Nancy Reagan: Style With Substance

On Sunday, we learned that former first lady Nancy Reagan had died of congestive heart failure in California at the age of 94. We learned this amid the cacophony of pronouncements from the men and the woman who would be president, several of whom invoked the name of Ronald Reagan. We learned this even as a movie company had been reenacting the 1963 funeral of President John F. Kennedy for the film “Jackie,” starring actress Natalie Portman as a first lady, who, like Nancy Reagan, seemed to embody glamour and class.

The news, the day, the time, summoned thoughts of a more recent presidential funeral, when the life of Nancy Reagan’s husband was celebrated at the National Cathedral in 2004. The iconography and the memories, 40 years apart, ran parallel: de Gaulle, the brothers Kennedy, John John saluting the coffin, the widow, the former presidents; then, later, the son of Reagan’s vice president (and a president himself), Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. In California, where the president was laid to rest, Nancy Reagan laid her head on the coffin and kissed him goodbye.

Presidents and their families and extended families are never far from our minds, especially during a year when we will choose the next occupant of the highest office in the land. So the news of the passing of Nancy Reagan triggered a host of emotions, especially if you’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for any length of time. What we know mixed with what we remember: inauguration day, the Reagans waving to the crowds, jets overhead, hearing about the release of the hostages. Yes, Nancy was wearing red.

The more time that passes, one realizes that there are not only second acts in American life, but third and fourth acts — especially, it would seem, among actors and presidents. Not only was Ronald Reagan the first actor to become president, but Nancy was the first actress to become first lady. Now they were playing out their roles in public.

He was the jovial, magnetic, charismatic, eternally optimistic and sunny conservative. She was the adoring wife, the fashion plate, the small, thin queen, a very protective and often controversial first lady.

The thing people seem to remember most was how tightly and intensely held a marriage the Reagans had, the kind that few couples achieve. But Nancy had her own style — sometimes bordering on the ostentatious in times that were often difficult for lesser beings — and she brought dazzle and light to a time that her husband had decreed to be “morning in America.”

They lived in a drama: the assassination attempt, the overture to the Soviet Union, White House controversies, “Just Say No,” the AIDS epidemic, Iran-Contra and so on.

Maybe the bravest things she did came after. In Reagan’s fading and twilight years, she showed the depth of her devotion, caring for him as he moved through the stages of Alzheimer’s, which finally robbed him of the memories of his own large life and their life together. In so doing, she battled the GOP on stem cell research, which may yet help in the fight against the disease.

After more than 50 years by her husband’s side, in the end she was alone, diminished physically, but grown to a size that matters in the imagination, in history, in our collective memory.