It was nearly noon, and Nancy Reagan stood in the Red Room with a butler, waiting. Over in the Oval Office, her husband had just finished the most consequential diplomatic meeting of his first term, last fall's tete-a-tete with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Now, for a few minutes, she was to do her duty as First Lady, to greet and charm the visitor from Moscow.
Something to drink? Gromyko took a glass of fruit juice, Nancy one of Perrier; the chitchat was of liters and pints, metrics vs. the old American way. But then Gromyko abruptly turned the small talk big. "Does your husband believe in peace or war?" he asked.
"Peace," she said.
"You're sure?" Yes, she said, she was sure, and the conversation floated back to more effervescent subjects. When it came time for the two men to go in to lunch, however, Gromyko returned to the central issue. "Well, then," he instructed the President's wife, "you whisper peace in his ear every night."
"I will," she replied. "I'll also whisper it in your ear."
Three months later, Nancy Reagan describes the heady encounter with precision and some satisfaction. She is pleased not so much that she got the last word with Gromyko but that the exchange took place at all. If Gromyko had come in 1981 instead of 1984, she says, "he probably wouldn't have broached it." Why? "Because I was different then."
Gromyko may or may not know it, but Nancy Reagan has changed. She still sometimes wears extraordinarily expensive Galanos dresses (size 4 or 6) and $950 beaded silk evening pajamas by Adolfo, and she still conveys a certain brittle, recherche haughtiness that drives feminists crazy. But she is no longer the liability for the President that she sometimes was during his first two years in office. In fact, in the past two years she has probably become an outright political plus, winning friends and influencing people. She remains tightly wound, by her own description "a born worrier," but now she has a public and private sure-footedness that she once seemed unable to manage. "I have more self-confidence," she says. A longtime presidential aide agrees. "She has become more of a person in her own right," says the aide, "and no longer just Ronald Reagan's wife." The First Lady delivers speeches more often and more effectively, and recently engaged an outside writer to provide her with new, improved material. She has plunged into unfamiliar territory, sitting on Mr. T's lap at a White House Christmas celebration, opening her arms to a young addict at a California drug rehabilitation clinic and, in Peking last spring, responding gracefully when Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping suggested to her that "next time" she "come alone." A few weeks ago she agreed to spend time with drug-addicted inmates at a jail in the heartland. But the new gusto goes beyond pageantry and photo opportunities. For Nancy Reagan has become a forceful figure within the Administration, and in recent months her White House clout has become strikingly apparent.