Ronald Reagan’s family was the ‘most dysfunctional I’ve ever known,’ a famed economist friend of the former first couple reveals in a major biography of the former President.
Arthur Laffer said that he was appalled at how Reagan and his second wife Nancy treated their own children and her two stepchildren in an upcoming book by Washington Post columnist Max Boot.
In the book, Reagan: His Life and His Legend, Boot writes about how Reagan was more devoted to Nancy than his own kids and said he would have preferred it if their son Ron hadn’t been born.
Nancy caused a great rift in the family with the children, who said the 40th president never stood up for them or wanted to hear their side of the story.
The First Lady was a ‘schemer and a snob obsessed with social standing’ who used to hit her daughter Patti Davis, Boot writes in the book, which is out on September 10th.
Nancy ‘froze out’ Reagan’s two children from his first marriage to actress Jane Wyman and forbade mention of Wyman’s name in her home, Boot revealed.
Ronald Reagan’s family was the ‘most dysfunctional’ as Nancy’s sour relationship with their children and his outward devotion toward his wife wreaked havoc in their household
Economist Arthur Laffer said that he was appalled at how Reagan and his second wife Nancy treated their children in Max Boot’s upcoming book
She ruled their home with an ‘iron hand’ and was called ‘Dragon Lady’ by Maureen Reagan, her stepdaughter.
Nancy even told Reagan’s adopted son Michael to change his name and move out of their home – where he slept on the sofa – because his teenage bad behavior was ‘not living up to the Reagan name’.
Boot’s book, which took a decade to write, takes a sweeping view of the Reagan’s life, including his troubled relationship with his family.
According to Boot, Reagan’s aversion to conflict came from growing up with an alcoholic father.
But Nancy was happy to step in and give orders to her husband, who was used to taking direction from his career as an actor.
Reagan was so devoted to Nancy that it seemed to ‘exceed his devotion to his children’, Boot, a former staunch conservative, who lost his faith in the Republican party after Donald Trump was elected president, wrote.
Ronald and Nancy’s daughter Patti was born in 1952 via C-section after a difficult pregnancy. In his diary, Reagan wrote: ‘In that moment her arrival didn’t impress me much.’
Regarding their son Ron’s birth six years later, also by C-section, Reagan wrote: ‘Personally, I would have settled for the three of us.
‘I grew frightened every time I remembered that long night Patti was born, and I didn’t want to take chances with a happiness already so great I couldn’t believe it.’
Boot writes that there was little doubt that Reagan’s ‘primary source of happiness was his wife, not his children’.
That extended to matters of discipline, where Reagan always sided with Nancy.
Nancy ruled their home with an ‘iron hand’ and was called ‘Dragon Lady’ by Maureen Reagan, her stepdaughter. They are pictured at the 1952 premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire
Nancy’s stepchildren Michael, now 79, and Maureen, who died in 2001 aged 60, were frozen out by the First Lady, Boot claims
Ron Reagan, 66, is now a liberal commentator who calls himself ‘an unabashed atheist’ in advertisements for the group Freedom From Religion. His sister Patti Davis, 71, received regular beatings at the hand of her mother
According to the book, Nancy was ‘strong-willed’ and ‘found it easy to manipulate her easygoing, uxorious husband who, having grown up with a domineering mother, was used to women telling him what to do’.
When Reagan came back from one of his work trips, Nancy – an actress in her youth – would give a ‘very one-sided, heavily fictionalized account’ of whatever dispute had arisen in his absence, Boot writes.
Nancy would describe in ‘lurid detail how she had been pained by [the children’s] misconduct.’
Reagan would ‘immediately and completely accept his wife’s account without trying to double-check it.’
Boot writes: ‘He would gently scold the kids, telling them: ‘Well, you’ve hurt your mother very much. You know she’s in there crying her eyes out.’
Michael, whom Reagan adopted while married to Wyman, recalled trying to tell his side of the story, only for his father to cut him off and say: ‘I don’t need to hear your side. I’ve heard the story. You’re wrong. Nancy is right.’
Patti, who later dropped the surname Reagan to try to escape the shadow of her family, recounted in her memoir how Nancy began beating her when she was just eight years old.
The beatings would sometimes be weekly and sometimes they were daily and in her memoir, Patti said she became ‘intimately familiar with what would set my mother off, what would push those buttons, even though I knew it would end up with a hand in my face.’
Nancy’s ire extended to the hired help too and her children recalled her screaming at a maid for washing the wrong dishes – Patti sang to herself to block out the sound.
Even taking the sedative Seconal and the tranquilizer Miltown did nothing to dispel Nancy’s unpredictable moods.
Jane Wyman was never to be mentioned in the Reagan household, Boot writes. Her two children, Michael and Maureen, were frozen out by their stepmother who Maureen called ‘Dragon Lady’
Ron told Boot that his mother was ‘not physically abusive in a Joan Crawford kind of way’ but she was ‘very difficult’.
He said: ‘She could be emotionally and psychologically abusive.’
According to Ron – who is now known for his liberal views and atheism – Nancy was particularly prone to ‘fits of anger and anxiety’ when her husband was away.
Ron concluded that Nancy was ‘worried Ronnie would either suffer some sort of accident or cheat on her’.
While Ron and Patti bore the brunt of their mother’s anxieties, Maureen and Regan’s adopted son Michael did not escape her anger.
Nancy did ‘nothing’ to win them over while she was courting their father and then ‘froze them out’ after she was married, Boot writes.
‘Nancy Reagan and Jane Wyman could not stand each other and Nancy forbade any mention of her husband’s first wife in their home,’ Boot writes.
Patti had to wait until she was seven before finding out that she had a half-brother and half-sister, and that was when Michael, who was 14 at the time, moved in to escape Wyman, with whom he was arguing with constantly.
Michael was ‘desperate’ to be accepted into his father and Nancy’s home and initially Nancy took care of him.
She was horrified to see he had a dozen cavities because Wyman hadn’t taken him to the dentist and his only clothes were school uniforms.
Yet Michael was still sent to a Catholic boarding school in the week which he hated.
When he was at home he slept on the couch, a sign of how unstable his life was.
Boot’s book is out September 10
Nancy decided to add an extra bedroom onto the house and Michael was initially thrilled as he assumed it would be for him.
Instead it went to his brother Ron’s nurse, a decision which ‘nearly killed me,’ Michael later said.
‘I was devastated. I felt that if dad and Nancy didn’t want me, I didn’t want them either,’ he admitted.
When Michael became a teenager and began engaging in self-destructive behavior, Nancy chastised him, telling him he ‘wasn’t living up to the Reagan name’.
Unless he got his act together he should ‘change his name and leave the house,’ Nancy said.
Michael would respond by telling Nancy: ‘You are not my mom.’ Writing in her own memoir, Nancy would later say that she and Michael had ‘such rough times there were days I could have killed him.’
Such was the tension that Nancy didn’t even invite Michael to his father’s deathbed in 2004.
Maureen, Reagan’s biological daughter with Wyman who died aged 60 in 2001, called Nancy the ‘Dragon Lady’ and the pair took decades to heal their relationship.
According to Patti, the message Nancy sent to Michael and Maureen was: ‘You’re not part of this family.’
Even the attempted assassination of Reagan 1981 did not bring the different parts of his family together.
While all of his children rushed to his bedside in Washington, they remained ‘isolated’ from each other.
The Reagan family all got together for the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit. Left to right, Ron, Patti, Nancy, the future president, Michael holding his son Cameron, Michael’s wife Colleen, Maureen
In her memoir, Patti wrote: ‘What kind of family is this? Even a bullet can’t bring us together.’
Boot is also frank about Reagan’s failings as a man during his marriage to Wyman, who divorced him because of his ‘obsession’ with politics.
Reagan was jealous of Wyman’s career success and was so long winded she once publicly called him ‘diarrhea-of-the-mouth.’
Author Max Boot was a right wing commentator but has drifted away from the Republican party in the Trump era
Reagan was a ‘typical career man who paid more attention to his work than his family’ and showed a ‘crippling lack of empathy’ towards Wyman, Boot writes.
Despite being known as the ‘Great Communicator’ for his ability to read a room, Reagan ‘often failed with interpersonal relations.’
His son Ron tells Boot: ‘There were a lot of gaps in his emotional intelligence.’
Reagan also faced unflattering claims from the late actress Piper Laurie who said he bedded her when she was an 18-year-old virgin.
Laurie called Reagan a ‘show-off’ who criticized her performance and complained about how much he’d spent on the condoms.
Boot notes that in her biography of Reagan, author Kitty Kelley even claimed that he was a date rapist, an allegation Boot says would be ‘unflattering if true’.
He writes: ‘This was the sort of conduct one might associate with notoriously priapic presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Donald J. Trump – not with Reagan, the happily married paragon of ‘family values.’
The First Lady was a ‘schemer and a snob obsessed with social standing’ who used to hit her daughter Patti Davis (far left), Boot writes in the book
Perhaps the only thing more tumultuous than the Reagan family life are the recent allegations against Boot’s wife.
In July, Sue Mi Terry was accused of illegally working as a foreign agent for South Korea.
During the Trump administration, Boot accused the former President of being a foreign asset, allegations his wife now faces.
According to prosecutors, his wife was allegedly given designer Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta handbags and money for her think tank programs in exchange for writing articles and organizing networking events to help Korean agents access Washington insiders.
Terry’s lawyer has called the allegations ‘unfounded.’
The book’s release comes as a new biopic about Reagan starring Dennis Quaid in the lead role hit theaters this weekend.
The movie focuses on Reagan’s dealings with the Soviet regime towards the end of the Cold War.
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