My Turn, by Nancy Reagan with William Novak, and "What Does Joan Say?" by Joan Quigley
Eastland, Terry
MY TURN: THE MEMOIRS OF NANCY REAGAN Nancy Reagan with William Novak/Random House/384 pp. $21.95 "WHAT DOES JOAN SAY?" MY SEVEN YEARS AS WHITE HOUSE ASTROLOGER Joan Quigley/Birch Lane Press/224...
...Last fall Nancy Reagan told Newsweek that she wrote the book because of what her critics were saying...
...Reagan's handlers for this book...
...It is tempting to blame Mrs...
...Reagan was furious when that happened...
...Almost plaintively, Nancy Reagan concludes her inscription in My Turn with a reference to "my children, who I hope will understand...
...More time might have led her to write a more compelling book—assuming the material for one is there...
...Reagan's care in tending her relationship with her husband has had a variety of consequences, not all of them happy...
...It almost killed me" to leave her, she says...
...Last fall Mrs...
...Reaching out for "help and comfort in any direction you can," she found Quigley (through the middleman Mery Griffin...
...Reagan pleads for understanding: astrology was her way of "coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life...
...Fortunately for everyone concerned, Joan Quigley was discreet...
...But her relationship with "Ronnie" is central...
...W ell, Quigley does criticize, though from Nob Hill...
...I was heavily involved in what happened in the relations between the superpowers, changing Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" attitude...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 43...
...Quigley advised as to which days were "safe" or not for travel, and Mrs...
...I timed congressional arm-twisting, the second Inaugural Oath of Office, the announcement of Anthony Kennedy's Supreme Court nomination...
...For all the support she has given her husband over the years, here she makes clear it is Nancy Reagan in this relationship that is the most important fact of her life...
...N of that My Turn provides any intentional insights into Reagan Administration policy...
...But first things first—this was, after all, a critical point in Reagan's career...
...Yet over the phone, from San Francisco, Quigley routinely advised Mrs...
...As her memoir shows, the quality others sometimes lacked Ronnie had in full supply...
...Reagan has understated it, that Quigley's account is closer to the truth...
...Reagan's book, which itself was a "bounce" of sorts off Donald Regan's memoir, which revealed the astrology business in the first Terry Eastland is The American Spectator 's Presswatch columnist...
...On the evidence presented in her book, she didn't influence policy...
...According to Mrs...
...I picked the time of Ronald Reagan's debate with Carter and the two debates with Walter Mondale...
...And yet there will always be those two women to take into account—First Lady Nancy Reagan and her astrologer, Joan Quigley...
...As Nancy Reagan says, this is a book about relationships: with her mother and stepfather, her husband "Ronnie," her children and stepchildren, some Hollywood friends, Reagan's political aides, the news media, even Raisa Gorbachev (and Joan Quigley...
...Reagan accordingly asked for adjustments in the schedule, some of which she says were made...
...Reagan asked her to "lie"—the "last word Nancy ever said to me"—about their relationship once it became public in May 1988...
...On her own admission, she is the misunderstood woman, and has been for years...
...all extended trips abroad as well as the shorter trips and one-day excursions, the announcement that Reagan would run for a second term, briefings for all the summits except Moscow, although I selected the time to begin the Moscow trip...
...But his treatment of her, which included no protestations based on faith or Scripture (she makes almost no reference to her own faith in this volume), is telling...
...Reagan published her memoir, and now Quigley has come out with hers...
...Reagan does not ask whether her husband should have sometimes been less understanding...
...What kind of protection would that have been...
...Mrs...
...Again, the point was to "protect Ronnie...
...Never, writes the First Lady, did Quigley influence policy...
...There is much silliness here, including the observation that the press is ruled by Pluto...
...in fact, she is estranged from her parents, writing thinly veiled, unflattering fiction about them...
...Hard as her life may have been, others have had it harder...
...There are some affecting portraits drawn, most notably of her mother Edith, and her stepfather, Dr...
...Reagan seems to have gone about the task without sufficient care...
...Reagan, her relationship with Quigley was the result of the assassination attempt on her husband in March 1981...
...I don't expect anyone will want to bounce off Quigley's tome, in part because it also happens to be an apologia pro astrologia, with charts and a glossary of terms...
...The reasons are evident...
...Mrs...
...Reagan has...
...She never comes to grips with a key question about her tenure as First Lady: Did she always use her position of influence upon the President wisely...
...place...
...But how influential was she...
...To do so would be unsettling...
...Quigley even tries to reconcile astrology with the Bible...
...17.95 Terry Eastland R onald Reagan was the first Presi- dent in fifty years to redirect both domestic and foreign policy while achieving re-election and maintaining party unity...
...Or: "He seems to need only one other person—me...
...On the other hand, it may be accurate...
...Once or twice a month, she phoned Quigley to review her husband's schedule for the next few weeks...
...Ronnie always understood, even if he or she, or both, or even their children, might be hurt by whatever she was doing from (always) good intentions...
...What if Quigley hadrevealed it to the wrong people, even inadvertently...
...Also, one has to wonder whether the public-relations conscious Nancy Reagan everpassed this book around to the politically astute friends often mentioned in the text—people like Katharine Graham and Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post...
...I'm also prepared to believe Quigley's claim that Mrs...
...I know: it's odd to call Quigley's book a memoir...
...The President was right about that...
...Here is her review of My Turn, from the first page of What Does Joan Say?: "What she has left out about the way she used astrology and my ideas would fill a book," namely, the one that follows, which she summarizes at the outset: I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs and landings of Air Force One...
...My Turn has not been well received...
...For example, her memoir does not take up the serious question of whether she should have been concerned about the potential danger to her husband resulting from Quigley's intimate knowledge of his schedule...
...Loyal Davis...
...Otherwise, it's hard to explain why a famous ghostwriter (William Novak), a top agent (Morton Janklow), and a prestigious publisher allowed this work to appear in its current form...
...I respect a wife's protecting her husband, especially one who is President (although lying raises its own set of questions...
...MY SEVEN YEARS AS WHITE HOUSE ASTROLOGER Joan Quigley/Birch Lane Press/224 pp...
...It'll remain for Lou Cannon and Edmund Morris, Reagan's biographers, to tell us more about Nancy's roles as wife and First Lady than Mrs...
...Almost everyone else has...
...Improved relations, glasnost and perestroika may, in some small measure, have come out of this...
...To Ronnie, who always understood," the book's inscription begins...
...Nancy Reagan was right about that...
...When Patti was three months old, Mrs...
...It is essential to her self-understanding that her husband must feel as she does...
...One cannot read parts of this memoir without feeling great sadness for all the Reagans...
...Reagan admits that she has been a better wife than mother...
...One of the few bits of news in her memoir is the fact that the President, a man of publicly avowed Christian faith, didn't know what his wife was up to...
...Her relationship with Quigley, which she characterizes as a "crutch" that became a "habit," lasted until Regan revealed it in 1988...
...That newspaper savaged her book, and I can't imagine that Graham or Greenfield—or any other of her wise friends—ever saw a draft...
...Mrs...
...Reagan proudly recalls her husband's reply...
...Amazingly, she writes almost nothing about her anti-drug effort...
...He was almost certainly the most successful and most influential President since Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Reagan trivializes and passes by important questions...
...Nancy Reagan paid her privately, but relax, you ethicists: a First Lady can do that...
...I recreated Nancy's image, defused Bit-burg, erected a chart for the INF Tieaty...
...I suppose she's entitled to write her account of the Reagan years...
...Mrs...
...At some point—it will take a brave reporter to determine precisely when—she finally did tell him about her "private project...
...Quigley's book is a "bounce' off Mrs...
...If it makes you feel better, go ahead and do it," he said, adding that it might look "a little odd if it ever came out...
...My life didn't really begin until I met Ronnie," she writes...
...Patti to this day remains the most distant of the Reagan children...
...Reagan for almost the entire Reagan presidency...
...My Turn is not Nancy Reagan's best profile...
...No immodest woman, Joan Quigley...
...She writes unbalanced, negative appraisals of key aides, such as James Baker, who contributed much to her husband's political success...
...The same reason that the First Lady hired Quigley in the first place: to "protect Ronnie...
...Yet from her own account Mrs...
...Here as on other occasions with aides and associates, Reagan was willing to indulge or ignore rather than deal with the matter at hand...
...I was seeing and reading what was said and it was very frustrating not to say, `That's not the way it was.' " Frustration unfortunately shaped composition...
...Reagan also didn't think it important to tell her husband at the outset about how she was "protecting" him, thanks to Quigley...
...She used Quigley's "astrological advice" to "protect Ronnie...
...And she is the queen of "woe-isme...
...I delayed President Reagan's first operation for cancer . . . and chose the time for Nancy's mastectomy...
...Don't criticize me," she writes, "until you have stood in my place...
...Reagan left her with a housekeeper while she went to be at Ronnie's side during a two-week turn he did at a nightclub in Las Vegas...
...I [became] the laughingstock . . . the 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 butt of countless jokes on television, radio, and in the press...
...Just how long he was in the dark, Nancy Reagan does not say...
...All of their children "have felt at one time or another that Ronnie and I were so devoted to each other that there wasn't room for them in our affections, and that they were somehow left out...
...But as to Quigley's influence upon the President's daily schedule of events, including trips and the like, I'm prepared to believe that Mrs...
...I don't think he willever forgive Don Regan for writing that book...
...She never worked in the White House nor was she on the government payroll...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
