WHICH WOULD MAKE TONY AND W A CIVIL UNION:

Cold War Couple: The marriage that did in an Evil Empire: An NRO Q&A (Kathryn Jean Lopez, 12/10/07, National Review)

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why did you pick “marriage” as the description of the Ronald Reagan — Margaret Thatcher relationship?

Nicholas Wapshott: Because their friendship and working partnership was far closer than any other, even more intimate even than that of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, where Roosevelt never let Churchill forget that he was a supplicant. Not only were Reagan and Thatcher completely in concert with their political beliefs, their unshakeable personal alliance echoed those harmonious arrangements in which men and women combine perfectly at work and take office husbands and wives.

If you read the many recently declassified private letters and telephone conversations between them I reproduce in the book for the first time, it is hard to avoid the fact that they had transcended the barriers which usually divide great political leaders and had come to share their White House and Downing Street decisions as a married couple might. Indeed, most married couples would think themselves lucky to take part in such a stimulating, productive, sympathetic, loyal, and affectionate union as Reagan and Thatcher enjoyed. You would either have to be very stuffy, or inappropriately proprietorial about the two of them, to object to the word marriage.

Just take another look at Reagan’s state funeral three years ago at the National Cathedral in Washington. If you knew nothing about who was being celebrated and who was mourning, it would be easy and understandable to conclude that Margaret Thatcher was the widow. It is not too much of a stretch to say that in the interment that followed at the Reagan Memorial Library in Simi Valley there were three widows, his former wife Jane Wyman, his wife Nancy Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2007 9:49 AM