The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

To Nancy Reagan, the 1960s were a dark and undisciplined time that devastated our young people and spawned a drug culture. Hollywood, once her spiritual home, often failed in its responsibilities to the young and the nation. Now she and her husband are destined to work and plead and pray harder in the next two years than they did in their first six.

The autumn sun lights on her shoulders as she sits in her White House drawing room, a red-dressed dot of flame that by some alchemy has ignited the nation against drugs. As First Lady, she could have eased up, turned away into antiques or gardening. "But you couldn't, you couldn't, you just couldn't," she says with the fervor of a healer that no one ever imagined dwelled in that 100-lb. frame so elegantly clothed and coiffed. "When you talk to those kids and you talk to those parents who are just torn apart, what it does to these families, and what it -- I mean it's heartbreaking." Her voice cracks just a bit, tears come to her eyes, and she apologizes. She is no Eleanor Roosevelt in health shoes, no Lady Bird Johnson rafting down the Rio Grande or Rosalynn Carter with a briefcase, ready to parley. She is so delicate that she seems to bend with each breath. To her critics, she is the most infuriating, contradictory and perplexing person in this Administration. Yet she could emerge as one of the most notable First Ladies in history.

Her six-year battle against drugs has carried her more than 100,000 miles, through 29 states and 57 cities. She has given 49 speeches and 125 media interviews. She has summoned 17 other First Ladies from around the world to the White House and signed them on to her crusade. This from "Queen Nancy," this from the darling of the couturiers? Whispers in Washington still have it that the drug issue was forced on her by the political handlers. In fact, advisers like Mike Deaver and Sheila Tate argued against it. Too negative, they said. A jungle. "Yes, it was a downer," admits Mrs. Reagan. "They didn't want me to get into it." But get into it she did, and even though the press itself is now fretting that it might have gone overboard in its breathless chronicling of the war on drugs, she is holding firm in her conviction that this is a national tragedy.

She remembers when the crusade was still only a platoon foray and full of peril. "Three hours I spent there," she says of one lonely outing. "And the kids would be crying and the parents would be crying and I was crying. And at the end of it I remember the young person who was conducting said, 'Well, I'm sure, Mrs. Reagan, you'd like to get up and say a few words.' Well, I was so teary and drained, I thought, 'Good night, how am I ever going to get up and say anything?' I struggled out a few words and -- but then, you know, it just went from there."

She could not let go of the tiger's tail. She drove herself. Then last spring one of suburban Washington's own marvels, University of Maryland Basketball Star Len Bias, was found dead of an overdose. In any other city the tragedy might have been buried by larger events. This one belonged to Congress, to the Washington Post, to the lobbyists and lawyers and media of the capital. Suddenly the nation's leaders had to look. Nancy Reagan stood there with her banner high, meticulous in her Bill Blass gown, defying all the laws of political gravity. She welcomed the horde into her caravan, but not without some admonitions. "I don't think throwing a lot of money into this problem is going to solve it. It's going to be solved by people standing up and taking a position that this is wrong and they won't put up with it. It's morally wrong."

Something deep inside Nancy Reagan's soul is still coiled. "I've said this to the kids: You only make this trip once. You'd better make it try to count, and if you're in a position, as we are now, then use it." Nancy's platoon is now an army, and it is marching.