The Week of the Dragon

The Dragon Lady in the now defunct comic strip Terry and the Pirates was voluptuous and deadly. Neither of those adjectives applies to Nancy Reagan. But after she was widely credited with organizing a coup by telephone against former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, the First Lady was depicted last week as a power-hungry manipulator more devious than any cartoon creature.

The most vitriolic attack came from New York Times Columnist William Safire. He wrote of Mrs. Reagan's "extraordinary vindictiveness" in dumping Regan and called her an "incipient Edith Wilson," referring to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson's control of the White House after her husband was incapacitated by a stroke in 1919. Nancy Reagan, rasped Safire, is "unelected and unaccountable, presuming to control the actions and appointments of the Executive Branch."

The furor grew after the Miami Herald quoted a remark by new Chief of Staff Howard Baker that when Mrs. Reagan "gets her hackles up, she can be a dragon." A front-page story in the New York Times announced that the First Lady intended to increase her involvement in White House affairs, including the effort to reach an arms-control agreement with the Soviets.

The First Lady added to the hubbub with a doozy of a double entendre that may have been an innocent reference to her childhood but was interpreted as a parting shot at Regan. Appearing at a convention in Washington of the American Camping Association, she told the audience of her girlhood camping experiences: "I don't think most people associate me with leeches or how to get them off. But I know how to get them off. I'm an expert at it."

The speculation about his wife's overreaching made the President angrier than any other aspect of the controversy over the Tower report. Reagan was so irked at the Dragon Lady image that he broke his rule of silence during a photo session to denounce the Nancy stories as "despicable fiction" by people who "should be ashamed of themselves." Friends rushed to the First Lady's defense. "Rubbish," said Columnist George Will of the flood of press accounts. The First Lady shrugged off the accusations as "ridiculous." Indeed, while she is by no means bashful about offering advice to her husband, the evidence indicates that she is not quite so all-powerful as the Regan affair suggested. The President resisted sacking his chief of staff until the end of February despite Regan's all too public feud with Nancy. Her influence, though, is unquestionably special. Last Wednesday, which happened to be the Reagans' 35th wedding anniversary, the President said, as he often does when people ask him his age, "My life began 35 years ago." And only Nancy could promise former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, as she once did, that she would whisper "peace" in Ronald Reagan's ear each night.