Nancy Reagan's astrologer

One morning, the American ambassador in London gets a confidential warning from home that a new wave of inflation is battering the economy and the republic is in dire trouble if he cannot contrive a trade treaty with Britain. There've been discussions and wrangles for some time over this treaty and the hopes for it are dim.

Now, the ambassador's wife enters on the scene. She tried to persuade her husband to seek a new loan from Holland which, once before, had bailed out the republic's finances. He pooh-poohs the notion, tells her to cool it and attend to her knitting. However, she goes off and secretly writes a letter to the American ambassador in Paris. 'Don't tell my husband about this,' she writes, 'but work on him by proposing a brilliant new idea, another loan from Holland!' The ambassador in Paris is convinced and begins to hammer away at his colleague in London who finally yields, negotiates the Dutch loan and, a year or two later, when he's back in the United States, is lavishly congratulated for his foresight and diplomatic skill in stabilising a wobbling economy.

He didn't learn about his wife's intervention until then and dropped her a rueful note. 'It's all your own intrigue which forced me to this loan. I suppose you'll boast of it as a great public service?'

Now all this happened, I forgot to say, exactly 200 years ago. The American ambassador to London was John Adams, to France, Thomas Jefferson. The enterprising wife was Abigail Adams. She turned a Christian ear to her husband's scolding. She was satisfied that the Dutch loan and one or two other initiatives that she claimed for herself had helped her husband become, as he did, vice president of the United States and, after eight years, when George Washington retired, John Adams was elected to the presidency.

His wife, Abigail, coyly protested, 'I am fearful of touching upon political subjects' but she soon conquered the fear. Every evening, she wanted a full account of the president's doings, what the Congress was up to and what it ought to be up to. She had one or two obsessive ideas which, at the time, were taken as a palpable sign of female mental instability. She wanted to abolish slavery. She urged a huge, expansive programme of public education and an excise tax on liquor and – this was 1789 remember – votes for women.

Well, the constitution had been written and had touched on none of these things. She rained scorn on her husband. 'Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands! Remember all men would be tyrants if they could!' When she heard her husband recite the noble preamble to some bill that was being debated, she groaned, 'While you are proclaiming peace and goodwill to men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives!' Adams liked that. 'I think you shine as a stateswoman of late,' he said, 'I cannot but laugh. You are so saucy!'

About this remarkable woman, in her mid-forties, daughter of a parson who taught herself Latin in order to teach it to her children, who always moved over in social gatherings to argue with the politicians and alarmed them with her brisk quotations from Shakespeare, Moliere, Pope and obscure old Romans. About her and her persistent interference, the politicians were not shy with their criticism. One of them, who was to become the secretary of the treasury, called her Mrs President and added a bitter complaint, 'not of the United States but of a faction'.

Well, her husband, John Adams, was defeated for re-election by Thomas Jefferson – a widower, by the way. And the popular charge that helped him to lose was her constant influence over the public conduct of her husband.

Well, there've been all sorts of First Ladies. The phrase, incidentally, wasn't coined until the 1860s. There've been backstage managers, clinging-vine invalids, stately country-club matrons, interior decorators and homebodies. That's what most Americans expect of the new First Lady – a homebody. But there have been one or two other Abigail Adamses, not quite so pungent, perhaps, in their political presence and they invariably stir up a breeze of indignation in the men of the new president's team who always assume, in defiance of the historical record, that the new First Lady will be a simple, preferably a decorative, but a simple keeper of the home fire-burning.

But doesn't this account of Abigail Adams strike a chord? Doesn't it sound suddenly strangely familiar? It ought to, after the publication of a book called 'For the Record', by Mr Donald Regan (pronounced Ree-gan), for much of it is about the influence over the public conduct of her husband of Nancy, Mrs Reagan, (pronounced Ray-gen). Mr Regan was the president's secretary of the treasury for four years and spent his last two years in the White House as the president's chief of staff, the man who, more than any other, has constant access to the holy of holies, the president's Oval Office.

An interesting, not to say bizarre, revelation of Mr Regan's is that he never, never saw the president alone, which must be a record in non-accessibility for the presidential crony of cronies. But if he didn't see much more of Mrs Reagan, alone, he heard from her over the telephone about three times more than he heard from the president. This was a shock at the beginning of his tenure of the role of Richelieu and down those two years, it became an irritant, bordering on an invasion of his public duty, so much so that this former officer in the marines, former chairman of the board of Merrill Lynch had a bang-up row with the president on the telephone and dictated what must be, the shortest, most abrupt letter of resignation there has ever been.

'Dear Mr President, I hereby resign as chief of staff to the President of the United States, respectfully yours, Donald T. Regan.'

Now, of course, there's much more to the mounting frustrations of his office, the pounding he was taking from the media, the betrayal of friends, than Mrs Reagan's waspish interventions, but there's no question that what lit the fire under his bafflement and made it crackle into helpless anger was the intensity of Mrs Reagan's intrusion on policy, on appointments, on who ought to stay, who should be fired. Mr Regan, of course, after four years in the Cabinet, was well acquainted with Mrs Reagan's unwavering devotion to her husband, her concern for his reputation, her frequent plunges into policy differences and her frank cultivation of favourites.

Two years ago, the media were on to her political influence. It was regular source material for stand-up comics and TV talk shows. Columnists, in particular a famous conservative, blasted her as an unelected interloper in the conduct of her husband's administration. Mr Regan must have guessed when he went to the White House that she was a First Lady after the Abigail Adams model, but as an Irishman who'd had a lot of experience of easing the stress of high command with dollops of humour, he expected to be able to handle her.

The big shock came when he discovered that she more or less dictated the president's appointment calendar, what Mr Regan calls 'the single most potent device in the White House because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he does it'. Time and again, Mrs Reagan told him when the president had better do this and not do that, from the timing of a summit to the periods of silence between press conferences.

Once, when Mr Regan was increasingly worried by the president's avoidance of the press, he heard there should be no press conference for three months. Impossible! It was then he discovered from the president's closest friend that he had better mark the days on his calendar with red, green and yellow ticks. In a daze, Mr Regan wondered why. Because, he was quietly told, they would presumably synchronise with Mrs Reagan's calendar ticks. They indicated propitious days and indifferent days and bad days, according to the signs interpreted for the First Lady by 'my friend' – a San Francisco lady astrologer. Regan could not believe his ears. When he finally had to disclose this star-gazing method to Mr Bush, the vice president delivered himself of the strongest expletive he had ever been known to use. 'Good God!' he said.

But there's little doubt about the truth of it. When the press eventually challenged the president, he had a couple of uncomfortable minutes. Yes, after the assassination attempt, his wife had consulted a friend, an astrologer. He swore, though, that astrology had never prompted changes in his official timetable. As for astrology as a belief, he said he didn't know enough about it to say whether there's something in it or not.

This is surprising, for at least two centuries, the scientists, the astronomers, have been saying that astrology is based on a theory of how the stars move in their courses that was badly shaken by the assertion of Copernicus and shattered, once for all, by Galileo's proof that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the universe. For this famous discovery – heresy at the time – Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

By the way, has the Vatican got around yet to pardoning Galileo? I believe it was being considered a year or two ago. I hope so. After all, if the Pope, after 350 years, is only just ready to believe that the earth is not the centre of the universe, who are we to say that president and Mrs Reagan are behind the times?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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