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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 Nineteen Eighties, died on Could 23 at her house in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 94.
Her son Clark Wurzberger confirmed the demise.
Ms. Reynolds led a Zeligesque life within the nation’s capital. Her father performed poker with Harry S. Truman. As a younger girl she dated J.D. Salinger and Jack Valenti, an advert govt who turned one in every of Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest aides and later led the Movement Image Affiliation of America.
She was greatest associates with Nancy Reagan, but in addition with Anne Wexler, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter often called the “Rolodex queen” for her in depth political connections.
Ms. Reynolds inhabited a Washington very completely different from right this moment’s hyperpartisan battleground. In her time, congressmen with decidedly completely different politics would possibly nonetheless clink glasses at a Georgetown reception and hash out a deal over canapés. Ms. Reynolds was one in every of a fast-vanishing breed of D.C. fixers — identified generally pejoratively as hostesses — who knew create the social circumstances to make these breakthroughs occur.
As a part of the Reagan transition workforce, Ms. Reynolds supplied a important hyperlink between the Washington institution and the presidential advisers imported from the West Coast, together with Michael Okay. Deaver, the incoming deputy chief of workers, and Edwin Meese III, a White Home counselor and future lawyer normal. When the socialite Brooke Astor was planning a reception for the Reagans in New York, she went 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 serious 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 carried out 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 workers, and changing into a confidante of Mrs. Reagan, serving to her navigate her new function as a politician’s spouse.
“Some individuals you are feeling simply completely at house with instantly, proper?” Ms. Reynolds advised The Washington Submit in 1980. “Properly, she’s pleasant and heat, however there’s quite a lot of reserve. It’s not simple to know her effectively at first. It takes time, but it surely’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 beloved the novel, “The Hunt for Pink October,” and his very public endorsement made it one of many decade’s greatest sellers.
Ms. Reynolds parlayed her political expertise and connections right into a profession as one in every of a brand new breed of Washington superlobbyists, opening D.C. places of work for main firms and later co-founding Wexler, Reynolds, Harrison & Schule, among the many strongest lobbying companies of the Nineteen Eighties and one of many first to be led partly by girls.
“What serves you effectively through the years is simply the outdated intestine response,” she advised The New York Occasions 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. It’s a must to 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 received a particular election in 1935 to turn into one of many state’s two U.S. representatives. Her mom, Virgil Irwin Clark, was a homemaker.
Shifting to Washington, the Clarks lived within the Shoreham Resort — de rigueur for brand new members of Congress, who felt that purchasing a house would possibly seem presumptuous. Mr. Clark needn’t have nervous: He received re-election in 1936 and a Senate seat in 1938. He was a New Deal Democrat, however he made associates throughout factions and events; his associates 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 time, she graduated from highschool in Washington, then studied English at Goucher Faculty, in Maryland. She graduated in 1945.
Already an skilled journalist, having interviewed movie stars like Lauren Bacall and Anthony Quinn for her faculty newspaper, she obtained 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 advised her a couple of story he was engaged on for The New Yorker known as “A Good 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. Once they divorced in 1961, she determined to begin over, transferring again to Idaho together with her boys in tow.
One other marriage, to Frank Reynolds, a journalist, Republican marketing campaign aide and lobbyist, additionally led to divorce. Alongside together with her son Clark, she is survived by her associate, Bob Kemble; three different sons, Kurt Wurzberger, Dean Wurzberger and Michael Reynolds; and 4 grandchildren.
Again in Boise, Ms. Reynolds obtained a job because the host of a daytime speak present. Just a few years later she moved to San Francisco, ultimately becoming a member of Governor Reagan’s workers.
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 — other than a six-month depart of absence in 1980 to work on Reagan’s White Home transition — till 1983, when she left to affix 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 associates 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 offered their agency in 1990, and shortly after, Ms. Reynolds moved to Santa Fe.
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