He became the 40th president of the United States. He won two landslide elections, rebuilt American confidence after a decade that had nearly broken it, and spent eight years in the White House being called the great communicator by people who had never in their lives agreed with each other about anything. But before all of that, he was a divorced man from Hollywood.
And he is to this day the only American president who ever was. He was a man whose first wife left him at the peak of her career and the low point of his. A man whose second wife loved him so completely that when a disease began slowly erasing him from the inside, she spent 10 years watching it happen without ever leaving his side.
Two marriages, two very different women, two stories that illuminate something essential about who Ronald Reagan was and what it actually cost the people who loved him. Tampico, Illinois, and the boy who needed an audience. To understand the man both women married, you have to go back to the beginning, to the specific town and the specific household that produced him.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6th, 1911 in an apartment above a general store in Tampico, Illinois, the younger of two sons of John Edward Reagan and Nell Wilson Reagan. His father, Jack, was an Irish Catholic salesman with a talent for charm and a serious problem with alcohol. A man who could win over a room and lose a month to drinking with roughly equal facility, and whose instability organized the family’s life around the specific anxiety of not knowing which version of Jack was going to come home. Ronald grew
up watching his father’s behavior from the specific perspective of a youngest child who had learned early that warmth and performance were better strategies than confrontation. His mother, Nelle, was the counterbalance. A woman of deep Protestant faith and genuine emotional warmth who threw herself into the community life of the small towns they moved through.
Who performed in local theatrical productions. Who read aloud to her boys and taught them that the expression of feeling was not weakness, but of connection. From her, Ronald learned to perform. From Jack, he learned that charm was a survival mechanism. From the combination, he developed the specific quality that would define his entire adult life.
The ability to be completely present and utterly magnetic in front of an audience. And considerably more difficult to reach when the audience went home. The family moved from Tampico to Monmouth, then to Galesburg, then back to Tampico. Then to Dixon, Illinois. Where Ronald would spend his formative years. Dixon was where he became a teenage lifeguard at Lowell Park.
Where he saved 77 people from drowning over seven summers. Keeping careful count on a log. Which is the kind of detail that tells you something about a young man who needed people to know what he had accomplished. He attended Eureka College on a partial scholarship. Played football. Participated in theater and student government.
And graduated in 1932 into the specific bleakness of the Great Depression job market. He talked his way into a sports announcing job on WOC radio in Davenport, Iowa. And then moved to the larger WHO radio station in Des Moines. Where he became a genuinely popular broadcaster with a gift for making listeners feel they were in the room with him.
His most celebrated broadcasts were his recreations of Chicago Cubs baseball games. He was not at the games, but receiving telegraphic summaries of the action, and then constructing a vivid play-by-play account from the sparse wire information he received. He invented the sounds, the atmosphere, the crowd noise.
He made it feel real. When the wire would go down in the middle of a game and the telegraphic summaries would stop arriving, he would improvise, extending at bats, adding foul balls, filling time with theatrical detail until the wire came back. It was, in retrospect, a perfect preparation for a career in politics, the ability to construct a compelling version of reality from limited information, and to make people believe they were witnessing something true.
He was good on radio for the same reason he would eventually be good in front of a camera and in front of a crowd. He understood, instinctively, how to make a communication feel personal. In 1937, a studio screen test arranged during a trip to California led to a contract with Warner Brothers. He was 26 years old.
He was about to become a movie actor. And on the lot where his career was beginning, he was about to meet the woman who would be his first wife. Jane Wyman, the woman who left. Jane Wyman was, in 1937, already somebody. Born Sarah Jane Mayfield in 1917 in St. Joseph, Missouri, she had come to Hollywood as a teenager and had been working steadily since the early 1930s.
First in small parts, then in increasingly substantial ones, building the career of a serious actress with the specific combination of discipline and ambition that the studio system rewarded in women who were willing to work hard enough. She had already been married once, briefly, by the time she met Ronald Reagan.
She had married a man named Myron Futterman in 1937 and divorced him the following year. She was 20 years old. The marriage lasted months. When she met Reagan on the set of Brother Rat in 1938, a Warner Brothers comedy in which they played love interests, she was a young woman who had already demonstrated a capacity for independent judgment about romantic choices that was ahead of her era.
Reagan was immediately attractive to her, tall, handsome, charming in the specific warm and uncomplicated way that made women in that world feel genuinely seen. He was also, in 1938, a Warner Brothers contract player whose career was clearly going somewhere, and who brought to their courtship the same quality of total presence that had made him good at radio announcing.
When Ronald Reagan paid attention to you, you felt it. She wangled the first date. This is the detail that people who know the story tend to remember. It was Jane who made the first move. Jane who engineered the situation. Jane who decided she wanted this particular man and went about getting him with the specific initiative of someone who understood what she wanted and was accustomed to going after it.
They returned from a personal appearance tour together, organized by the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, whose coverage of the tour in her syndicated column gave the relationship a kind of public imprimatur that accelerated the social inevitability of marriage. On January 26th, 1940, they were married at the Wee Kirk of the Heather Wedding Chapel in Glendale, California.
The early years of the marriage were, by the standards of Hollywood couples, relatively stable. They were both under contract to Warner Brothers. They had complementary careers. Their daughter, Maureen, was born on January 4th, 1941. In 1945, they adopted a son, Michael Edward Reagan, born on March 18th. The fan magazines celebrated them as one of Hollywood’s ideal couples, the kind of coverage that the studio publicity machines manufactured, but that also required some foundation in visible reality to sustain.
World War II changed the dynamic of the marriage in ways that were not immediately obvious, but that proved significant. Ronald had enlisted and was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit, a film production unit that made training films and promotional footage for the Army Air Forces. He was based in Culver City, California, and never went overseas.
He had severely near-sighted eyes that disqualified him from combat duty, but his career stalled for the duration of the war as the best roles went to actors who were either overseas or not in uniform and therefore available for studio productions. Jane’s career did not stall. It accelerated. While Ronald was making military training films, Jane was making movies that mattered.
She appeared in The Lost Weekend in 1945 alongside Ray Milland, the Billy Wilder film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture and for which Milland won Best Actor. And then, most significantly, she filmed Johnny Belinda in 1947. In Johnny Belinda, she played a deaf-mute woman in rural Nova Scotia navigating a world that could not communicate with her on her own terms.
She immersed herself in the role to a degree that was unusual even for the era. She wore earplugs on set, learned sign language, refused to speak during production. The performance was extraordinary. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it in 1948, the same year she filed for divorce from the man who had won nothing notable in several years.
The contrast between their career trajectories in the post-war years is the central fact of what went wrong in the marriage. Jane was ascending to the highest levels of Hollywood recognition. Ronald was struggling to find his footing in a post-war film landscape that was shifting in ways that did not favor the kind of wholesome heroic roles he was suited for.
But the career disparity was the surface of the problem. The deeper issue was what Ronald had become increasingly consumed by in the late 1940s, politics. SAG politics and the wife who stopped being heard. Ronald Reagan’s transition from movie actor to political figure did not begin with his gubernatorial campaign or his famous speech for Barry Goldwater.
It began in the late 1940s when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild and threw himself into the labor politics and anti-communist investigations that were convulsing Hollywood. He was on the SAG board. He He meeting with government investigators. He was testifying. He was attending meetings. He was, by Jane Wyman’s account and the account of people who knew the couple in those years, talking about politics constantly.
In the evenings, at dinner parties, in private moments that might otherwise have been devoted to the marriage. Jane Wyman was not particularly interested in politics. She was interested in her work, in her craft, in the specific discipline of acting that was producing the greatest performances of her career.
She did not share her husband’s consuming passion for the political arguments of the day. She found, as the late 1940s progressed, that she and Ronald were living in the same house, but inhabiting different worlds. That the things he wanted to talk about were not the things she wanted to talk about. And that the emotional availability she needed from the marriage was being consumed by his preoccupation with a public life she did not share.
She filed for divorce in May 1948, citing grievous mental cruelty, the legal language that California divorce law of that era required, which in practice meant the incompatibility and emotional distance that had accumulated, rather than any specific incident of cruelty. The divorce became final in 1949. Reagan was devastated.
He has described the divorce in his autobiography as something that left him feeling that he had failed in the most fundamental personal sense. That the marriage ending was the specific private failure he could not fully process publicly, because the public life he was building did not accommodate that kind of visible vulnerability.
He did not fully understand why it had ended. Or at least he did not publicly articulate an understanding. He described himself in those years as lost. The formal reason cited in the divorce filing was mental cruelty, the legal terminology available in California at the time. But Wyman gave her own account in court testimony that was more specific and more revealing than the legal language suggested.
She described a marriage in which the political discussions that consumed her husband had become relentless and inescapable. In which attending a dinner party with Ronald meant listening to his political opinions for the entire evening, while the other guests either agreed or tolerated him. In which the intimacy of the marriage had been progressively replaced by his preoccupation with a public world she had no interest in inhabiting.
She described feeling invisible in a marriage where the husband’s attention was entirely elsewhere. Reagan, for his part, was initially bewildered by the filing and then deeply shaken. He had not, it seems, fully understood how far the distance between them had grown. He was someone who could read an audience of thousands and completely misread the person sleeping beside him.
That gap between the extraordinary public emotional intelligence and the limited private emotional availability is the central paradox of Ronald Reagan as a person. And it is the thing that his first marriage made visible in the most painful possible way. What happened between the filing and the finalization made the marriage’s ending more painful than it might otherwise have been.
In June 1947, Jane had given birth to a daughter, 3 months premature. The baby, a girl they named Christine, lived for less than a day. The of a child is the kind of grief that either pulls a couple toward each other or reveals the distances already between them. For Ronald and Jane, it revealed the distances.
Both of them grieved. Neither of them appears to have been able to reach the other through the grief in the way that the crisis required. Jane Wyman, after the divorce, continued one of the most distinguished careers in Hollywood. She won her Oscar. At the ceremony in March 1948, she accepted the Academy Award for Best Actress for Johnny Belinda with a brevity and wit that became one of the more celebrated acceptance speeches of the era, noting that she had nothing to say because she had spent so much of the production not speaking.
She continued working in film and television through the 1950s and 1960s, building a career that was genuinely independent of any association with the man she had divorced. She appeared in Stage Fright, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1950. She appeared in The Glass Menagerie in 1950 alongside Kirk Douglas. She starred in the enormously successful Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and All That Heaven Allows in 1955, both directed by Douglas Sirk, which gave her career a second major peak more than a decade after the first.
By the 1960s and 1970s, she was working steadily in television. And then, in 1981, the same year that her ex-husband began his first term as president of the United States, she began playing the powerful matriarch Angela Channing on Falcon Crest, a role she would inhabit for nine seasons and that introduced her to a television generation that knew nothing of the Golden Age Hollywood films that had made her famous.
She married again, twice. Fred Karger, a musician, in 1952, divorced 1955, remarried 1961, divorced again 1965. She never discussed Ronald Reagan publicly after their divorce. Not in interviews, not in memoirs, not in any public forum. She was not visibly bitter. She was simply someone who had made the decision that the past was the past, and who maintained that position for the rest of her life with a consistency that was, in a world where celebrities routinely trade on their associations, genuinely remarkable.
She died in September 2007 at the age of 90, having outlived Reagan by 3 years, and having maintained her silence about the marriage to the end. Ronald Reagan, in the years after the divorce, described himself as wandering. He continued acting. His career was not recovering in the way he had hoped. And then, in 1949, a working actress named Nancy Davis contacted the Screen Actors Guild with a problem that required the attention of the SAG president.
Nancy Davis, the woman who chose him on purpose. Nancy Davis had a problem with a list. It was 1949. The McCarthy era was building toward its peak, and the Hollywood blacklist, the list of performers and writers and directors considered suspected communist sympathizers whose names were circulating through the industry and preventing them from finding work, had created enormous collateral damage for people whose names happened to match the names of people who were actually on the list.
Nancy Davis, a working actress at MGM, had discovered that a name matching hers was appearing in some of those lists. Her ability to work was being affected. She needed someone with authority to clarify the situation. She contacted the Screen Actors Guild. The SAG president was Ronald Reagan. A mutual friend, the director Mervyn LeRoy, arranged a dinner meeting at a Hollywood restaurant called La Rue.
By Nancy’s account, she was immediately taken. By Ronald’s account, he was attracted but cautious. A man who had been recently and painfully divorced and who was not ready to commit to another relationship with the speed that the attraction suggested might be appropriate. They began dating. The courtship lasted nearly 2 years before he proposed, which by the standards of Hollywood relationships of that era was measured and deliberate.
Both of them were clear by the time the relationship was becoming serious that this was something different from what either had experienced before. Nancy Davis had been born Anne Francis Robbins on July 6th, 1921 in New York City. Her biological father, Kenneth Robbins, was a car salesman who was largely absent from her early life after her parents’ marriage dissolved.
Her mother, Edith Luckett, was a working actress who performed in theater and touring productions. A woman of considerable professional resourcefulness who navigated single motherhood and a performing career with more success than most people in that position managed. Young Nancy spent portions of her childhood living with relatives in Bethesda, Maryland while her mother worked.
An early experience of loving a parent whose career put constant demands on their availability. Her mother’s marriage to Loyal Davis reorganized Nancy’s world entirely. Loyal Davis was a prominent neurosurgeon in Chicago, a man of discipline and accomplishment, and strongly conservative political convictions.
The kind of steady, principled male figure whose consistent presence provided a stability that Nancy’s earlier childhood had not consistently offered. Nancy has written about her stepfather in the warmest possible terms, describing him as the most important male influence of her life before Ronald Reagan. He adopted her when she was 14, and she became Nancy Davis, the name she used for her acting career and for the rest of her life.
His conservatism shaped her political orientation long before she encountered Ronald Reagan. His model of a capable and principled man who took his obligations seriously established the specific standard against which she would eventually measure the sage president who picked up the phone when she called about her blacklist problem.
She had attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduated in 1943, come to New York to try acting, found success in theater, and been brought to Hollywood by MGM, where she was a working contract player. She was not a star on the scale that Jane Wyman had achieved. She was a competent and professionally serious actress who had a career and took it seriously.
But she also knew, from very early in her relationship with Ronald Reagan, that the career was not the thing she cared most about. She described in later years the specific quality of how being with Ronald Reagan felt. The total attentiveness, the warmth, the specific gift he had for making whoever he was with feel like the most important person in the room.
She said, in various ways and in various interviews across the decades that followed, that she knew from very early on that this was the person she was going to spend her life with. She had dated other men before Reagan. Clark Gable, Robert Stack, Peter Lawford were among the names mentioned in various accounts.
But none of them had produced the specific feeling that Reagan produced. They married on March 4th, 1952 at the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, a small ceremony with the actor William Holden and his wife Ardis as their witnesses. It was Nancy’s first marriage. It was Reagan’s second. And as of his election to the presidency in 1980, he remained the only divorced president in American history.
Their daughter, Patricia Ann, Patti, was born on October 22nd, 1952, 7 months after the wedding. Their son, Ronald Prescott Reagan, Ron Jr., was born on May 20th, 1958. Nancy also became stepmother to Michael and Maureen from Reagan’s first marriage, a blended family that had its complicated dimensions, as blended families in Hollywood tended to.
The political years, from Sacramento to the White House. The marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan developed in the context of a career that was transforming itself in real time. Ronald’s film career, which had never recovered the momentum of the early 1940s, was redirected in the early 1950s toward a hosting and touring role with General Electric.
He became the host of General Electric Theater, a television anthology series, and spent years traveling the country giving speeches at GE plants and facilities. Those years, the General Electric years of the 1950s and early 1960s, were the years in which Ronald Reagan developed the political ideas and the political voice that would eventually carry him to Sacramento and Washington.
He had been a Democrat, a Franklin Roosevelt admirer, a New Deal supporter in his younger years. The process by which he became the conservative figure who eventually defined the modern Republican Party was gradual, influenced by his conversations with GE’s management, and by the specific concerns about the growth of federal power that those conversations crystallized for him.
He formally registered as a Republican in 1962. Nancy was alongside all of it. Where Jane Wyman had been uninterested in the political turn that Ronald’s attention was taking in the late 1940s, Nancy was engaged by it. Or at minimum, she was engaged by Ronald and was willing to inhabit the world that Ronald inhabited, wherever that world led.
She was not simply a passive follower. She had her own strong opinions and her own strong will. The political world absorbed her as genuinely as it absorbed him, and she became, over the course of the Sacramento and Washington years, one of the most politically influential first ladies since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Not because she shaped policy directly, but because of her influence on the man who shaped policy, and because of her fierce protectiveness of his interests and his image. His campaign for governor of California in 1966 was his first political race. He won it, defeating the incumbent Edmund Brown by a margin that surprised most observers.
He served two terms as governor from 1967 to 1975. He ran for president in 1976 and came close to defeating the incumbent Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, then stepped back and waited. He ran again in 1980 and won in a landslide over Jimmy Carter, carrying 44 states. He was reelected in 1984, carrying 49 states in one of the largest landslide victories in American presidential history.
Nancy’s role in his presidency was one of the most discussed and debated aspects of the Reagan administration. She was, by the accounts of people who served in the White House, simultaneously its most protective force and one of its most influential. She fought personnel battles with a ferocity that made her feared.
She pushed for the removal of aides she believed were not serving Ronald’s interests effectively, and she generally won those battles. The chief of staff, Donald Regan, who had a significant falling out with her, later published a memoir that included the detail about her consulting an astrologer, Joan Quigley of San Francisco, about the scheduling of presidential events.
The revelation emerged after the presidency and generated considerable controversy. The astrology was the detail that the press fixed on, but it was arguably the least significant dimension of Nancy’s influence on the Reagan presidency. The more significant dimension was her role as the person who told the president things that other advisers were reluctant to say, who maintained the access to him that allowed her to shape his understanding of situations and people in ways that his official staff could not easily counter.
She was not the deputy president. She was the person he trusted most completely, and that trust translated into a form of influence that was real and that the people who worked alongside it had to navigate carefully. When Reagan was shot on March 30th, 1981, Nancy’s response crystallized in a single moment the specific quality of her protectiveness toward him.
The bullet had entered his lung and come to rest an inch from his heart. He was in surgery for hours. Nancy sat in the hospital waiting for news, maintaining the public composure that her role required, while, by the accounts of people who saw her in those hours, managing a private terror that the composure barely contained.
When she finally saw him in recovery, her relief was visible in the specific way that feelings are visible when they are too large to fully contain. She told reporters afterward that it was the most frightening day of her life. She later described it as the moment that deepened permanently the already fierce protectiveness she felt toward him, that she had come too close to losing him once, and was never going to let anything she could prevent take him from her again.
The diagnosis and the long goodbye. Ronald Reagan left the White House in January 1989 at the age of 77, and the couple retired to their Bel Air home in Los Angeles with the specific expectation of people who have completed an enormous shared project and are now returning to the private life that the project temporarily displaced.
Nancy wrote her memoirs, My Turn, published in 1989, a candid and occasionally controversial account of the Reagan White House that confirmed her reputation as someone who had very strong views and was perfectly willing to articulate them. They worked on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, which opened in November 1991, and which became one of the most visited presidential libraries in the country.
They traveled. They entertained. They were together in the way they had been for 37 years. In the early 1990s, people who observed Ronald Reagan began noticing things. He would occasionally repeat a story he had already told earlier in the same evening. He would struggle for a word that should have come easily to a man of his verbal facility.
He seemed at moments to lose the thread of a conversation before finding it again. The people who knew him well recognized what they were seeing, even if none of them wanted to name it. In 1994, Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83 years old. He announced the diagnosis himself in a handwritten letter to the American people released on November 5th, 1994.
A letter that was, for everyone who read it, one of the most emotionally direct documents to emerge from his public life. It acknowledged the diagnosis honestly. It expressed his characteristic optimism about what lay ahead for America. And it turned, at its end, to Nancy, noting specifically that he wished there was some way he could spare her from what the illness was going to require of her.
Nancy’s life, from the moment of the diagnosis, reorganized itself entirely around the illness. The decade that followed, from 1994 to his death in June 2004, was what she described as the long goodbye. It was 10 years of exacting caregiving, managing his medication, his daily care, his contact with the outside world, his security.
The specific and relentless logistics of caring for a person with progressive neurological disease in a private home. She rarely left his side for more than a few hours at a time. She was present at the house in Bel Air for the entire decade, with occasional lunches with close friends representing the outer limits of what she allowed herself while he was still alive.
She described the decade to interviewers in terms that made visible both the love and the cost. The long goodbye was also the loneliest thing, she said, because she could not share it with the person it was happening to. She could not say to Ronnie, “This is terrible, isn’t it?” because Ronnie was the one being lost.
She could only be there. And she was there every day for 10 years, watching the disease do what it does. The Alzheimer’s progression in Ronald Reagan was the specific horror of the disease doing what it does, erasing the person systematically from the inside out. He had been, all his life, a man of extraordinary verbal facility and extraordinary memory.
The man who could recall a specific joke from decades earlier and deliver it with the timing of someone hearing it for the first time. The disease took those things first, and then took the people he recognized. And then took the thread of conversation. And then took the recognition of faces he had known for 50 years.
There were days when he did not recognize Nancy. That specific dimension of The Long Goodbye, the husband looking at the wife who has organized her entire existence around him and finding a stranger’s face, is the thing that Nancy described in various interviews after his death as the most painful aspect of the decade.
Not the work. Not the isolation. The moments of non-recognition. Jane Wyman’s daughter, Maureen, Reagan’s daughter from the first marriage, died of cancer in August 2001 while her father was still alive but no longer capable of attending the funeral. Jane Wyman attended, using a cane, and placed a cross on the casket.
It was one of those quiet moments that contained the entire arc of two marriages simultaneously. The father who could not come. The first wife who could. The daughter who had spent her life navigating the space between two families that a single divorce had reorganized and that time had continued to reshape. Ronald Reagan died on June 5th, 2004 at the age of 93 at his Bel Air home.
Nancy was at his side. What two marriages left behind. The two marriages of Ronald Reagan are, in some respects, the most human story in a life that is usually told in the language of political achievement and historical legacy. Jane Wyman was the first wife of a man who had not yet become who he was going to become.
She was, at the time of their marriage, his professional equal, and then his professional superior. The better known actor, the higher earning performer, the person who won the Oscar while he was struggling to find his footing in the post-war film landscape. She left him when the gap between what she needed from the marriage and what the marriage was providing had grown too large to bridge.
When his consuming interest in the political world she did not share had created a distance that neither of them knew how to close. She was not wrong to leave. She was someone who understood that the life she was being offered had ceased to be the life she wanted and who said so when the social world she inhabited made that enormously difficult to say.
Reagan’s description of those years in the aftermath of the divorce was of someone who felt genuinely lost, who had the specific experience of a man who has had the central organizing relationship of his adult life removed and does not fully understand who he is without it. He was not by nature someone who thrived in solitude.
He needed an audience in the public sense and he needed an intimate witness in the private one. And Jane’s departure left him without the intimate witness for several years that he described as among the most disorienting of his life. Nancy provided that witness for 52 years in a way that Jane, by the nature of who she was and what she needed, could not have sustained.
Nancy was not a woman who required Ronald Reagan to be someone other than who he was. She was not a woman who needed him to be less interested in politics or more emotionally available in ways the political life didn’t accommodate. She was someone who found in the man exactly what she had been looking for and who organized her life around protecting and supporting and being present for the person she had found.
Whether Nancy Reagan’s specific quality of total devotion, the willingness to make herself subsidiary to his life and his needs to the degree that she demonstrably did, is something to celebrate or something to view with a certain complexity, is a question that the people who knew her have answered differently.
She herself never seemed to experience it as a sacrifice of anything essential. She experienced it, by all her public accounts, as simply what love looked like when it was real. The complete commitment of one person to another, repeated across 52 years of marriage and a decade of caregiving. She continued, after his death in 2004, to advocate for Alzheimer’s research, becoming one of the most prominent public advocates for federal funding of the research that she hoped might eventually prevent other families from
experiencing what The Long Goodbye had required of hers. She advocated specifically for stem cell research, which put her in complicated political territory, given the conservative base of her husband’s political coalition. She did it anyway. She had outlived Ronald Reagan, and she was going to do what she believed was right.
She died on March 6th, 2016, at her Bel Air home at the age of 94. She was buried beside Ronald at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, beside the man she had described as her whole life, in the ground of the state where they had built everything together, looking out over the mountains.
Ronald Reagan was the only divorced president. He was also, by most accounts of the people who knew both marriages, a man who was loved very differently by the two women he married and who offered something genuinely different to each of them in return. The first marriage was between two people who were each becoming themselves, whose paths diverged when the becoming took them in different directions.
The second marriage was between two people who found in each other exactly what they were looking for and who held on through the assassination attempt and the presidency and the specific merciless progression of a disease that takes everything and never let go. Nancy Reagan once said, describing what it was like to watch her husband disappear into the Alzheimer’s, that the loneliest thing was doing it without him.
She could not share the grief of losing him with him because he was the one being lost. She could only be there. She was there. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
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