewife
who hears God on the radio. It's very wholesome,
very 1950s. Or Donovan's Brain, which is this
sci -fi B -movie where she plays the baffled
wife of a scientist whose body is being possessed
by a disembodied brain in a tank. Baffled wife
seems to be the lane Hollywood picked for her.
She was the reactor, never the actor, if you
know what I mean. Critics were actually kind.
The New York Times called her delightful and
convincing. But she wasn't setting the world
on fire. She wasn't Marilyn Monroe. Not at all.
She famously said later, I was never really a
career woman, but became one only because I hadn't
found the man I wanted to marry. That brings
us to the meet cute, or maybe the meet scheme,
depending on how cynical you want to be. This
is one of the great debates among biographers.
So it's 1949. The Red Scare is heating up in
Hollywood. The blacklist is real. Very real.
Nancy Davis sees her name on a list of communist
sympathizers in a Hollywood trade paper. Which
would be a career killer. Yeah. Even for a solid
actress. Absolutely. Now, it turns out it was
a different Nancy Davis. Common name. But she
is frantic. So who does she call to clear her
name? The president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Ronald Reagan. Of course. She asks for a meeting
to get this cleared up. They meet for dinner.
He explains it's a mistake. The guild will protect
her. He'll take care of it. And the rest is history.
But I feel a but coming. But some biographers
argue she knew exactly what she was doing. She
was the daughter of loyal Davis. She was well
connected. She could have fixed a clerical error
regarding her name without a personal dinner
meeting with the president of the guild. The
suspicion is that she used the scare as a pretext
to get in a room with him. She saw her target.
Ronald Reagan was handsome. He was charming.
And he was a leader. He was the ultimate security
object. She later said, my life began with Ronnie.
And I think she meant that quite literally. She
felt like a half person until she found him.
So they get married in 1952. And this detail
stuck out to me. The wedding had only two guests.
William Holden and Brenda Marshall. That's it.
That's it. No family, no big reception. That
feels incredibly isolated for two Hollywood actors
who know everyone. It sets the tone for their
entire life. It was an exclusive club of two.
They were notoriously insular. They didn't really
need other people. They didn't have a wide circle
of intimate friends who were let inside. It was
Nancy and Ronnie against the world. They were
total opposites, though. How did that dynamic
work? On the surface, yes. Ronald was the eternal
optimist. He was sunny. He believed things would
just work out. He was the guy who could sleep
soundly before a big speech. Nancy was the worrier.
She was the pessimist. She was the one anticipating
the disaster. She did the worrying so he didn't
have to. Exactly. They completed each other.
He could float because she was holding the string,
checking for storm clouds. But that puts a tremendous
burden on her. If he is the good cop of his own
life. She has to be the bad cop. And that intensity,
that us against the world vibe, that had to have
fallout. And the fallout usually lands on the
kids. It was very difficult for the children.
You have to remember the structure. You have
Michael and Maureen, Ronald's kids with Jane
Wyman, his first wife. Right. And then Nancy
and Ronald have Patty and Ron. The relationship
there was strained, is putting it mildly. Patty
Davis in particular seems to have been a lightning
rod. Patty was the rebel. She completely rejected
their conservatism. In the 60s and 70s, she went
full counterculture. I read she lived with the
Eagles for a while. She did. She joined the nuclear
freeze movement, which was explicitly protesting
her father's policies. She wrote books that were
very critical of her parents, portraying Nancy
as cold and controlling. For long periods, Nancy
was estranged from her children. It feeds into
that Queen Nancy narrative later that she was
cold, but inside the marriage, it was warm. They
were famously affectionate. He called her Mommy.
She called him Ronnie. Mommy, great. It was a
closed ledge of affection that didn't always
extend to the next generation. They were so focused
on each other, the kids often felt like interruptions.
So Ronald moves from acting to politics. Yeah.
And Nancy becomes the first lady of California
in 1967. Was she ready for that? She was reluctant.
She didn't love the campaigning. She didn't like
sharing him. But once she was in, she was fierce.
And this is where we see the first flashes of
the controversy that would follow her to Washington.
The house, right. The governor's mansion in Sacramento.
It was an old Victorian house. Nancy took one
look at it and basically said. No way. Not happened.
She called it a fire hazard, said it wasn't fit
for a family, so they moved to a wealthy suburb
instead. Which I'm sure went over great with
the taxpayers. Critics called her snobbish. It
reinforced this idea that she was too good for
the people's house. It was the first time the
public started to see her as high maintenance.
And then came the press. In 1968, Joan Didion,
I mean one of the sharpest writers of the century,
wrote a piece called Pretty Nancy. Ooh. That
sounds like a compliment, but knowing Joan Didion.
It's loaded. It was definitely not a compliment.
Didion spent a day with Nancy and wrote this
scathing profile. She portrayed Nancy as artificial,
out of touch, basically a plastic doll with a
frozen smile. Wow. She described Nancy plucking
imaginary lint off her dress while talking about
the poor. That ladle artificial stuck. And it
hurt Nancy deeply. It made her incredibly defensive
through the media, a grudge she carried all the
way to the White House. Let's jump to that transition,
the 1980 election. Reagan wins. They arrive in
Washington in 1981, and the vibe change from
the Carters to the Reagans was significant. Whiplash.
Absolute whiplash. Jimmy Carter was the guy carrying
his own luggage, turning down the thermostat
in the White House, wearing cardigans to save
energy. The malaise era. The mood was austerity.
The Reagans wanted to bring back the glamour.
They were thinking Kennedy -esque Camelot. But
the timing was terrible. Because the economy
was in the tank. A deep recession. People were
losing jobs. Interest rates were sky high. And
here comes Nancy arriving in town, deciding the
White House is in disrepair, which to be fair
to her, it actually was, and launching a massive
renovation. And then. The China. Oh, the China.
This is the stuff of PR nightmares. It is taught
in crisis management classes on what not to do.
She ordered a new state China service from Lenox.
4 ,370 pieces, red with etched gold bands. And
the price tag. $209 ,508. Over $200 ,000 for
plates. In 1981, money. Now here's the nuance.
This was paid for by... Private donations. It
wasn't tax dollars. Okay, that's an important
distinction. The Knapp Foundation paid for it.
Yeah. But the optics, absolute disaster. Because
at the exact same time this news breaks, the
Reagan administration is proposing budget cuts
to school lunches. Oh, right. This is the infamous
ketchup is a vegetable moment. Exactly. The administration
proposed classifying ketchup and pickle relish
as vegetables to save money on school lunch requirements.
So the media juxtaposes these two things. Nancy's
$200 ,000 gold -rimmed china versus classifying
ketchup as a vegetable for poor kids. That's
brutal. It solidified the Queen Nancy nickname.
She was seen as Marie Antoinette. And the clothes
didn't help. No, she loved fashion. Reagan red
became her signature color. She wore Galanos,
Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta. The problem was
she wasn't just buying them. She was borrowing
them. And borrowing is in heavy air quotes here.
Heavy air quotes. She would accept thousands
of dollars in designer gowns. She claimed they
were loans to promote American fashion and that
she would return them. But often she didn't or
she kept them for a long time without disclosing
them. And that's not legal. And that violated
the Ethics and Government Act. Did she ever get
caught? She did. Years later, after they left
the White House, the IRS and ethics committees
investigated. The Reagans ended up having to
pay back taxes and interest on something like
$3 million worth of fashion items and gifts that
hadn't been reported properly. Wow. That is staggering.
But she was savvy. She knew she was bleeding
public support. So in 1982, she goes to the Gridiron
Dinner, which is this annual press roast, usually
pretty stuffy. Nancy comes out on stage dressed
as a bag lady. Wait, really? The first lady?
Yes. She's wearing mismatched clothes, feathers,
rain boots. She looks ridiculous. And she sings
a parody song called Secondhand Clothes to the
tune of Secondhand Rose. And at the end, she
smashed a plate on stage. That is bold. It was
brilliant. She proved she could take a joke.
She proved she wasn't this humorless ice queen.
The press loved it. It bought her a huge amount
of goodwill. It was a masterclass in changing
the narrative. So she's navigating this PR minefield,
trying to fix her image. But then, just a few
months into the presidency... everything changes
march 30th 1981 the assassination attempt we
cannot overstate how this event rewired nancy
reagan's brain she gets to the hospital george
washington university hospital and she sees him
she said later i had never seen a face like that
with my husband in it it was chaos reagan was
gray he was struggling to breathe he had a bullet
in his lung yeah And yet, famously, he looked
at her and cracked a joke. He told her, honey,
I forgot to duck. Which is the ultimate Reagan
optimist moment. Even on death's door, he's the
performer. Right. But for Nancy, the pessimist,
the worrier, this was the apocalypse. This was
her worst nightmare coming true. The one thing
she feared most. The one thing she was supposed
to do, keep him safe, had failed. She lost 12
pounds in weeks. She started sleeping with one
of his shirts because the smell comforted her.
She was absolutely terrified every time he left
the White House. And this is where she pivots
from socialite first lady to the protector. She
decided her primary job above policy, above parties,
above everything else was to keep him alive.
And if the Secret Service couldn't guarantee
it. She needed something else. She needed an
edge. Enter the astrologer. Enter Joan Quigley.
Now, I think a lot of people hear astrology and
they think she checked her horoscope in the newspaper
over coffee. But this wasn't that. No, this was
an operational dependency. Nancy had dabbled
in astrology before, like many in Hollywood.
But after the shooting... Merv Griffin, the TV
host, told Nancy that Joan Quigley had actually
predicted that March 30th would be a dangerous
day for the president. Oh, that is the worst
possible thing she could have heard. Yeah. It
validates the fear. It tells her this could have
been prevented. Completely. Nancy believes Quigley
has the answers. She hires her. Quigley is on
a retainer, $3 ,000 a month paid through a private
fund, and she starts dictating the president
of the United States schedule. How deep did this
go? Was it just avoid Tuesdays? It was incredibly
granular. Quigley would provide color code and
calendars. Green for good days, red for bad days,
yellow for be careful. No. This determined when
Air Force One took off. It determined when he
gave speeches. It determined the timing of cancer
surgery. It even determined the timing of the
Geneva summit with Gorbachev. Scheduling the
Cold War was determined by the alignment of the
planets. Effectively, yes. If Quigley said, don't
travel on the 14th, the president didn't travel
on the 14th. And this was a state secret. Strictly.
Nancy knew how it would look. She knew the public
would think they were crazy, so they kept it
totally under wraps. Well, someone had to know.
The staff had to know. You can't just move the
president's schedule without telling the chief
of staff. The staff knew and it drove them crazy.
Specifically, Donald Reagan, the chief of staff.
This brings us to the power behind the throne
section. Because this wasn't just about stars.
It was about access. Donald Reagan was a powerful
man, a former CEO of Merrill Lynch. He was a
master of the universe type. He liked order.
He liked hierarchy. And suddenly he's trying
to schedule a press conference. And Nancy is
saying, no, Ronnie can't go out on Tuesday. The
stars aren't right. Or his void of moon is in
the wrong place. That's lead to a clash. It was
a war. Donald Reagan resented her involvement.
He saw her as a meddler. He called her the dragoon.
Nancy saw him as a liability who wasn't protecting
her husband enough, especially when the Iran
-Contra scandal broke. Ah, okay. She felt Reagan
was arrogant and was letting Ronnie take the
fall for the arms for hostages deal. So how does
this end? It ends with a phone call. They are
arguing about the schedule. Nancy is demanding
he resign. The conversation gets heated. Donald
Reagan in a moment of frustration makes the fatal
mistake of hanging up on the first lady. You
do not hang up on Nancy Reagan. You do not. When
the president heard about it, he was furious.
He felt it was a deep disrespect to his wife.
He fired Reagan shortly after. This cemented
the idea that Nancy was the associate president.
If you crossed her, you were gone. She had already
helped push out campaign manager John Sears back
in 1980. She pushed out national security advisors.
She was the H .R. Department of the White House.
But she also used that influence on policy. Yeah.
Particularly regarding the Soviet Union. This
is her most significant political legacy. She
knew that history would judge Ronald Reagan on
whether he was a warmonger or a peacemaker. The
hardliners in the administration, the hawks,
wanted to keep the pressure on the evil empire.
They didn't want to talk. Nancy wanted him to
talk to Gorbachev. She was the dove. She was
the pragmatic dove. She pushed him to soften
his rhetoric. She allied herself with George
Shultz, the Secretary of State. She believed
that a personal relationship with Gorbachev could
end the Cold War. She whispered in Ronnie's ear
constantly, do it for your legacy. Be the peacemaker.
Which brings us to the other relationship in
that equation. Nancy and Arisa Gorbacheva. The
First Lady Wars. These two did not get along.
Raleza was the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev. She
was an intellectual lecturer on Marxism -Leninism.
She was sharp, opinionated, and she did not defer
to Nancy. She didn't play the adoring wife role.
No. She would come to the U .S. and lecture Nancy
on the failings of the American system, on the
superiority of socialism, on history, on architecture.
And Nancy probably didn't love being lectured.
Nancy reportedly asked her staff, who does that
dame think she is? She found Reza tedious and
preachy, but, and this is credit to her discipline,
she sucked it up. She orchestrated the social
side of the summits perfectly. Let me give an
example. There is a famous moment at the Washington
Summit. Nancy invited Van Cliburn, the pianist.
Now, Van Cliburn was an American, but he was
a hero in Russia because he had won the Tchaikovsky
competition in Moscow years earlier. A huge one.
Nancy asks him to play Moscow Nights. A Russian
classic. And as he plays, the Gorbachevs start
singing along. Ronald Reagan starts humming.
The tension in the room just evaporated. George
Shultz said later you could feel the ice crumbling.
Wow. Nancy weaponized the dinner party for the
sake of DeConte. She played the hostess role,
but with a strategic geopolitical endgame. While
she's doing all this behind the scenes firing
staff, managing the Cold War, she needs a public
platform. Every first lady needs a cause. And
Nancy's was big. Massive. Just say no. Where
did that phrase actually come from? It sounds
like a Madison Avenue marketing slogan. It was
spontaneous, actually. She was visiting a school
in Oakland in 1982. A little girl raised her
hand and asked, Mrs. Reagan, what do I do if
someone offers me drugs? And Nancy just said,
just say no. And it caught fire. It became the
catchphrase of the decade. She traveled 250 ,000
miles. She appeared on different strokes. She
hosted conferences with first ladies from around
the world. It was a cultural phenomenon. But
looking back, it gets a lot of criticism. It
does. It's viewed by many experts today as overly
simplistic. It treated drug addiction as a failure
of willpower rather than a complex medical or
social issue. Critics argued. It ignored the
root causes, poverty, unemployment, the systemic
issues driving the crack epidemic that was devastating
cities at the time. It was a slogan, not a solution.
It felt like a Band -Aid on a bullet wound. And
then there is the silence, the other epidemic
of the 80s, AIDS. This is the shadow over her
legacy. The AIDS epidemic exploded during the
Reagan presidency. Thousands of people were dying.
And the administration was largely silent for
years. And this was personal for them, right?
Yeah. They came from Hollywood. They had friends
in that community. They did. Rock Hudson, a close
friend and Hollywood giant, died of AIDS. When
he was dying in Paris, he reached out to the
White House for help getting into a hospital.
And the response was cool. That's rough. The
criticism, and it is heavy, is that Nancy, who
had the president's ear, didn't push him to speak
out publicly until it was too late. Does the
historical record show any movement from her
on this? There are reports that privately she
urged him to address it. She knew it was a disaster,
but publicly she held the party line. She didn't
want to alienate the conservative base. So it
was political. The contrast between her hyper
visibility on drugs and her invisibility on AIDS
is something historians still critique her for
heavily. It remains a major point of contention.
So the Reagans leave the White House in 1989.
They go back to Bel Air. But the story doesn't
end there. No. And in some ways, her most humanizing
chapter happens after the power is gone. First,
there was her own health scare. Right. In 1987,
actually, while still in office, she was diagnosed
with breast cancer. She chose to have a mastectomy.
And that was a controversial decision at the
time. Some people thought it was too drastic
compared to a lumpectomy. There was actually
a bizarre backlash where critics said she was
setting women back by not fighting to keep the
breast. That seems incredibly unfair. It's a
medical decision. It was. But the Nancy effect
was real. Mammogram rates across the country
spiked. She saved lives by being public about
it. But then comes a real tragedy. 1994. Ronald
Reagan writes that famous handwritten letter
to the American people announcing he has Alzheimer's.
The long goodbye. For a decade, Nancy Reagan
went from being the glamorous first lady to the
primary caregiver. And this wasn't just managing
care. She was there. She protected his dignity
with the same ferocity she used to protect his
safety. She created a cocoon around him. She
did. She filtered visitors. She made sure no
one saw him when he wasn't himself. She wanted
the world to remember the robust president, not
the man fading away. And this changed how the
public saw her. Completely. The dragon lady image
softened. People saw a woman who was losing the
love of her life by inches day by day. Her devotion
was undeniable. It was tragic and it was human.
And she made a surprising political move during
this time. She did. This is where the protector
role overrode the conservative role. She came
out in support of embryonic stem cell research.
Which was a huge issue at the time. It was the
hot button issue of the early 2000s. The George
W. Bush administration was against federal funding
for it. The Republican Party was largely against
it on religious and ethical grounds. But Nancy
believed it could hold the cure for Alzheimer's.
So she broke with her party. She broke with the
party. She lobbied the White House. She publicly
disagreed with George W. Bush. It showed that
her loyalty was to Ronnie, not to a political
platform. If she thought something could help
him or help his legacy, she didn't care about
the politics. And then the funeral in 2004. I
think everyone remembers the images. She planned
every detail, of course. She invited Margaret
Thatcher. She invited Gorbachev. But the moment
that defines her widowhood. was at the very end
at the casket she had held it together all week
the rigid composure she was famous for but as
she was leaving the casket at the burial site
in simi valley she broke She leaned over, kissed
the coffin, mouthed, I love you, and she just
collapsed into tears. It was raw. It was the
moment the public finally understood the depth
of that bond. She lived for another 12 years
after that. She did. She reconciled with her
children, Patty and Michael, which was a nice
closing arc. She continued to protect the Reagan
legacy until she died in 2016 at age 94. So let's
unpack the legacy. Where did she stand? It's
a fascinating trajectory. When she left the White
House, her approval ratings were... Mixed. In
1993, Siena College polled historians and she
ranked nearly last among first ladies. But recently,
she's climbed up to around 15th place. As we
get distance, historians are recognizing that,
like her or not, she was effective. She was powerful.
She was essential to the Reagan presidency. It's
the paradox of Nancy Reagan. Exactly. She projected
this 1950s housewife image. I'm just looking
at Ronnie. But she wielded more raw political
power than perhaps any first lady since Edith
Wilson. Which raises the big question for our
listeners. Right. We elect a president? one person.
But the reality is they bring a partner and that
partner is unelected, unvetted and has total
access. Nancy Reagan's primary motivation wasn't
the Constitution or the party or the voters.
It was the personal protection of her husband.
So the question is, is the role of protector
in chief a necessary burden that we just accept?
Or is it a constitutional loophole that gives
immense power to someone we never voted for?
Something to chew on. Nancy Reagan, a complicated
woman who loved a man, feared the world, and
ran the White House to keep the two apart. Thanks
for joining us for this deep dive. Always a pleasure.
And to our listeners, next time you see a First
Lady, look a little closer. There's always more
going on behind the gaze. We'll see you next
time.