Nancy Reagan Opens Women’s Conference : Talk Focuses on Anti-Drug Drive, White House Years

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan opened the annual Southern California Conference on Women on Tuesday with a half-hour talk that highlighted her anti-drug campaign and her tumultuous eight years in the White House as “wife of the most powerful man on earth.”

Organizers of the Anaheim conference had barred the media from covering the first day of events, including Mrs. Reagan’s speech, citing security reasons and the former First Lady’s wishes to keep reporters out. However, Mark Weinberg, a spokesman for Nancy Reagan, disputed that.

“I think the whole organization (sponsoring the conference) is not desirous of the press. Mrs. Reagan had no objections whatsoever,” Weinberg told several reporters who simply paid the $35 conference fee and observed Mrs. Reagan’s talk with 3,500 others.

Chief conference organizer Karen L. Smith, approached after the talk, declined to comment on the barring of the media.

The annual conference has been bathed in controversy recently because its original sponsor, state Sen. William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights), paid about $200,000 in fees to his wife, Margene, and conference organizer Smith, who is his Orange County field coordinator. Campbell has disassociated himself from the conference, although Smith is still its primary organizer. Feminists had, in the past, protested the conference, charging that Campbell has frequently voted against women’s issues in the Legislature. Campbell is a staunch opponent of abortion.

But the former First Lady’s talk Tuesday was anything but controversial. Basically, she covered the same material she had mentioned in several post-White House interviews.

Peppered with self-deprecating humor and references to “Ronnie,” Mrs. Reagan talked about the “highs” and “lows” of her eight-year stint in the nation’s capital, from the bad publicity she received over replacing the White House china to the media scrutiny her husband’s surgeries attracted.

Those years, she said, “probably changed me forever.”

A First Family doesn’t “just move in to the White House,” she said. “You learn to live there. . . . But I really came to love that house.”

Among the high points: “In one week, I was in the Kremlin (with the Gorbachevs), Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth and Disney World with foster grandparents.”

She said the lowest point in her White House years came with the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan, “when the bullet came within an inch of my husband’s heart. Actually,” she added, “I think the bullet got closer to my heart.”

Although her spokesman said Mrs. Reagan had no objection to press coverage of her talk, and she stressed to the audience that she “would not trade our time in the White House for anything, the tremendous scrutiny of the media” had both “hurt” and frustrated her.

“It really is like nothing you’ve ever imagined,” she said with a sigh.

“Remember the china?” she asked, then paused. The crowd laughed. She sighed again. “Well, believe me, there was a time when I never wanted to hear the word china again.” Mrs. Reagan explained that the new replacement china cost taxpayers nothing; it was donated.

“Remember my sprucing up some rooms in the White House,” she asked rhetorically. “And remember the flap over the designer dresses?”

Each question was answered with laughter and applause by the crowd, which gave her two standing ovations and clearly admired her.

Especially difficult, Mrs. Reagan said, were the media accounts--quoting former Cabinet officials--of her alleged influence on the President.

“You can imagine how surprised I was to read I was calling the shots on the nuclear arms race,” she quipped.

Dressed in a pink floral dress and appearing relaxed, Mrs. Reagan used humorous anecdotes to charm the audience. There was the story of how her husband accidentally pinned an important dignitary to the woman’s chair when the President accidentally “planted (his feet) on the back of her dress,” she said.

“And there was the time when I was wooing a wealthy woman to contribute to the White House Historical Fund. And my wrap-around skirt unwrapped, and fell around my ankles,” she said to more laughs. “And there I was.”

She also discussed her highly publicized campaign against drug abuse whose watchword is “Just Say No,” calling it a five-year battle to convince America that drugs are indeed a national problem.

Although she stopped short of criticizing President Bush’s efforts, Mrs. Reagan did say that the country’s attention should be shifted from foreign countries that export drugs, like Colombia, to education and the consumer. Her drug comments were particularly popular with the crowd.

Asked to share a few details of her upcoming book, “My Turn,” Mrs. Reagan declined, saying her publisher has adamantly ordered her not to.

Despite the expressed concern over security, Mrs. Reagan arrived in a limousine at the front of the hotel, and guests who entered the ballroom to hear her underwent no special security measures. Secret Service agents stood discreetly at each side of the stage.

However, several reporters, photographers and television crews were turned away from the registration desk Tuesday morning by three different organizers who refused to identify themselves. They claimed that there were “security problems” with Nancy Reagan, the day’s keynote speaker.

Conference organizers claimed that they were following the her wishes.

“This is mass confusion,” said one harried organizer. “We invited everybody in the press, and now they can’t come to hear her.”

The 7-year-old conference has attracted a bevy of Hollywood personalities, as well as women leaders in business and politics. Keynote speakers have included television personality Oprah Winfrey and exercise guru Richard Simmons, astronaut Sally Ride and Labor Secretary Elizabeth H. Dole, who previously served as secretary of transportation.

It has grown from a one-day conference that attracted only 500 participants to a three-day stint at the Anaheim Marriott with 75 seminars and an expected attendance of more than 10,000 women.