Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan had already built one career as a Hollywood contract actress before she built a second one managing her husband's. She met Ronald Reagan in 1949 while he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, married him in 1952, and spent the next three decades shaping his public presentation with an attentiveness that outside observers sometimes found controlling and insiders considered essential to his political success. By the time Reagan reached the White House in 1981, Nancy was vetting his schedule, his staff, and often his speeches, treating stagecraft as a serious instrument of government rather than a distraction from it.

Her signature public initiative was the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign, launched in the early 1980s to discourage children and teenagers from experimenting with drugs through school visits, public service announcements, and a simple slogan that entered the national vocabulary almost immediately. Critics argued the approach oversimplified addiction and underfunded treatment, but the campaign made Nancy Reagan one of the most visible First Ladies on a single issue since Lady Bird Johnson's highway beautification drive, and it gave her a public identity distinct from the image-management role she was better known for inside the White House.

After the Reagans left Washington in 1989, Nancy devoted much of her remaining public life to Ronald Reagan's care and legacy, and in the 2000s became an unlikely advocate for embryonic stem cell research, breaking with much of her own party to argue publicly for funding it. She died in March 2016 at 94, a decade after Ronald, and was buried beside him at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California.