Ronald Reagan came to the marriage with two children from his marriage to actress Jane Wyman, the late Maureen Reagan, and Michael Reagan. Throughout his presidency and after, as Ronald and Nancy Reagan advocated family values, their relationship with their own children was a running drama, creating the public impression of a highly dysfunctional family.
Patti Davis’s 1992 memoir, “The Way I See It,” described a mother driven by appearances, abusive toward her and a habitual user of tranquilizers.
“As uncomfortable as it is to talk about, and write about, abuse is part of this story. I first remember my mother hitting me when I was eight. It escalated as I got older and became a weekly, sometimes daily, event. The last time it happened was when I was in my second year of college,” Davis wrote. (Mother and daughter reconciled when Ronald Reagan was struggling with Alzheimer’s, and remained close in recent years.)
In 1984, Nancy Reagan triggered a public feud with Michael when she acknowledged publicly that he was estranged from the family; he shot back that Ronald Reagan had yet to see his then only grandchild, who was 19 months old. A few years later, Michael wrote his memoir, summed up by the title, “On the Outside Looking In.”
While not as critical as his sister’s, his book told of feeling disconnected from his father, his mother (Wyman), and his father’s second family. During Reagan’s first presidential campaign in 1976, Michael writes, he and older sister Maureen “felt as though Nancy was pushing us out of the family circle and trying to bring Ron and Patti in,” despite their disinterest, because “the campaign staff . . . felt we made Dad look too old.”
He also said that he and Maureen called Nancy “dragon lady” when they were younger. Later, Michael and the Reagans reconciled.
