In June 2004, an 82-year-old woman pressed her cheek against the casket of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, and could not make herself walk away. She had spent her entire life afraid of this moment—of being left behind. What few people knew, not the cabinet, not the Secret Service, was how far she had gone to prevent it. Nancy Reagan was photographed throughout her husband’s presidency with her gaze fixed entirely on him.
The world saw a devoted first lady in red dresses and pearls, a woman who once said without apology, “My life really began when I married my husband. ” What the cameras could not show was the color-coded calendar she kept in her private White House quarters, with days marked as dangerous or safe—a system devised not by the chief of staff, but by a woman in San Francisco whom the Secret Service had never met, and whose telephone calls shaped the schedule of the most powerful man on earth for seven years. The story begins in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1923. Nancy Reagan was born Anne Francis Robbins, the daughter of Edith Luckett, a Broadway actress.
When the child was two years old, Edith packed a suitcase, kissed her daughter goodbye, and left to pursue her career. The little girl was placed in the care of her aunt and uncle and remained with them for six years. According to her son, Ron Reagan, she suffered from a form of separation anxiety ever after and was deeply concerned about being abandoned her whole life. In 1929, Edith married Loyal Davis, a Chicago neurosurgeon, and brought her eight-year-old daughter to live with them.
Nancy adored her stepfather and arranged, as a teenager, for him to formally adopt her. She went on to attend Smith College, where she majored in drama, and eventually made her way through her mother’s theatrical connections to Broadway and a screen test at MGM. She made eleven films and was considered professional and pleasant on set, but acting was never the point. She was looking for someone who would stay.
In 1951, she contacted Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, to help with a case of mistaken identity involving another actress with the same name. They met for dinner, and he was not looking for anything serious after his divorce from Jane Wyman. Nancy, however, had spent the better part of her life practicing the art of making someone feel they were the center of everything. They married on March 4, 1952, in a small ceremony in the San Fernando Valley.
She retired from acting almost immediately, which surprised people. She had a contract at MGM and a recognized name, but she set it down without apparent anguish. Years later she wrote in her memoir, “My life really began when I married my husband,” meaning it as precise description rather than performance. Before Ronnie, she had been waiting.
After Ronnie, she was home. Their marriage was more than love. It was also a calling. Reagan was optimistic and inclined to think well of people, and Nancy became the one who noticed what he did not.
Senior political adviser Stuart Spencer described her as the personnel director, with Reagan as the CEO. She looked at every person who came through the door and asked the question Reagan would never think to ask: What does this person actually want? Those loyal to Reagan found a fierce ally. Those she suspected were not loyal encountered a wall of polite, immovable resistance.
Their children found the perimeter harder to navigate. Patty Davis, born in October 1952, grew up in a household where her mother’s love was fierce but conditional in ways she would spend decades trying to articulate. Their son Ron, born in 1958, had an easier passage, though he too understood that to live inside Nancy’s devotion was to live inside something both sheltering and total. She had made her choice before any of it began.
She had chosen Ronnie as an act of identity. In January 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th president. Sixty-nine days later, John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots outside the Washington Hilton, and a bullet pierced the president’s lung and lodged an inch from his heart.
Nancy did not know for several minutes whether he was alive. That afternoon changed something. Not her love, but her fear. The fear that had always been present became the dominant sound.
In the weeks after the shooting, she could not sleep. The threats against her husband had increased, and she watched him walk out the door each time, feeling something inside her go quiet until he returned. “I worried terribly every time he went through the door,” she said years later in an interview with Mike Wallace. “I don’t think my heart started again until he came back.
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The entertainer Merv Griffin mentioned that he knew an astrologer in San Francisco who had predicted the day of the shooting would be dangerous for the president. Nancy called the woman, Joan Quigley, a credentialed daughter of a San Francisco hotel family who considered herself a serious scientific astrologer. Quigley reviewed astrological charts for the president’s travel dates and public appearances, identifying favorable and hazardous days. Nancy noted them on a calendar in her private quarters—green for favorable, red for dangerous, yellow for caution—and those notations shaped the president’s movements for seven years.
Donald Regan, chief of staff from 1985 to 1987, wrote in his 1988 memoir that virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during his time was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain the planets were favorably aligned. He did not know her name. The book landed in May 1988, and the reaction was immediate. Nancy confirmed the essential facts in her own memoir the following year, while disputing that astrology had shaped policy.
She had been frightened, she wrote, and looking for any form of reassurance. “I talked to anybody and everybody who would give me some advice, some consolation,” she told Mike Wallace. After you’ve been shot and lived through it, she said, the threats increase. The president himself, when she told him what she was doing, reportedly said, “If it makes you feel better, go ahead and do it.
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They left the White House in January 1989 and returned to a house in Bel-Air, California, that Nancy had made ready for the quiet life she had planned. The threats had receded, the schedule was their own, and for the first time in years she was close to simply happy. But there were signs she chose not to name. Moments of blankness that lasted a beat too long, words that arrived late or not at all.
In November 1994, Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to the American people announcing that he had Alzheimer’s disease. Near the end, he wrote, “As Alzheimer’s disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. ”
What followed was a slow and total surrender of the life she had planned.
She stopped traveling. She arranged her world so that she was never more than five minutes from the house. She did not want him to be alone. In an interview several years into the illness, she said, “There are so many memories that I can no longer share, which makes it very difficult.
When it comes right down to it, you’re in it alone. Each day is different, and you get up, put one foot in front of the other, and go. And love. Just love.
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Patty Davis, the daughter who had spent decades in open conflict with her mother and had written in a published memoir that Nancy had been abusive, came home because of Alzheimer’s. Watching her father disappear rearranged something in her. She began calling and visiting, bringing zucchini bread. “She really was sort of the architect of our fractured family,” Patty would say later.
“And also, she was there at the end standing beside her. ”
On June 5, 2004, Ronald Reagan died at the family home in Bel-Air. He was 93 and had been ill for ten years. According to Patty’s account, near the end he opened his eyes, which had faded to a dull gray but were briefly clear and blue again.
He looked at Nancy, and then he was gone. The state funeral was choreographed across multiple days and cities. Nancy moved through it with composure, receiving dignitaries and standing at the appropriate moments. Then, on a hillside in Simi Valley, California, as the sun went down in the golden way of California evenings, the ceremony reached its conclusion.
Soldiers folded the American flag and carried it to her. She held it against her chest, bowed her head, and leaned forward over the mahogany casket, pressing her cheek against the wood. She stayed there. According to those present, she said very quietly that she could not leave him, that she was not ready.
After 52 years, this was not something she knew how to do. They brought her home that night. Her children stayed with her, and she fell into a sleep so deep she did not wake for more than twelve hours. Her body had been carrying it for a decade.
She lived for twelve more years. She took up the cause of stem cell research, the field that held the most credible promise of a future treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and lobbied publicly, breaking with many of her husband’s political allies. She visited the Reagan Library, placed flowers, and managed a legacy she considered sacred. On March 6, 2016, Nancy Reagan died at her home in Bel-Air of congestive heart failure.
She was 94 years old. They buried her at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley beside her husband, on the same hillside where she had once pressed her cheek against his casket and found she could not walk away. In her memoir, she had written, “My life really began when I married my husband. ” People had quoted that line for decades to make a point about the era she came from.
But perhaps it is simply the testimony of a woman who, after years of waiting that began in a borrowed house in Bethesda, had finally found what she had been waiting for, and held on to it for 52 years of marriage, ten years of vigil, and twelve years of aftermath, until there was nothing left to hold and she let go.