I Love You, Ronnie by Nancy Reagan

life—which, I guess, it was. It was such a wonderful place. I had heard so much about it and was so anxious to see it, and was happy to find it was all I had hoped for. Jimmy Carter had at one point considered selling it—he hadn’t, thank God (he discovered that he liked it). But when we first started going out there, it needed some work. I did some gardening and some work on the cabins, which I really enjoyed. And Ronnie enjoyed himself in his own usual ways—being outside and riding, in particular. The Secret Service didn’t want him going too far at first, but as time went by, he’d suggest adding a little more to the trail and then a bit more and a bit more, until, by the end, he had the kind of substantial ride he was used to.
    Sometimes, just the two of us went to Camp David (that is to say, the two of us plus the Secret Service, the White House doctor, someone from the press office, and other White House staff—that’s solitude during the presidency). Sometimes Ron and his new wife, Doria, would come, or a couple of close friends, like Charles and Mary Jane Wick and their children. But we never made a big social event out of it. What we really enjoyed doing there was relaxing, wearing blue jeans, reading, riding horses, watching movies—just generally doing the kinds of things that we’d always done on the ranch back home.
    I think that’s largely why we didn’t find Washington strange or lonely the way many people who move there from other places say they do. We were still together all the time, and we were still us—with Ronnie on the left side of the bed and me on the right, waking up with our breakfast trays and our King Charles spaniel, Rex, a gift from Pat and Bill Buckley, jumping into bed between us. We added many new people to our lives who are still friends. Of course, living in the White House, if we wanted to make new friends, we had to reach out—just as anyone who moved to a new city has to do.
    Making these new friends and bringing them home to Ronnie was part of the fun for me, and a big part of what I saw my job to be as first lady. There was also the work I’d begun in California: the Foster Grandparents and the drug program. The drug program, now on a national scale, took a lot of time. But it was also particularly rewarding.
    Its best-remembered slogan, “Just Say No,” had actually come into being during a visit to a school in Oakland. I was talking to a class of fifth graders when a little girl raised her hand and said, “Mrs. Reagan, what do you do when somebody offers you drugs?”
    “Well,” I had said, “just say no.”
    Somehow that caught on. I’m sure people thought it was a PR strategy that we’d worked out in the White House, but it really came about by accident. Obviously, it wasn’t the whole answer to the drug problem, but it was useful and effective. It became a rallying point. You saw it on milk cartons and billboards, and you still hear it used today. I’ve always been proud of that, and of the work we did.
    At the top of my list of duties as first lady, though, was taking care of Ronnie. I still considered that to be my most important job, as it had always been. For that matter, I do believe that taking care of the president is the most important thing a first lady can do—the essential thing, in fact, that she
must
do—because she is the person in the White House who knows him best. There are other people around who are supposed to take care of everything else—his scheduling, his briefings, his cabinet, his relations with the press. But the first lady is the only one who can really take care of the president’s personal needs. She’s the only one who really knows what’s needed—at least, I think she should be.
    Sometimes, though, at the most important moments in the president’s life, you just can’t be there. Try as you might, you can’t always protect him from the outside world.

    I’m getting off the horse at Camp David, in the way Ronnie