Nancy Reagan, protector of former president's legacy, dies at 94

Former first lady Nancy Reagan, the indispensable partner and protector of the nation's 40th president who became a fierce advocate in the fight against the disease that stole him from her, has died, the Reagan Library announced on Sunday. She was 94.

"Her romance with Ronald Reagan was a storybook love story," said historian Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Reagan Diaries. "She is the one who deserves credit for orchestrating the great legacy that is Ronald Reagan."

"She was a true partner to the presidency,'' Anita McBride, a chief of staff to former first lady Laura Bush, said in an interview Sunday with CNN.

In a statement, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama said they were "fortunate to benefit from her proud example, and her warm and generous advice" when they arrived at the White House.

"Our former First Lady redefined the role in her time here," they wrote. "Later, in her long goodbye with President Reagan, she became a voice on behalf of millions of families going through the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s, and took on a new role, as advocate, on behalf of treatments that hold the potential and the promise to improve and save lives."

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that in many ways the Reagan love story was "classic Hollywood, but it was unmistakably human too. Hands intertwined, Nancy and Ron rose to the pinnacle of political power, weathered cancer and personal heartbreak, and braved the depths of Alzheimer's cold embrace — always together. I know every American felt Nancy's immense pain when she, kissing Ronnie's casket, mouthed a tearful farewell to the best friend she once said she couldn't imagine life without."

Moment of silence held for Nancy Reagan during debate

Nancy Reagan often said, "My life didn't really begin until I met Ronnie." She will be buried beside him on a hilltop at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. There, at the president's funeral in June 2004, much of the world watched the tearful widow lean over his coffin to say farewell as the sun set over Simi Valley.

Gone was the so-called 'dragon lady' whom her press secretary, Sheila Tate, said could make the most powerful White House aide shake with fear. Nearly forgotten were the closets of designer gowns and cabinets of expensive china that she preferred, and for which she was criticized. Even her unblinking gaze of connubial adoration -- The Gaze, reporters called it -- that so annoyed feminists seemed forgiven.

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In her place was a frail, barely 5-foot-4-inch bird of a woman who had spent a decade losing her great love to Alzheimer's disease, and who, after 52 years, had finally let him go.

She never stopped grieving. "I miss him now more than I ever did," she told CNN's Larry King in June 2007. Despite a tight circle of friends and her work at the Reagan Library, "I'm lonely because I don't have him."

The Reagans' fierce devotion — their children complained they felt like outsiders in their own family — was legendary. It was also polarizing. She was criticized as an overzealous gatekeeper for her husband, who called her "Mommie." Yet some who knew them say the out-of-work actor who'd been divorced by his more famous first wife, Jane Wyman, might well have remained a Hollywood has-been had he not met a B-movie starlet named Nancy Davis.

"I don't think he would have ever got elected governor (or) president if she wasn't his wife," said Stuart Spencer, who managed Reagan's California and national campaigns. "She was that important to him. She was the anchor."

'I thought I married an actor'

In Hollywood or Washington or on the campaign trail, "She was the perfect supporting actress in that she always made Ronnie look good," said Bob Colacello, author of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan: Their Path to the White House.

She was born Anne Francis Robbins in New York City on July 6, 1921, but later shaved two years off her age. Her father, Kenneth Robbins, was a used-car salesman who soon skipped out of his marriage and his daughter's life. Her mother was Edith Luckett, a stage actress. Silent movie star Alla Nazimova was godmother to the girl everyone knew as Nancy.

Divorced, Luckett toured in acting companies to earn money, leaving Nancy, then 2, with Luckett's sister in Bethesda, Md. She didn't retrieve her until six years later, when Luckett married prominent Chicago neurosurgeon Loyal Davis. The family settled down to a life of privilege at his home on tony Lake Shore Drive. Show business friends like "Uncle" Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy visited when they passed through town.

Tracy helped Nancy Davis, who had taken her adopted father's surname, get a screen test in Hollywood. She signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1949 and went on to appear in 11 movies. Most, she wrote in her memoir, My Turn, were "best forgotten."

She wrote that the two people who became the Reagans metafter she learned in 1949 that her name was on an industry blacklist of Communist sympathizers. Suspecting a mix-up with another Nancy Davis, she contacted the Screen Actors Guild for help. The union's president was Ronald Reagan. And, in a story varnished into lore by the Reagans, their meeting led to romance.

Reagan was on the downside of his acting career and on the rebound after Wyman divorced him and took custody of their children, Maureen and Michael. After an on-again, off-again courtship, he and Nancy were married in a private ceremony on March 4, 1952. Seven months later, daughter Patti was born.

"When I married Ronnie, I thought I married an actor," Reagan would write. They did co-star in the 1957 potboiler Hellcats of the Navy. By then, he was a spokesman for General Electric and learning he had a politician's gift of gab.

'She had one constituent'

Nancy Reagan had been the breadwinner for a short time, but eventually she gave up acting to stay home with Patti and son Ron, born in 1958. She had a new career: Ronnie.

"She had one constituent," said chief White House speechwriter Ken Khachigian, "and that was Ronald Reagan."

Nancy Reynolds, a former aide and close family friend, recalled traveling on a plane with Nancy Reagan a few weeks after her husband was elected governor of California in 1966. A man behind them was griping about Reagan's stance in a budget battle in Sacramento. "She pushed her seat back, looked him right in the eye and said, 'That's my husband you are talking about and you don't have the facts straight,'" Reynolds recalled. "Then she clicked the button that brought the seat up. She wasn't shy."

As a newly hired speechwriter during the 1980 presidential campaign, Khachigian sat knee-to-knee with the Reagans in the backseat of a limousine. As the candidate known as "The Great Communicator" pored over his prepared speech, his wife told the aide, "You need to know that Ronnie is best when he's stirring the emotions in his audience."

If she knew her husband best, her ability to gauge others was keen, too. In his autobiography, An American Life, Ronald Reagan wrote that his wife "was gifted with a special instinct that helped her understand the motives of some people better than I did."

The president, whose 1984 re-election campaign theme was "Morning in America," was "a bit whimsical and liked people of all stripes and persuasions," Brinkley said. "Nancy had a built-in danger detector. She would weigh in constantly on who to trust and who not to trust."

Her antennae for those more interested in their own agenda than her husband's made her the unofficial White House "personnel director," said Spencer, the campaign manager. "He never fired anybody in his life. But she had no qualms about bringing the hammer down if they weren't doing the job right."

That would become apparent in Reagan's second term. But in the first, it was Nancy Reagan who got clobbered by the media over her elegant tastes in a time of national belt-tightening.

'A new Jackie'

After the frugal Carter years of turned-down thermostats and cardigan sweaters, Nancy Reagan moved into the White House determined, as she later wrote, "to reclaim some of the stature and dignity of the building."

The first lady raised money to renovate the executive mansion, which had grown shabby. She ordered the first complete set of White House china since the Truman administration. She hosted lavish parties and 57 state dinners, inviting old Hollywood pals like Frank Sinatra and close friend Merv Griffin. Top fashion designers like Halston, Adolfo and Galanos provided her size 4 evening gowns, often in her signature "Reagan Red."

"She was so obviously trying to be a new Jackie (Kennedy) and restore the elegance and haute couture," said Kati Marton, author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History.

But times had changed. The country was in a recession.

Controversy greeted the Reagans' call for private donations to renovate the White House living quarters when it was disclosed amid an oil crisis that some of the money raised came from the energy industry. Although a private foundation footed the $200,000 bill for new dishes, the news broke the day the Agriculture Department promoted ketchup as a vegetable on kids' lunch plates. And the public didn't appreciate that Reagan failed to return expensive borrowed gowns and jewelry.

As more women entered the workforce, Reagan's total devotion to her husband seemed to some like a throwback to an earlier era, Colacello said. "Her timing was wrong. She came in at the height of feminism, when things like china and fashion were passé." A December 1981 Gallup poll showed Reagan was the least popular first lady since 1960.

Part of the first lady's problem, Colacello said, was that the media were unable to lay a glove on the "Teflon president" and instead "took it out on Nancy." (The president endorsed that theory.) Her "Just Say No" campaign against drugs became a punchline for late-night comics. Michael Deaver, a White House aide and one of Nancy Reagan's closest confidantes, wrote that she was the "flypaper first lady."

She earned "a second beginning" in the spring of 1982 when she staged a surprise performance at the Gridiron Dinner, the annual white-tie gathering of Washington's journalism and power elite. Wearing bag-lady clothes, fake pearls and a red straw hat, Reagan sang a parody called Second-Hand Clothes and topped it off by smashing a piece of china.

The skit won over skeptics. Reagan wrote: "From that night on, my image began to change."

A mistake to underestimate her

Her Gridiron triumph was nearly a year to the day after she "came within an inch of losing the man I love." The March 30, 1981, assassination attempt on the president convinced her that "I had to be more involved in seeing that my husband was protected in every possible way."

After the shooting, "her neurotic paranoia and need to control every detail of their lives really served her husband very well," Marton said. "He could pretend nothing bothered him because he knew everything bothered her, and Nancy was eternally vigilant."

One way was to consult an astrologer to help plan her husband's schedule. That riled Donald Regan, her husband's chief of staff in the second term. He also didn't like constant calls from the boss' wife. Regan, underestimating the power the first lady wielded, had even hung up on her.

That, said Khachigian, brought his downfall. "What Mrs. Reagan said almost always reflected the president. People at their peril would think that the first lady was freelancing when she passed along a piece of advice or an instruction."

She enlisted Washington power broker Robert Strauss and trusted White House aides to engineer Regan's ouster, made all the more urgent after the biggest scandal of her husband's presidency — the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal -- erupted on his watch.

"When Nancy was sidelined, that's when he got in trouble, like Iran-Contra under Don Regan," Marton said. "She would have smelled trouble with Ollie North," the National Security Council staffer charged with illegally funneling money to Nicaraguan rebels.

Reagan had her own ideas for her husband's legacy. Marton said she was instrumental in encouraging detente with the Soviet Union, leading Reagan "away from his 'evil empire' posture toward a role as a man of peace."

"Even though she wasn't a policy person, she knew what was going on," White House aide James Kuhn said in a University of Virginia oral history interview. "She had a major role in getting him to engage the Soviet Union. She was the one who worked on him the most, to open up his mind."

After a second term that saw him survive colon cancer surgery and her undergo a mastectomy for breast cancer, the Reagans retired to their California ranch. It wasn't all that long after they left the White House that the former president began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. In 1994, he wrote a letter to the American people to say he was withdrawing from public life.

"Finally she had her beloved Ronnie all to herself," Marton said, "and basically he ceased to be who he had been. It was the greatest tragedy of her life."

Over the next decade, the woman who had loved to travel became a full-time caregiver. She left their Bel Air home only on rare occasions, almost always to burnish his legacy, as when she christened the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Sometimes Reagan, who for years fought off rumors of anorexia and whom Colacello said lived on Cobb salads and chocolate chip cookies, caught a quick lunch with friends at the Bel Air Hotel before rushing home to her husband.

As she watched her soulmate taken "to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," Reagan spoke out in favor of embryonic stem cell research and its promise in treating Alzheimer's. That put her at odds with many, including President George W. Bush, in what had become "the party of Reagan."

Reagan's embrace of the stem-cell issue "earned her a lot of credibility, the way she was willing to speak up for that and cut against the grain of the Republican Party," her son Ron, a liberal talk show host, told Colacello in a July 2009 Vanity Fair article.

When Obama reversed Bush's policy limiting federal dollars for research, Reagan issued a statement that she was "very grateful" and said, "These new rules will now make it possible for scientists to move forward."

Obama thanked Reagan but, to her and others' surprise, did not invite her to the White House announcement ceremony. "Politically, it would have been a good thing for him to do," she later told Colacello in Vanity Fair. "He could have gotten more mileage out of it."

By then, the public that had seen her "as the pampered, precious, self-indulgent first lady," Khachigian said, had changed its view. "She became a much more sympathetic figure. She was not out flitting around and socializing. She was by (her husband's) side during a very difficult time. People saw she had qualities that they had overlooked."

Among them was daughter Patti Davis, from whom she had been estranged for years. Nancy Reagan wrote in her 1989 memoir that she had probably been a better wife than mother and said, "I hope and pray before my own life is over" to reconcile with Patti.

Shortly before the former president was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she got her wish. The wildest of the four Reagan children, who had publicly derided her father's conservative views and written that her mother had abused her, moved back to Los Angeles in 1997 to be near her parents.

Before Ronald Reagan died, Davis said in a 2004 interview with NBC, he opened his eyes in "this moment of just utter clarity looking straight at her. And he closed his eyes and he took his last breath."

Nancy Reagan would live nearly a dozen more years. Occasionally, she appeared at events as her husband's standard-bearer, as at the 2008 GOP presidential debate at the library. That October, she fell and fractured her pelvis, forcing her to use a walker and then a cane.

She tried, as her deteriorating health allowed, to lead a full and meaningful life. Yet "it was never the same for her" after Reagan died, Reynolds said. "She lost her true other half."

Now, the two halves are whole again.

Contributing: Rick Hampson