Nancy Clark Reynolds, 94
Nancy Clark Reynolds, whose life as a Washington insider stretched from the 1930s, when she arrived as the daughter of a New Deal congressman, to her role as a confidante to Ronald Reagan and, finally, to her prominence as one of the city’s best-connected lobbyists in the 1980s, died May 23 at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 94.
Her son Clark Wurzberger confirmed the death.
Reynolds led a Zelig-esque life in the nation’s capital. Her father played poker with Harry Truman. As a young woman, she dated J.D. Salinger and Jack Valenti, an ad executive who became one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest aides and later led the Motion Picture Association of America.
She was best friends with Nancy Reagan, but also with Anne Wexler, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter known as the “Rolodex queen” for her extensive political connections.
Reynolds inhabited a Washington very different from today’s hyperpartisan battleground. In her time, congressmen with decidedly different politics might still clink glasses at a Georgetown reception and hash out a deal over canapes. Reynolds was one of a fast-vanishing breed of D.C. fixers — known sometimes pejoratively as hostesses — who knew how to create the social conditions to make those breakthroughs happen.
As part of the Reagan transition team, Reynolds offered a critical link between the Washington establishment and the presidential advisers imported from the West Coast, including Michael Deaver, the incoming deputy chief of staff, and Edwin Meese, a White House counselor and future attorney general. When socialite Brooke Astor was planning a reception for the Reagans in New York, she came to Reynolds for advice.
Reynolds began her career as a TV journalist in the late 1940s, when the medium was still in its infancy, and in the mid-1960s became one of the first women to anchor a major nightly news program, in San Francisco.
She was known for landing high-profile interviews, including with Sonny Barger, a founder of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, and with Ronald Reagan during his successful 1966 campaign for governor of California.
That interview, which she conducted on horseback at Reagan’s ranch near Santa Barbara, so impressed him that he hired her as his press secretary. She stayed with him for his two terms as governor and through his 1976 presidential campaign, handling celebrities (a not-unimportant task in California), easing tensions among the hardcharging gubernatorial staff, and becoming a confidante of Nancy Reagan, helping her navigate her new role as a politician’s wife.
She did not join the administration but remained close to it, hosting parties and opening doors for the White House on Capitol Hill. She was close enough to give Ronald Reagan reading recommendations, including a 1984 thriller by Tom Clancy, a not widely known author at the time. Reagan loved the novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” and his very public endorsement of it made it one of the decade’s bestsellers.
Reynolds parlayed her political experience and connections into a career as one of a new breed of Washington superlobbyists, opening D.C. offices for major corporations and later cofounding Wexler, Reynolds, Harrison and Schule, among the most powerful lobbying firms of the 1980s and one of the first to be led in part by women.
Nancy Lee Clark was born June 26, 1927, in Pocatello, a small city in southeast Idaho. Her father, David Worth Clark, was a lawyer who won a special election in 1935 to become one of the state’s two U.S. representatives. Her mother, Virgil (Irwin) Clark, was a homemaker.
Moving to Washington, the Clarks lived in the Shoreham Hotel — de rigueur for new members of Congress, who felt buying a home might appear presumptuous. Clark needn’t have worried: He won reelection in 1936 and a Senate seat in 1938. He was a New Deal Democrat, but he made friends across factions and parties; his friends included Richard Russell, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, and Robert Taft, a conservative Republican from Ohio.
Washington in the 1930s was a very different place from the one Reynolds would return to in the 1970s. In many ways it was still a sleepy Southern town, crisscrossed with bridle paths, on which she rode horses with her father. Although the family returned to Idaho every summer, she graduated from high school in Washington, then studied English at Goucher College in Maryland. She graduated in 1945.
Already an experienced journalist, having interviewed film stars like Lauren Bacall and Anthony Quinn for her college newspaper, she got a job as a reporter for a Baltimore TV station, WBAL.
She met Salinger in New York, where he showed her around Greenwich Village and told her about a story he was working on for The New Yorker called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” She advised him to change the title. He didn’t.