When Ronald Reagan celebrated his inauguration in the Capitol on January 20, 1981, each table was decorated with a vase of California roses, in honor of his adopted home state, and each guest was given a silver-plated box filled with multicolored jelly beans, his signature snack. The marbled Statuary Hall echoed with loud talk and clinking tableware as guests dug into chicken piquante, rice pilaf, and fresh asparagus. At 2:15, an aide leaned down to whisper into Reagan’s ear. The just-minted president smiled, stood up, and said, “With thanks to Almighty God, I have been given [the kind of] tag line…everyone wants….Some 30 minutes ago, the…planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace and they’re now free.”
The crowd erupted. Reagan couldn’t have scripted a better launch to his administration if it had been authored by Frank Capra.
At that moment, Jimmy Carter, the man who had strained nearly to the breaking point to win the hostages’ release, was driving to the airport. He was utterly drained. When the limousine’s phone rang, Vice President Walter Mondale answered. It was the news from Tehran: after 444 days, the fifty-two hostages had been freed. The two men stared at each other with tears streaming down their cheeks. They were relieved, but could not help wondering what might have been. Politics can be a brutal arena, and the hostages’ release would forever be associated with Ronald Reagan, not Jimmy Carter.
At sixty-nine years and 348 days, Reagan was the oldest newly elected president in history at that point. At his inauguration, he, like Jack Kennedy, wore a formal morning suit: gray jacket, vest, and striped pants. Nancy Reagan wore a $3,000 raspberry-red dress and coat by Adolfo, with a matching hat reminiscent of the famous pillbox worn by Jackie Kennedy. Though they denied it, the Reagans were striving for the kind of effortless glamour not seen at the White House since Camelot.
Reagan’s inaugural was the biggest and, at $16 million, the most expensive in history by then. (By contrast, Carter’s “ ‘people’s’ inauguration” in 1977 cost just $3.5 million.) With a huge parade, laser light shows, fireworks, and dozens of performances around town, it ushered in a pro-business, antigovernment, anti-Soviet era and sent a clear, brash message: times had changed. Gone were Carter’s soft sweater-vests, failed hostage rescue, and earnest moralizing; Rosalynn’s small-town friends and molded cheese rings; Amy’s roller skates and burned cookies; White House staffers “in bare feet” (so a National Security Council member claimed); and outlaw guests smoking weed on the roof. In came “Queen Nancy” Reagan, who insisted on pressed suits and ties, crisp skirts and shiny high heels, Hollywood players and haute cuisine.
The Reagans’ inaugural guests included a dozen wealthy, conservative friends who called themselves “the Kitchen Cabinet.” (The term originated with Andrew Jackson’s intimate circle, a group of unofficial advisers who clashed with his official staff, the “Parlor Cabinet.”) Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet—including the department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, the auto dealer Holmes Tuttle, the steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, the oilman William Wilson, and the Colorado beer magnate Joseph Coors—had supported him as he hopscotched from the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild to the California governor’s mansion and into the White House. Their wives, who called themselves “the Group,” had been Nancy’s close friends since the 1950s. The Group appeared at Reagan’s inaugural dressed in matching sable coats and blond bouffants.
“Some folks are jokingly calling it a coronation,” one Reaganite said. It didn’t seem like a joke to critics, who singled out Nancy’s wardrobe—including a $10,000 Galanos gown and diamond earrings worth $480,000 loaned by Harry Winston—as particularly cringeworthy at a time of national belt-tightening. The cost of her handbag alone was equivalent to more than a year’s worth of food stamps for an entire family, the press calculated. It was the kind of critique Mrs. Reagan would court, and resent, over the next eight years.
For the kitchen staff, the fortieth president was a mystery. A West Coaster who was virtually unknown in Washington, Reagan was said to be a man of simple tastes who hated tomatoes and liver but loved steak, Mexican food, and sweet desserts. As for Mrs. Reagan, she was a five-foot-four-inch-tall, 110-pound woman known as “the Iron Butterfly” for her ferocious drive, eye for detail, and instinct for political stagecraft.
The chef Henry Haller took Nancy’s perfectionist tinkering—with the food, china, and flower arrangements—in stride. But the pastry chef Roland Mesnier was “scared shitless” and thought he might be fired when a Reaganite glared at the raspberry puree smeared on his chef’s whites. “No one knew what to expect,” he recalled.
Privately, Mrs. Reagan felt the same way about “permanent Washington” and its notoriously tight-knit tribes—those listed in the city’s Green Book social registry, or the “cave dwellers,” whose roots extended back to the founding of the capital.
With greater insecurities and sharper political instincts than Rosalynn Carter, the new First Lady set out to woo the Establishment. A former actress, Nancy bought the right costumes, learned proper manners, studied diction, and hired Mabel “Muffie” Brandon Cabot, a bluestocking Democrat from Boston, as her social secretary. When Nancy cried, “I don’t want to be Rosalynn Carter!” Cabot coolly replied, “Mrs. Reagan, you don’t have a chance in hell of being Rosalynn Carter.” Nancy also hired Letitia Baldrige, Jackie Kennedy’s first social secretary, to coach her on the finer points of White House entertaining. Mrs. Reagan “wanted to have people consider her a woman of great taste and knowledge,” Baldrige recalled. “She wanted everything to be perfect. If there was a mistake on the table—the way the silverware was put down, for example—that would upset her terribly.”
From the start of her husband’s administration, Nancy made a point of reaching across the aisle, which was part of a “social strategy” mapped out by Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver. First, she introduced herself to the mostly left-leaning crowd of socialites, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, and diplomats at the venerable F Street Club. Then she engineered a reception for Reagan deep in enemy territory, at the home of Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company and publisher of its titular newspaper. A committed liberal, Graham introduced the Reagans to power brokers such as Henry Kissinger, Ben Bradlee, Vernon Jordan, George Will, and Alan Greenspan. True believers on both sides of the aisle were scandalized. The Democratic superlawyer Clark Clifford dismissed Reagan as “an amiable dunce,” while traditional Republicans chafed at Nancy’s parvenu social ambitions. But in retrospect, Deaver said, the First Lady’s networking proved “a very smart thing.”
Having navigated Hollywood and Sacramento, Mrs. Reagan understood the power of political entertaining, even—or especially—when it came to private events. In the language of protocol, a private White House party is one the First Family hosts for friends and donors. Journalists are usually excluded. Taxpayers are not billed for the wine, food, or extra staff. In return, government officials do not have much say in the food, guest list, entertainers, or other details. Private parties tend to be looser and livelier and go later than official dinners, and invitations to these soirees are highly prized.
On February 6, 1981, three weeks after Reagan took office, the First Lady staged her first White House party: a private, “surprise” black-tie dinner dance to celebrate the president’s seventieth birthday. The guests included Hollywood friends such as Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, and Jimmy Stewart. These were the Reagans’ people, and their faces would appear at almost every White House party over the next eight years. They feasted on lobster en Bellevue with sauce rémoulade, stuffed veal with a wine sauce, and plenty of California red. Roland Mesnier baked an enormous birthday cake accompanied by ten satellite cakes, each ringed by seven lit candles, representing the president’s seven decades. The cost of the lavish spread was not disclosed, and the Kitchen Cabinet picked up the tab. With that first party under her belt, Mrs. Reagan was eager to tackle a bigger, riskier objective: her first state dinner.
Twenty days after President Reagan’s birthday, a crowd of citizens braved the chill to wave little Union Jack flags by the South Lawn, where the First Couple greeted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, a retired oil company executive. The two leaders were officially meeting to reaffirm the “special relationship” between the United States and the U.K.; unofficially, they were getting to know each other. Reagan, a former lifeguard from Illinois, welcomed Thatcher, the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, in a style befitting royalty—with a trill of heraldic trumpets, a color guard, and a nineteen-gun salute. It was the kind of pageantry Washington hadn’t seen in years and that Carter had disdained as “monarchical.” But the contrast was the point. When Carter hosted Thatcher in 1979, their lack of chemistry was glaringly obvious, but Reagan and Thatcher sipped from the same cup.
When they first met, at the House of Commons in 1975, Thatcher pointed to her head and told a colleague Reagan had “nothing there.” But after her first state visit in 1981, the two became “ideological twins,” she said. “This is the century when we have had the biggest battle of ideas in history. Between totalitarianism and freedom. Coercion versus liberty. Ron Reagan was a passionate warrior in this battle. I was also a warrior. So we had both sides of the Atlantic covered. And we won.”
The prime minister endured a tarantella of meetings, visits with Congress, and photo ops. With her lips pressed together quizzically, she observed Reagan the gracious host—“the relaxed, almost lazy generalist who charmed everyone,” noted her biographer Charles Moore. By contrast, Thatcher was a “hyperactive, zealous, intensely knowledgeable leader, who injected energy into all her doings but also displayed what Reagan considered to be the elegance of a typical, gracious English lady.”
Nancy Reagan, meanwhile, worried over every detail of her first state dinner, grimly insisting it “has to be fun.” She understood how splendid food and drink can amplify diplomatic goodwill and further the president’s agenda—or, as she said, “You can get a lot of business done at these dinners.”
The men dressed in sleek tuxedos, and the women wore sparkling sequined dresses with the wide shoulder pads then in fashion. Mrs. Reagan was sheathed in a slim gown with a flower print that projected a chic Hollywood glamour. Mrs. Thatcher, “the Iron Lady,” swept her cropped brown hair back into a helmet and wore a black dress and black velvet jacket, which projected the image of a powerful cold warrior. In truth, Britain was struggling economically and beset by the Irish Troubles, racism, and violent protests over social inequality. Mrs. Thatcher had a lot riding on the dinner, too. (“How did I do?” she earnestly asked a White House staffer after a speech at another event. The staffer was touched to see that the Iron Lady was “human after all.”)
In the Diplomatic Room, guests were greeted by waiters with trays of cocktails, another luxury the Carters had banished. The State Dining Room was decorated with baskets of red and blue anemones, and just ninety-four guests had been invited. Haller prepared a classic Anglo-American feast: supremes of pompano in champagne; roasted racks of lamb with sweet mint sauce; and soft hearts of lettuce with creamy wedges of Brie. President Reagan showcased sparkling wines from California. For dessert, Mesnier served crowd-pleasing, richly flavored Grand Marnier soufflés.
The dinner went off without a hitch and helped re-cement the special relationship between the United States and the U.K. “Oh, the anemones on the green moiré tablecloths! It was magical,” recalled Social Secretary Muffie Brandon. “The Reagans had such ease as hosts….There was a sense of a new beginning—which was the slogan of the Reagan campaign.”
A month later the Reagans toured Ford’s Theatre. When he looked up at the box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the president felt “a curious sensation” that it was “still possible for someone who had enough determination to get close enough…to shoot” him.
On March 30, Reagan attended a luncheon with AFL-CIO leaders at the Washington Hilton. When he emerged into the parking lot at 2:27 p.m., John W. Hinckley Jr.—a twenty-five-year-old Texan who believed that by killing the president he would impress the actress Jodie Foster—fired a .22-caliber pistol in Reagan’s direction. One of his bullets ricocheted off a limousine and lodged three inches from Reagan’s heart. Another bullet hit Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a policeman. The president coughed up blood and was rushed away.
“Honey, I forgot to duck,” Ron joked at the hospital. Nancy was not amused.
Vice President Bush hastily returned from Texas to assume control, and Reagan grew listless with a 103-degree fever.
Nancy attempted to feed him, but he wasn’t hungry. Frantic, she called Ann Allman, a Czech woman who worked as their housekeeper in Los Angeles and was a creative home cook. Allman made batches of Reagan’s favorite soups—split pea, and hamburger soup made with beef broth, lean ground beef, fresh tomatoes, and hominy—which friends brought from L.A. to Washington. Nancy placed a television set and a bowl of hamburger soup in front of her husband. “I thought if he watched the news, as we often did over dinner…I could get some food into him,” she said. “Ronnie didn’t eat much…but at least he tried.”
On April 28, Reagan addressed a joint session of Congress and used their post-shooting goodwill to relaunch his Economic Recovery Program, which reduced federal spending and income taxes while increasing the military budget by $26 billion. The plan had been mocked by Democrats as hocus-pocus “Reaganomics.” But Congress passed the budget, and Reagan declared it “the greatest political win in half a century.” His approval ratings soared to 59 percent. In truth, he was still recovering, so he and Nancy slipped away to their little ranch house in California, the one place where they could be their true selves.
They called the property Rancho del Cielo, meaning “the Ranch in the Sky,” or “Heavenly Ranch,” in Spanish. You get there by driving into the mountains above Santa Barbara—high chaparral country of oak, sycamore, and sun-browned grass in the Santa Ynez Mountains. At the top of a rugged, seven-mile driveway the Reagans’ house sat in a meadow twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. Up there in the empyrean it was hot during the day and chilly at night. To the west, the Pacific spread wide and sparkling. To the east lay gnarled vineyards, rolling horse farms, and purple lavender fields. The rancho “cast a spell over us,” Reagan wrote. “If it isn’t heaven itself, it probably has the same zip code.”
They spent three hundred days there during his administration. The house was a simple one-story, roughly twelve-hundred-square-foot, whitewashed adobe structure with five modest rooms, a faux-brick vinyl floor, aluminum windows, a red tile roof, and no central heating. The living room held brown sofas, an orange Naugahyde chair, cowboy paintings, and mounted jackalope heads. A minibar featured green Mexican goblets and pewter mugs. In the kitchen, jars of onion flakes sat next to an electric range painted in a 1970s hue called Harvest Gold.
Up there, the Reagans’ routine was synced to the diurnal rhythms: up at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast and paperwork; a horseback ride at 10:00; lunch at noon; and outside work between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. As night fell, they tucked into enchiladas, chile rellenos, tacos, refried beans, and guacamole, usually cooked by Ann Allman.
Every Thanksgiving, the extended Reagan family gathered at the rancho under Nancy’s strict rules: guests arrived at 5:00 p.m.; dinner was served at 6:00; there would be no political talk or football watching, but plenty of Irish blessings, meandering reminiscences, and bad jokes. Allman invariably prepared a feast of turkey, sweet potatoes, Monkey Bread (a soft, sticky pastry baked with cinnamon sugar, so-called because it is torn apart and eaten with the fingers), mincemeat pie, and persimmon pudding.
“Nancy didn’t cook,” said her stepson, Michael. “Nancy? We didn’t let her boil water!”
The president insisted on carving the bird with an electric knife, though he sliced a finger one year. After dessert and coffee, everyone was ushered out at 8:00, no lingering allowed.
The Santa Ynez hills are known for excellent Pinot Noirs (made famous by the movie Sideways). Noting that his father had been the governor of the biggest wine-producing state in the nation, Michael Reagan said, “He got a lot of people drinking red wine.” White House wines had been relatively uninspired since the Kennedy days, and Reagan hired the Sacramento oenologist David Berkley to advise him on which vintages could play a dual role: acknowledging a White House guest in a special way while pairing well with Chef Haller’s food. Berkley replaced traditional, sharp Chenin Blancs with smoother Chardonnays, and encouraged the use of bold Zinfandels and Merlots for the first time.
As he recuperated from the assassination attempt, Reagan joked that the next time he spoke at the Hilton, he’d be sure to “wear my oldest suit.” He often used humor to deflect fear and discomfort, though friends said he was more rattled by the shooting than he would admit. Nancy, meanwhile, was a “world-class worrier” who feared chaos and disorder.
After Ron’s shooting, she dropped from a featherweight 114 pounds to a nearly skeletal 104 pounds; her dress size fell from a 6 to a 4 to a 2. Her cheeks and eye sockets grew hollow, despite thick applications of makeup and her attempts at a smile. She found herself tearing up at awkward moments.
Some worried that Nancy had cancer. Others speculated that she suffered from anorexia nervosa, a complex mental and eating disorder that causes people to stop eating to lose weight. Anorexia is commonly associated with stress and questions of control. As Psychology Today explains, “The sufferer attempts to take control of her life by exerting control over one section of her life, her diet and thereby her body, and illness develops when that exertion of control turns into its opposite, the state of being controlled by a pathological compulsion to control.”
Nancy denied she was starving herself. She was busy, she explained—traveling fifty-seven thousand miles a year, exercising on a stationary bike, and worrying about Ronnie. “People believe that when one occupies this position life is all roses and glamour,” she said. “How I wish I was one of those people who never lets anything show on her face. Everything shows on mine….I eat. I always have but, no matter what I do, I lose [weight]. This has happened to me before. But I’m trying. I love cookies and I have them by my bed. Truly, there’s nothing physically the matter and I plan to keep nibbling cookies until I’m my normal size 6 again.”
In fact, Mrs. Reagan was brooding about “the presidential (or Tecumseh) curse”—the notion that a commander in chief had died in office roughly every twenty years. JFK was shot eighteen years earlier, in 1963. A superstitious person, Nancy turned to the San Francisco–based astrologer Joan Quigley, who said that she could have predicted Hinckley’s attack: “it was very obvious” from Reagan’s chart. As Nancy secretly consulted Quigley on a regular basis, the astrologer created color-coded calendars alerting her to “dangerous days,” and Nancy altered the president’s schedule accordingly. In 1988, the former chief of staff Don Regan, who had clashed with Mrs. Reagan, revealed “the most closely guarded domestic secret of the Reagan White House”: the president’s schedule was based on the stars and was “cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco.”
Quigley exulted in her new status. “Not since the days of the Roman emperors, and never in the history of the United States presidency, has an astrologer played such a significant role in the nation’s affairs,” she said. Mrs. Reagan was humiliated, but wrote, “No First Lady need make apologies for looking out for her husband’s personal welfare….Nobody was hurt by it—except, possibly, me.”
In 1962, Ronald Reagan left the Democratic Party and recast himself as a conservative Republican. Four years later he was elected governor of California. On election night, the Reagans celebrated with veal stew and fresh coconut cake, a lucky meal they would repeat on special occasions. Otherwise, Reagan’s food tastes were shaped by his midwestern roots. He gravitated to homey fare, such as meat loaf with mashed potatoes, beef and kidney pie, pizza, and anything sweet, especially jelly beans.
He had been a pipe smoker who appeared in Chesterfield cigarette ads, but quit smoking when he ran for governor. To combat his cravings, he substituted jelly beans for tobacco. The candies became his signature accessory, and—just as barbecue defined LBJ or peanuts defined Carter—they helped identify Reagan in the public mind as a relatable, fun-loving sort.
His favorite jelly beans were made by the Herman Goelitz Candy Company in Oakland. In 1965, Goelitz introduced a mini jelly bean in which the entire bean is flavored (in standard beans, only the shell is flavored, and the center is made of sweet jelly). In 1976, Goelitz introduced “gourmet” candies called Jelly Bellys, which were a quarter the size of regular beans, cost three times as much ($4 a pound), and came in thirty-six flavors including green apple, root beer, very cherry, grape, and Reagan’s favorite, licorice. When he won the presidency in 1980, Jelly Bellys caught the nation’s attention. “Addicts vow” that the candies are “to the ordinary jelly bean what foie gras is to liverwurst,” Time wrote. Their flavors were so nuanced that “the beans should be eaten one at a time, not by the vulgar handful. How else to appreciate the richness of the coffee mocha, the tang of the pina colada, the bouquet of the strawberry daiquiri?” Thanks to Reagan, Goelitz became a “worldwide company overnight,” its CEO crowed, and sales doubled to $16 million a year. In 1981, the company shipped three and a half tons of red (very cherry), white (coconut), and blue (blueberry) beans to Reagan’s inauguration, during which forty million jelly beans were consumed. The White House placed a standing order of 720 bags of jelly beans a month. Some fans crafted jelly-bean portraits of Reagan, and when he died in 2004, people left Jelly Bellys at his grave site.
In the Oval Office, Reagan kept a crystal jar filled with Jelly Bellys on his desk. He’d snack on them, dole them out to visitors, and use them to gauge people’s essential nature. “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful,” he said.
What was Reagan’s essential character? Jelly beans were one way to divert personal questions; humor was another. When asked how he remained so youthful looking, Reagan quipped, “I keep riding younger and younger horses.” With his folksy charm, he made people feel that “you were the most important person in the room,” Michael Deaver said.
Yet Reagan was essentially unknowable. He used “a preternatural affability” to “maintain…his privacy,” wrote the columnist George Will. “He was a very complex, private man and not the ‘hail fellow well met’ that he appeared to be.”
Nancy was more clearly defined. Her parents divorced acrimoniously; she graduated from Smith and worked as an actress. Becoming First Lady was the “role of a lifetime,” every headline declared. Though she assiduously prepared for the role, it was one she never fully inhabited. “You don’t just move into the White House, you must learn to live there,” she recalled. “Life in the mansion is different.”
Dressing in signature red ensembles, inviting Mother Teresa to tea, working for antidrug and pro-education charities, she hoped to build respect. But Nancy’s hunger for approval was so palpable that, like Mary Todd Lincoln, she could be off-putting. Critics faulted her for borrowing gowns from Bill Blass and not returning them, for lavishly redecorating the President’s House (with funds provided by her friends), and for “the gaze”—the adoring, unblinking stare she directed at her husband with big, doe-like eyes. “Ronnie says I should just forget” the critics, Nancy wrote. “But I can’t….Everything I did or said…was instantly open to criticism….My clothes. My friends…The way I looked at my husband! My entire life was suddenly fair game.”
A famously picky eater, she made a breakfast from vitamin pills, orange juice, and a health shake. For lunch, she espoused a lo-cal diet of fruits, steamed vegetables, or California-style salads: avocado slices with orange sections; watercress and alfalfa sprouts; Riverside salad, with radicchio, watercress, and grapefruit in a tangy dressing. She liked chicken pot pie, and fish—especially salmon mousse, broiled trout with kiwi, or swordfish Véronique (baked swordfish napped with lemon butter). At dinner parties she would serve paella Valenciana, a combination of chicken and fish over rice.
When Nancy was at home, President Reagan’s breakfast consisted of bran cereal with skim milk, melon or grapefruit, and decaf coffee. Once a week, she would allow him eggs—scrambled, poached, or soft-boiled—with whole wheat toast or a muffin. Lunch was a bowl of soup in the Oval Office: navy or black bean, Scotch broth with barley, or lentil with diced hot dogs. Like the Eisenhowers, the Reagans liked to plop into soft chairs and eat dinner while watching the evening news. Their “TV dinners” became famous, but they weren’t frozen TV dinners in flimsy aluminum trays: they were full meals on porcelain plates served on folding tables. (The Reagans often watched the evening news, and liked mainstream entertainments like The Carol Burnett Show and The Waltons. The president’s favorite sitcom was Family Ties, whose main character was a Reaganite Republican raised by ex-hippies.)
The minute Nancy left town, Ron would revert to bachelor fare: a thick steak cooked well done, gooey macaroni and cheese, and rich chocolate mousse for dessert. Those items were banned by the First Lady, and the latter was a virtual state secret. “We would have been shot if she ever found out!” Mesnier recalled.
While Henry Haller diplomatically noted that the First Lady was “a sophisticated diner. She has an artist’s eye for visual appeal,” Mesnier considered Nancy “a tough character” who routinely “had a problem with” his desserts. She “never made effusive compliments. It was high praise indeed to hear that everything was fine,” he wrote. When he once added a bit of chocolate to a fruit plate, the First Lady scalded him: “I am the only person who decides what is to be served at White House dinners, Roland. Not you or anyone else…no chocolate!”
Yet there were times when the stern “taskmistress” revealed a surprising sense of humor. One day Mesnier made a hazelnut yule log with chocolate bark and marzipan squirrels and nuts. Displaying the dish to Nancy and her stepdaughter, Maureen, he said in a thick French accent, “Here we see a squirrel eating his nuts.” The ladies burst out laughing. Embarrassed, Mesnier said, “I had no idea that in English the word ‘nuts’ is…slang for ‘testicles.’ ”
The personal and political spheres of White House life were separated by a very thin membrane, and occasionally it burst. Such was the case in September 1981, when President Reagan proposed cutting $1.46 billion from the school lunch program, the oldest federal feeding program in the country. Pitched as a way to reduce “waste” by the Agriculture Department, the cuts would shrink the amount of food in school lunches, lower nutrition standards, and reduce the number of poor children eligible for free food. The plan reduced vitamin requirements and slimmed six-ounce containers of milk to four ounces, but most notoriously it deemed sweet ketchup and relish “vegetables.”
“Ketchup Is a Vegetable?,” headlines jeered. Not only did the administration have “egg on its face, but ketchup too.”
The proposal set off a firestorm as critics noted that the money taken from kids’ lunchrooms was about the same as the $1.44 billion spent on five executive dining rooms at the Pentagon, while Reagan kept federal tobacco subsidies in place. One irate food service director said, “That our young people are not as important as keeping the price of cigarettes down is absolutely criminal.” Reeling, the president claimed he wasn’t aware of the details of his plan and shelved the cutbacks.
By a quirk of fate, the day Reagan announced he was shrinking public school lunches, his wife announced that she had acquired a new set of bone china for the State Dining Room: 4,732 plates, service plates, dessert plates, coffee cups, and saucers—enough to set a formal state dinner for 220 people—at a cost of $209,508. The White House china is produced by Lenox, an American porcelain company that has done the job since Woodrow Wilson ordered 1,700 pieces of tableware in 1918. The Reagan pattern nodded to the Wilson plates, which featured a gold presidential seal—the presidential arms—set on a creamy white background encircled by rings of deep blue and gold. The Reagan pattern used the same design elements but replaced the blue with a band of scarlet red, Mrs. Reagan’s signature color, with gold filigree. The pattern was elegant—but too much so, for those angered by cuts to school lunches.
The new china was long overdue, Mrs. Reagan argued, because the White House had not bought a complete set of china since Bess Truman ordered a green-and-gold set in 1951, and so many plates had been broken over the years that there were not enough pieces in a single pattern for a large dinner party. (Most place settings include twelve to nineteen pieces, from a finger bowl to plates, soup bowls, and a coffee cup.) The Reagans were hosting many more guests than their predecessors—75,761 people dined at the mansion in their first term alone, while the Carters hosted just 47,797 over four years—and the mismatched table service embarrassed the First Lady. Further, the new china was underwritten by private funds, a detail overlooked in the brouhaha. Mrs. Reagan had a point, but like Marie Antoinette allegedly declaring “Let them eat cake” while poor Frenchmen starved, her purchase of fancy china while her husband slashed children’s meals “was a symbol of my supposed extravagance,” Nancy ruefully admitted. “The timing…was unfortunate.”
Food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.
—Anthony Bourdain
Over their eight years in the White House, the Reagans held more official dinners than any other First Couple. They hosted seven kings and three queens, seventy-seven prime ministers, forty-five foreign ministers, thirteen princes, and a sheik at numerous banquets and fifty-two state dinners (or fifty-four, depending on your definition of a state dinner). This feat was just shy of LBJ’s record fifty-five state dinners, but quadruple the number hosted by George W. Bush or Barack Obama. “It was a vital part of our roles as President and First Lady,” Mrs. Reagan said. “And it was a duty that we enjoyed immensely.”
Their wining and dining worked to project power, abundance, and connections on a global scale and, on a personal level, showed the Reagans could compete in Washington. Hovering in the background were the ghosts of the Kennedy parties, the casual elegance and sheer fun of which the Reagans’ almost never matched. Almost.
In November 1984, Ronald Reagan declared it was “Morning in America” and with help from a superheated economy defeated Walter Mondale to win a second term. The following July, the president was diagnosed with colon cancer. After he recovered, he and the First Lady were in need of a pick-me-up. A party, perhaps—but not just any party, a royal party.
In May 1981, the Reagans had hosted a black-tie dinner for Charles, the thirty-two-year-old Prince of Wales and heir to the British Crown. He was engaged to the vivacious Lady Diana Spencer, a dozen years his junior. After a spring feast of roasted saddle of lamb in mint sauce, Reagan gave the prince some advice on marriage. “The step you are about to take is really a very serious step,” he said. “But your sense of humor will carry you through.” Charles was not known for his humor. But Lady Di was adored as “the People’s Princess,” for her coltish looks and outspoken support of AIDS patients and land-mine victims. Only nineteen, she proved a jujitsu master at publicity, alternately flirting with and running away from the paparazzi, which made her all the more desirable.
In 1985, Charles and Diana toured America, culminating in a White House gala on November 9. Mrs. Reagan and her social secretary, Gahl Hodges Burt, brainstormed over how best to harness the Windsor charisma to the Reagan presidency. They consulted with Buckingham Palace and spent months planning: aside from the usual splendid food and entertainment, they learned, the princess would enjoy an after-dinner dance. But the burning question was, who would make a dazzling dance partner for Di? After some head-scratching, they hit on an inspired choice. Arrangements were made.
On the night of November 9, Prince Charles was dashing in a tuxedo with a red carnation in his lapel, but Princess Diana looked stunning as she glided into the White House in a floor-length midnight-blue velvet gown, a diamond-encrusted choker, her thick blond hair cropped stylishly short, her cheeks flushed, her smile bright, her eyes sparkling.
“Nothing short of absolute perfection would do” for Mrs. Reagan, Mesnier recalled. He and Haller were ordered to provide “the finest dinner anyone had ever seen.” The meal began with a fennel-infused lobster mousse and proceeded to a glazed chicken entrée and a profusion of side dishes. For “a distinctly feminine” dessert, Mesnier prepared white chocolate baskets filled with sorbet “peaches,” inside of which was a dark chocolate “pit”; the arrangement was framed by hundreds of handmade sugar flowers.
After dinner the crowd swept into the Entrance Hall, where the marble floor is laid in a pink-and-white checkerboard pattern. The Marine Band tuned up, and Reagan asked Lady Diana to dance. Prince Charles squired the First Lady. At midnight, the party was humming along when Mrs. Reagan nudged a man in the shadows. As he stepped into the light, the crowd gasped: it was the actor John Travolta, famed for his sinuous moves in Saturday Night Fever.
He gamely asked the president if he could cut in. Reagan smiled as Nancy swept him away. With a bow, the actor addressed the princess: “Would you care to dance?” She dipped her head “in that Lady Diana way,” Travolta recalled, and “we were off for fifteen minutes.” The audience cheered, while photographers madly snapped, and the band pounded out the disco beat of “Stayin’ Alive.” The two beautiful people shimmied and whirled across the checkerboard floor as if time were suspended.
Later, Diana would famously struggle with depression, would attempt suicide, and was in the grip of bulimia nervosa. (Like anorexia, bulimia is a mental illness and eating disorder that can lead to death. Superficially, they are opposites: an anorexic believes she is in control of her eating and her life; a bulimic believes she is not in control; in reality, neither sufferer is in control.) But that night with Travolta, Di became “the people’s princess.”
Nancy Reagan beamed. She had finally pulled off a night worthy of Jackie Kennedy—one that fused Ronald Reagan with British royalty, Hollywood celebrity, diplomacy, and domestic politics in one supernova moment. The photographs of Di and Travolta would help define the 1980s, and the evening was hailed as the most famous state dinner of modern times (though technically a state dinner is held in honor of a head of state, which the royals were not).
Mrs. Reagan managed to enjoy herself, and her social coup paid political dividends. It even warmed up the eastern Establishment. “They thought, ‘Those Californians, they don’t know anything,’ ” said Betsy Bloomingdale. “But the Reagans surprised them. Everything was so beautifully done. After a while, the old guard in Washington had to admit that they turned out to be pretty good.”
If the dance party for Charles and Diana represented the peak of the Reagans’ social display, then their state dinner for Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev two years later would prove their most significant diplomatic meal.
In his first term Reagan derided the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire” and led the biggest peacetime military buildup in history. When he deployed Pershing II missiles in Europe and announced the Strategic Defense Initiative—a putative space-based missile shield nicknamed Star Wars—fears of nuclear conflagration leaped. But in his second term, Reagan the hawk transformed into a closet dove.
“Don’t you get it?” he said to friends. “I’m doing this so I can get the Soviets to the table.”
In June 1987, Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and theatrically declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Six months later, the fifty-six-year-old Gorbachev accepted the seventy-six-year-old Reagan’s invitation to arms reduction talks in Washington. They would cap their meetings with the first state dinner for a Soviet leader since Khrushchev dined with Eisenhower in 1959. But it was not the first time Reagan and Gorbachev had broken bread together, and—much like Nixon’s gastrodiplomatic détente with China—the Russian state dinner was the result of years of careful advance work.
In 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev held a series of private dinners, got to know each other, and developed a rapport. Years later, the Russia specialist Jack Matlock recalled that “including private dinners [in the diplomatic process] was built on the idea that these two leaders must not only respect each other but also like each other to accomplish [peace]. It was also a signal to the bureaucracy that it was okay to be friends with the other side….It helped reduce tensions, ultimately. Being friendly…does not achieve everything, but it becomes a lot harder to achieve your common goal if you’re not being friendly.”
On the afternoon of December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated all Pershing II missiles in Europe. That night the Gorbachevs stepped out of a Soviet ZIL limousine and were escorted into the White House by the First Couple. President Reagan wore a tuxedo, and Mrs. Reagan wore a beaded black gown with flowers running up the sleeves. The Soviet leader dressed in a three-piece navy suit (to blunt criticism of bourgeois excess) while Raisa Gorbachev, who had been mocked as a “Gucci comrade” for shopping in Paris, wore a two-piece black brocade gown with a skirt that swished around her ankles.
Meanwhile, Henry Haller—who, after serving five administrations, was the longest-serving executive chef yet—retired to write a cookbook-memoir. In September, he was replaced by Jon Hill, who had cooked in restaurants from Florida to Hawaii, and was the first American-born executive chef. (After just four months on the job, and a handful of state dinners, including the Gorbachev banquet, Hill “quit,” becoming the shortest-tenured White House chef in history; according to “unconfirmed reports,” Mrs. Reagan considered his food “sub-par.” In January 1998, he was replaced by the German-born Hans Raffert, who had cooked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since 1969, and was best known for the charming White House gingerbread models he built every Christmas.)
For the Gorbachevs, Hill devised a menu that featured American ingredients with a Russian spirit: salmon from the Columbia River (where many Russians had settled) with lobster medallions in a caviar sauce; roasted veal loin with wild mushrooms in champagne sauce; zucchini boats loaded with vegetables; a green salad with crushed walnuts and Brie. The meal was paired with fine vintages from California. Mesnier’s dessert was an homage to some of Russia’s favorite flavors: tea sorbet in honey ice cream, served on a large oval platter with fresh raspberries. After dinner the leaders toasted to peace, and the pianist Van Cliburn, the first American to win the Tchaikovsky Competition, in 1958, played Schubert, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms in the East Room. Then, on the spur of the moment, he added the soulful “Moscow Nights,” which the Russian delegation softly sang along to. With that, Gorbachev wrapped the pianist in a bear hug, and promised, “Winter is on the wane.”