Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [74]
On December 7, 1941, the debate between isolationists and interventionists was rendered moot by Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A day later, the United States Senate, with only one dissenting vote, declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America was at war whether it wanted to be or not. And suddenly the world apart didn’t seem so far away from the rest of the world and its problems after all.
C H A P T E R S I X
NANCY AT SMITH
1939–1944
I was in Chicago in September 1941, until I went into the Navy in late 1943. I was doing the evening news on WBBM at the time and narrating one of the soap operas as well. Edith Davis was one of the people around WBBM, and we would drink occasionally in the Wrigley Building bar—
WBBM was in the Wrigley Building. She was a very attractive, interesting woman. If she was bawdy, she was bawdy in a funny way. She was just a funny woman who was enjoying her life and was very happy to have met Loyal. I got to know her and her child. Her child was very ladylike, a Smith girl, with the Peter Pan collar and the black patent leather shoes and the white gloves and the pearls. Nancy was—her father’s darling. Utterly, utterly unlike her mother.
Mike Wallace to author,
May 30, 2002
After high school, I went to Smith College, where I majored in English and drama—and boys.
Nancy Reagan,
My Turn 1
IN THE SUMMER OF 1939, RICHARD DAVIS, NANCY’S STEPBROTHER, CAME
to live with Edith and Loyal in Chicago, after his mother died of tuberculosis in California. “Nancy was terribly nice to me,” Richard recalled. “She never said, ‘Well, I’m sorry your mother died,’ but she was very kind. Of course, she was going out with boys, and they would always take me along to the movies. We had a lot of fun together as a teenager and a college student.”2 Though Nancy and Richard had hit if off from the time they met as children, a closeness was established between them during these years that would last for the rest of their lives, perhaps because they were both 1 2 1
1 2 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House only children, of opposite sexes, and far enough apart in age so that they didn’t threaten each other’s position in the family. “My most positive memories of Nancy are from those days,” he said. “She was a very happy person. She had a great smile, she was always laughing, she was the life of the party.”3
That fall Nancy started her freshman year at Smith College. She had promised Dr. Loyal that she would complete at least a year of higher education before pursuing an acting career, but she soon discovered that life at the exclusive girls’ school suited her. Situated on two hundred acres in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith, with 2,500 students, was the largest of the prestigious group of women’s colleges known as the Seven Sisters. It had been founded in 1875 with a bequest from Sophia Smith, a deaf local spinster, with “the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”4 Nancy arrived at the end of the tenure of Smith’s greatest president, William Allan Neilson, who had vastly expanded the campus and the curriculum, transforming the high-minded provincial retreat into an internationally recognized liberal arts institution, well known for its Junior Year Abroad Program, which he started in 1924.
Tuition, room, and board were $1,000 a year, and Nancy received an allowance of $100 a month.5 Students lived and took their meals in residences called cottages, which were staffed by uniformed maids. For her first two years Nancy roomed with her friend from Girls Latin Jean Wescott, and struggled with the required courses, particularly science and math.6
Her first college boyfriend, Frank Birney Jr., was also from Chicago. The son of a banker, Birney had attended