Nancy Clark Reynolds, whose life as a Washington insider stretched from the Thirties, when she arrived because the daughter of a New Deal congressman, to her function as a confidante to Ronald Reagan and, lastly, to her prominence as one of many metropolis’s most well-connected lobbyists within the Eighties, died on Could 23 at her house in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 94.
Her son Clark Wurzberger confirmed the dying.
Ms. Reynolds led a Zeligesque life within the nation’s capital. Her father performed poker with Harry S. Truman. As a younger lady she dated J.D. Salinger and Jack Valenti, an advert government who turned considered one of Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest aides and later led the Movement Image Affiliation of America.
She was finest pals with Nancy Reagan, but additionally with Anne Wexler, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter referred to as the “Rolodex queen” for her in depth political connections.
Ms. Reynolds inhabited a Washington very completely different from at the moment’s hyperpartisan battleground. In her time, congressmen with decidedly completely different politics may nonetheless clink glasses at a Georgetown reception and hash out a deal over canapés. Ms. Reynolds was considered one of a fast-vanishing breed of D.C. fixers — identified generally pejoratively as hostesses — who knew tips on how to create the social circumstances to make these breakthroughs occur.
As a part of the Reagan transition staff, Ms. Reynolds supplied a vital hyperlink between the Washington institution and the presidential advisers imported from the West Coast, together with Michael Okay. Deaver, the incoming deputy chief of employees, and Edwin Meese III, a White Home counselor and future legal professional basic. When the socialite Brooke Astor was planning a reception for the Reagans in New York, she got here to Ms. Reynolds for recommendation.
Ms. Reynolds started her profession as a tv journalist within the late Nineteen Forties, when the medium was nonetheless in its infancy, and within the mid-Sixties turned one of many first girls to anchor a significant nightly information program, in San Francisco. She was identified for touchdown high-profile interviews, together with one with Sonny Barger, a founding father of the Hells Angels bike gang, and one with Ronald Reagan throughout his profitable 1966 marketing campaign for governor of California.
That interview, which she performed on horseback at Reagan’s ranch close to Santa Barbara, so impressed him that he employed her as his press secretary. She stayed with him for his two phrases as governor and thru his 1976 presidential marketing campaign, dealing with celebrities (a not-unimportant process in California), easing tensions among the many governor’s hard-charging employees, and changing into a confidante of Mrs. Reagan, serving to her navigate her new function as a politician’s spouse.
“Some individuals you’re feeling simply completely at house with immediately, proper?” Ms. Reynolds informed The Washington Put up in 1980. “Nicely, she’s pleasant and heat, however there’s a substantial amount of reserve. It’s not simple to know her nicely to start with. It takes time, however it’s value it.”
She didn’t be a part of the administration however remained near it, internet hosting events and opening doorways for the White Home on Capitol Hill. She was shut sufficient to offer President Reagan studying suggestions, together with a 1984 thriller by Tom Clancy, an writer not extensively identified on the time. Reagan liked the novel, “The Hunt for Pink October,” and his very public endorsement made it one of many decade’s finest sellers.
Ms. Reynolds parlayed her political expertise and connections right into a profession as considered one of a brand new breed of Washington superlobbyists, opening D.C. workplaces for main companies and later co-founding Wexler, Reynolds, Harrison & Schule, among the many strongest lobbying corporations of the Eighties and one of many first to be led partly by girls.
“What serves you nicely over time is simply the previous intestine response,” she informed The New York Instances in 1983. “Expertise and contacts assist, however ultimately it’s an intuition, an antenna. This metropolis is an amazing amalgam of unimaginable individuals from all walks of life who’re elected to political workplace. You must be fascinated with the political course of.”
Nancy Lee Clark was born on June 26, 1927, in Pocatello, a small metropolis in southeast Idaho. Her father, David Price Clark, was a lawyer who gained a particular election in 1935 to grow to be one of many state’s two U.S. representatives. Her mom, Virgil Irwin Clark, was a homemaker.
Transferring to Washington, the Clarks lived within the Shoreham Resort — de rigueur for brand new members of Congress, who felt that purchasing a house may seem presumptuous. Mr. Clark needn’t have fearful: He gained re-election in 1936 and a Senate seat in 1938. He was a New Deal Democrat, however he made pals throughout factions and events; his pals included Richard Russell, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, and Robert Taft, a conservative Republican from Ohio.
Washington within the Thirties was a really completely different place from the one Ms. Reynolds would return to within the Seventies. In some ways it was nonetheless a sleepy Southern city, crisscrossed with bridle paths, on which she rode horses together with her father. Although the household returned to Idaho each summer season, she graduated from highschool in Washington, then studied English at Goucher School, in Maryland. She graduated in 1945.
Already an skilled journalist, having interviewed movie stars like Lauren Bacall and Anthony Quinn for her school newspaper, she acquired a job as a reporter for a Baltimore TV station, WBAL.
She met J.D. Salinger in New York, the place he confirmed her round Greenwich Village and informed her a couple of story he was engaged on for The New Yorker known as “A Excellent Day for Bananafish.” She suggested him to vary the title. He didn’t.
Quickly after, she married Invoice Wurzberger, had three kids and settled down within the suburbs. After they divorced in 1961, she determined to begin over, shifting again to Idaho together with her boys in tow.
One other marriage, to Frank Reynolds, a journalist, Republican marketing campaign aide and lobbyist, additionally resulted in divorce. Alongside together with her son, she is survived by her accomplice, Bob Kemble; her sons, Kurt Wurzberger, Dean Wurzberger and Michael Reynolds; and 4 grandchildren.
Again in Boise, Ms. Reynolds acquired a job because the host of a daytime speak present. A number of years later she moved to San Francisco, finally becoming a member of Governor Reagan’s employees.
After Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential marketing campaign, Ms. Reynolds went to work for the constructing supplies firm Boise Cascade as its head of presidency relations. She later held the identical job for the producer Bendix, the place she stayed — apart from a six-month go away of absence in 1980 to work on Reagan’s White Home transition — till 1983, when she left to hitch Ms. Wexler.
In 1981, Reagan named her the U.S. consultant to the United Nations Fee on the Standing of Ladies, a part-time function that took her a number of occasions to Africa. She fell in love with the continent and particularly its prehistory; after changing into pals with the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, she joined him on a number of of his digs within the Rift Valley, in japanese Africa.
She and Ms. Wexler bought their agency in 1990, and shortly after, Ms. Reynolds moved to Santa Fe.
