Kitty Kelley

I mentioned picking up a biography of Nancy Reagan by Kitty Kelley at Raynes park last month (see reference 1). We have both now had a go and while neither of us had read more than around a quarter of it, it is now en-route to the skip at Sainsbury's. Or at least it will be next Monday, having just missed this week's round.

A book which leaves one thinking that Mrs. Reagan must have been a very odd person whom, inter alia, it did not do to cross. Maybe damaged as a child of a broken home. Or perhaps just the usual traumas of a child of show business. We do have such people nearer home. But one does not think that much better of Ms. Kelley (who shares a double billing with her subject on the dust jacket): what sort of person wants to make a living out of raking up all this sort of stuff?

Mrs. Reagan appears to have been no slouch when it came to getting expensive freebies on the back of her husband's job. Furthermore, both she and her husband made use of astrologers, whom, it is alleged, had some influence of the timing of their various public & private activities. One might have thought that this would not have done them any good with the religious right, but perhaps the Reagans knew better, that the god people were OK with astrologers too. And considering her own colourful life as a young woman, she came down pretty hard on the not so colourful lives of both her step-children and her children. But I focus on one incident which caught my eye.

In the course of planning a visit to Germany in 1985 (pages 433 et seq.), a tricky point in US-USSR relations, someone thought that it would be a good idea for President Reagan to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg. The someone may have thought that there were some US servicemen buried there (there was a base nearby) and probably did not know that of the 2,000 German servicemen who were, some 50 had been members of the Waffen-SS. All this triggered a tremendous row, but Reagan stood his ground, in part because he felt he owed Chancellor Kohl. But his programme was tweaked and he did add a visit to the site of a concentration camp to his itinerary. Mrs. Reagan, it seems, was furious with the someone and wanted the cemetery visit pulled, but did not get her way on this occasion.

Furthermore, although Reagan had a perfectly respectable war as a limited service man (because of bad eyesight) making films for the army in Hollywood, he allowed himself to use words to journalists which suggested something a bit more armed & active - which just made him look silly. An odd slip for someone who was usually so good at that sort of thing.

I don't think I have a view on the merits of the business, beyond a feeling that it was a pity that such a thing still stirred such passions forty years after the event. I wonder what would happen now?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/festival-of-rattle.html.