Dragon! Nancy Reagan dies at 94

Cold War crumbling’: Nancy Reagan dies at 94

Nancy Reagan, wife of the 40th US president, Ronald Reagan, died on Sunday morning at her home in Los Angeles at the age of 94. Known as both “Queen Nancy” and “dragon lady”, she greeted USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife during their historic visit to the White House in 1987.
“She played a strong role in her husband's presidency, including ending the Cold War,” said K.T. McFarland, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the White House while Ronald Reagan was in power.

“Mrs Reagan will be buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, next to her husband, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who died on June 5, 2004,” her representative Joanne Drake wrote in a statement. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.


Nancy Reagan was born in New York City on July 6, 1921. She was an actress when she met Ronald Reagan in 1951. He had been an actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild at that time.

“My life began with Ronnie,” Nancy Reagan told Vanity Fair magazine in 1998.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan got married in 1952 and had two children – Patti Davis, an actress, and Ron Jr., who pursued careers in ballet and television. Their marriage lasted 52 years until his death in 2004.

During her husband’s term in the White House and in the years that followed she was also Reagan's closest adviser. She lived through the early years of the Cold War, was blacklisted by Hollywood for alleged communist views, managed eight years in the White House, helped her husband survive through an assassination attempt and endured his nearly decade-long battle with Alzheimer's.

“I miss him now more than I ever did. I'm lonely because I don't have him,” she told CNN's Larry King in June 2007.

Nancy Reagan was also a prominent social campaigner, known for her 'Just Say No' campaign to combat drug abuse in the 1980s, advocating for lifting restrictions on stem cell research and promoting better treatment of America's veterans.

From ‘Queen Nancy’ to ‘dragon lady’
During her time in the White House, Mrs. Reagan’s perfectionism led the residence staff to consider her not easy to work for, with tirades following what she deemed as mistakes. One staffer later recalled, “I remember hearing her call for her personal maid one day and it scared the dickens out of me – just her tone. I never wanted to be on the wrong side of her.”

When she went to live at the White House in 1981, the former Hollywood actress gave off an impression of a simple-minded woman concerned only with fashion and decorum, inspiring a mocking moniker “Queen Nancy”. Yet by the time she moved out two terms later, Nancy Reagan was addressed to as “dragon lady” behind her back and surrounded by accusations that she was a behind-the-scenes head of state, with unlimited power over her husband’s administration.

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