And why not? Nancy monitored his every move: his schedule, his travel, his diet. After their rides, for instance, he would unsaddle the horses and do a few chores in the barn until Nancy rang a dinner bell summoning him to lunch. Reagan loved macaroni and cheese, but his wife only let the cooks prepare the fatty fare for him occasionally. (On Air Force One, regular passengers would immediately know the first lady wasn't aboard if the president was served his favorite meal.) And in the early 1990s, when she encountered the one enemy from which she could not protect her husband—Alzheimer's disease—Nancy Reagan tried to manage that, too, arranging golf games for him with old pals and then, when he could no longer get out, standing in for him at public events and relentlessly raising funds for the Reagan Library, the only legacy that she could really control.
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At the end, Reagan recognized no one but Nancy. As his Alzheimer's progressed, she still climbed into bed next to him every night and slept by his side to comfort him. Some day, she will be at his side in death, too, in a hillside crypt overlooking the Pacific. As Reagan explained to controversial biographer Edmund Morris, "They'll seal the door . . . temporarily, until she joins me. Then we'll lie there, just the two of us, and look at the sea together."
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