SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Mourners from the top ranks of Washington and Hollywood paid final tribute to Nancy Reagan on Friday, recalling at her funeral how the former first lady and her husband made up “two halves of a circle,” with a legendary love that seemed to inspire everyone they met.
Inseparable in life, the pair were to be reunited in death in side-by-side graves at Ronald Reagan’s presidential library.
During a service filled with poignant and often humorous memories, each speaker came back to the couple’s love story.
“When they were together, he hid love notes around the house for her to find,” said Reagan’s former chief of staff, James Baker. “She reciprocated by secreting little notes in jellybeans in his suitcase.
“Ronald and Nancy Reagan were defined by their love for each other,” Baker added. “They were as close to being one person as it is possible for any two people to be.”
Although many speakers invoked the president’s name, they were also quick to add that Mrs. Reagan was more than just a supportive wife. She was a force of nature herself.
“There would be no Ronald Reagan Presidential Library without a President Ronald Reagan, and there likely wouldn’t have been a President Ronald Reagan without a Nancy Reagan,” said the couple’s son, Ron Reagan.
It was her belief in what her husband could accomplish that gave his father the “chutzpah” to seek political office, he added.
“It would be a mistake, by the way, to consider her as somehow subordinate to him just because he was the one usually taking the center stage,” Reagan said. “They were co-equals. They complemented one another.”
While her husband was affable, Mrs. Reagan could be loving, friendly and quick to laugh. But, if anyone did anything she thought was harmful to her husband, she was fiercely protective and sometimes quick to anger.
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalled that when he once questioned the hard-luck story of the president’s early life, Mrs. Reagan was so angry that Reagan’s own staff advised him to stay away from the White House until she calmed down. Reagan didn’t mind the criticism, Brokaw said, but his wife did.