Eleanor Clift: Nancy Reagan at 90

As an aspiring actress in Hollywood, Nancy Davis shaved two years off her age, claiming July 6, 1923, when she was born in 1921. A woman being coy about her age is not uncommon, and the truth didn’t come out until the onetime actress was in the White House as first lady. “I told a little fib,” she said.

Not that she minds anymore that well wishers are keeping count. Reagan turns 90 on Wednesday, a milestone to celebrate as much for the life she has lived as her longevity. She’ll mark the day by attending a luncheon in her honor at the home of a longtime friend, Ruth Jones, whose husband headed Northrup Corp. and whose birthday lunch for Nancy is an annual affair.

Friends who were with her at the events surrounding the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth earlier this year say that she appears increasingly frail since she broke her pelvis in a fall in October 2008. But her spirit remains indomitable. She relies on a cane but gamely took the stage at the Reagan Library, moving very slowly but with the kind of focus and determination that sustained her through the White House years, and then her husband’s decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s.   

Looking back on the various stages of Nancy Reagan’s life, Carl Anthony, the author of a dozen books about presidential wives and families, finds what he calls “an arc of grace” that has brought her to a very different place in the American imagination than the shallow “Queen Nancy” the public initially saw when she came to Washington wearing designer clothes and wanting new china for the White House....