ST. JOHN’S HEALTH CENTER
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
JANUARY 20, 2001
9:05 A.M.
Nancy Reagan sits in a chair next to her husband’s hospital bed, watching a new president being sworn in.
“I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear…”
Ronald Reagan also watches the ceremony, completely unaware that he took that same oath twenty years ago today. There is a faraway look in his eyes as he gazes at the television. It is now seven years since the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Reagan will turn ninety in two weeks. Eight days ago, he broke his hip in a fall at home, and upon his release from the hospital he will be bedridden for the rest of his life. The former president’s rugged physique has grown frail, his daily workouts a thing of the past. His once-broad shoulders are shrunken; the bones in his back are clearly visible, pressing through his thin flesh.
But Ronald Reagan is unaware of his physical condition. He also does not even recognize his own wife. “My mother speaks of the loneliness of her life now,” daughter Patti writes in her journal. “He’s here, but in so many ways he’s not. She feels the loneliness in small ways—he used to put lotion on her back. Now he doesn’t. And in the huge, overwhelming ways—a future that will be spent missing him.”
Nancy knows that her unswerving devotion to her husband made her a target of scorn in their White House days, and for that she makes no apologies. “I’m the one who knows him best, and I was the only person in the White House who had absolutely no agenda of her own—except helping him,” she stated in her autobiography.
The Reagans’ good friend Jimmy Stewart once noted that if “Nancy had been Ron’s first wife instead of his second, he would have been a real star in Hollywood, with a couple Oscars to show for it.”
Instead, Nancy guided him to the presidency. “As much as I love Ronnie,” she writes, “I’ll admit he does have at least one fault: He can be naive about the people around him. Ronnie only tends to think well of people. While that’s a fine quality in a friend, it can get you into trouble in politics.”
In this way, Nancy Reagan had a hand in changing the world. Now, as she and her Ronnie watch the presidential inauguration just hours before Reagan will be released from the hospital, her commitment to him continues. Since the fall, he never leaves the house anymore, other than on those occasions when he is placed in a wheelchair and rolled outside to the patio.
“My father is the only man in the house these days, except for members of his Secret Service detail who occasionally come in,” Patti Davis will write. “It’s a house of women now—the nurses, my mother, the housekeepers.”1
It is a tedious life for Nancy. She remains at her husband’s side night and day, leaving only occasionally to have a Cobb salad and chocolate chip cookies with friends at the nearby Hotel Bel-Air. The relief is needed because Ronald Reagan can no longer do anything for himself. His home office has been turned into a bedroom. There, next to the desk on which he once wrote so many letters and speeches, he spends his days on a hospital bed, tended to by his staff and Nancy. He cannot feed himself or even speak.
He is simply waiting to die.
* * *
“I christen thee United States Ship Ronald Reagan, and God bless all those who sail on her,” says Nancy Reagan on March 4, 2001, standing before a crowd of thousands in Newport News, Virginia. She swings the traditional bottle of champagne, shattering it against the ship’s steel hull. Nancy smiles as the audience of naval personnel and dockyard employees breaks into applause. Her husband would love knowing that a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is being commissioned in his honor.
On this day, she and Ronald have been married forty-nine years. But Ronald Reagan does not know this as he lies almost still, day after day, in California.
“It’s lonely,” Nancy will tell Mike Wallace in a rare televised interview for 60 Minutes. “When you come right down to it, you’re in it alone. And there’s nothing that anybody can do for you.”
* * *
So it is that one year after the USS Ronald Reagan is launched, the Reagans’ landmark fiftieth wedding anniversary comes and goes without fanfare. “There were times I had to catch myself,” Nancy will recall of March 4, 2002. “Because I’d reach out and start to say, ‘Honey, remember when…’”
* * *
Two years later, it is clear that Nancy Reagan’s lonely vigil will soon come to an end.
Ronald Reagan, asleep, is struggling to breathe, unaware that his daughter Patti sits atop his old desk, watching him slip away. Ron Jr. has cut short a Hawaiian vacation and is on his way to California. “We are witnesses to the end of a life,” Patti will write, “and even though we have known this is coming for years, it feels as if we have never considered it as a reality.”
But Nancy Reagan will not say good-bye to her husband. Throughout his decade of decline, she has tended to him as if he were still sound of body and mind. Nancy still sleeps in their bed, keeping as many traditions alive as possible.
From the day they met in 1949, she made it her mission to marry Ronald Reagan and then mold him into the man she thought he could be. She has endured years of scathing attacks, all because of her loyalty to her husband.
Even now, in the midst of what doctors are calling “continual neurological degradation,” Nancy protects the former president. No outsiders are allowed to see him, other than family. Right to the end, she is managing the legacy of Ronald Reagan, even as she struggles to imagine life without him.
“He’s there,” she once told an interviewer, explaining why she could not say good-bye to this man with whom she’d shared a wondrous lifelong journey. “He’s there.”
Two days later, on June 5, 2004, a sobbing Nancy finally acknowledges the reality.
Ronald Reagan is gone.