Remembering Nancy

At the risk of having Settleback Saturday fall into a rut, I'm hauling a few of my own old cartoons out of the archives yet again -- this time remembering former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

I have seldom drawn cartoons about First Ladies of the United States, except in the cases of Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. (You may recall one of Nancy Reagan's appearances in a Supreme Court cartoon I posted just a couple Saturdays ago.) Mrs. Reagan came to the White House determined to redecorate; she was front and center in the anti-drug "Just Say No" campaign; and was a force for others in the administration to reckon with to a degree not seen since Eleanor Roosevelt or Edith Wilson.

Edith Wilson might be the more relevant example. We now know that President Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer's Disease as early as 1984. Nancy Reagan may not have been the one taking his calls ... at least not that we know of.

This is a fragment of a never-completed cartoon on an Alice in Wonderland theme. Nancy Reagan was widely considered to be the force behind the firing of President Reagan's longtime friend Donald Regan as White House Chief of Staff in 1987. She felt that he was mishandling the Iran/Contra scandal, and he chafed at her astrology-based demands regarding her husband's schedule. Regan allegedly got the boot after having abruptly hung up on the First Lady.

Regan complained publicly about Nancy and her astrologer, Joan Quigley, in his 1988 memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington: "Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise."

Except for the one at the top of this post, I've chosen cartoons from the last two years of the Reagan administration. I'll wrap up with this cartoon of the Reagans taking their curtain call with several administration members from the previous eight years. It's not a particularly unique take on the end of the Reagan administration, I'll admit. Had I not drawn this cartoon while away from home and reference sources at an out-of-state family funeral, the cartoon would have worked better if the set had looked more like the Oval Office.