When Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff, Donald Regan, published his memoirs in May 1988, he bestowed on his ex-boss’s presidency one of its historical signatures.

Along with Reaganomics, Irangate, the chilly confrontation with the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR and the subsequent thaw in the Cold War, the Reagan era would henceforth be remembered for its obsessive devotion to astrology.

Or as TV host Johnny Carson joked, for changing the White House theme tune from ‘Hail To The Chief’ to ‘That Old Black Magic’.

What was shocking about the revelations in Donald Regan’s book, For The Record, was not that Reagan had consulted an astrologer, but that the entire Presidential schedule had been calibrated according to astro-diktat.

Other world leaders were known to take the occasional consultation - France’s Francois Mitterand, for example, called on the services of society astrologer Elizabeth Teissier without raising too many eyebrows – but the degree to which the White House timetable was for seven years set by the stars remains staggering even to astrologers.

Reagan, it transpired, had not so much as twiddled his cufflinks at a White House dinner without the planetary omens first being consulted via a secret astrologer employed by his First Lady and protector Nancy, who was the conduit for the resultant cosmic counsel.

 ‘Nancy had complete faith in a woman astrologer in San Francisco,’ wrote Regan. ‘Mrs. Reagan insisted on being consulted on the timing of every Presidential appearance and action so she could consult her friend in San Francisco about the astrological factor.’

The media, already gorging on the scandal of Irangate and the possibility of presidential impeachment, exploded with astonishment at Regan’s disclosures. Within hours reporters were on the trail of the mystery star-gazer who had helped plot Reagan’s eight year term, and quickly found her.

On a California bound jet Time magazine grabbed the first interview with the astrologer concerned, Joan Quigley,  who confirmed her involvement with the Reagans, and who continued to grant interviews to press and television, despite being urged by Nancy Regan, in her last communication with her confidante, to ‘lie’.

For the media and much of the public, the news that the White House had been in thrall to an unknown (and unelected) star-gazer was final proof that the Reagan presidency had been an elaborate and slightly deranged sham, their president a superstitious halfwit. An aura of unreality had always surrounded Reagan’s ascendancy from B movie actor to leading politician.

When he first announced his candidacy for the the Governorship of California back in the mid Sixties, the reaction of his opponents was a mixture of scorn and incredulity. Who would take seriously a man whose most famous role was fronting ‘General Electric Theatre’ on TV, reciting the company slogan ‘Progress is our most important product’ ?

Against conventional political wisdom Reagan prevailed, thanks in no small part to the backing of a cabal of industrialists and power brokers from the upper echelons of American society. His good looks, homespun manner and simplistic right-wing politics struck a chord with the American people, if not with the country’s liberal elite, who tended to view Reagan and his formidable wife Nancy as vulgar showbiz arrivistes.

Once Reagan had acceded to the White House, he brought more than a touch of tinseltown’s Neptunian illusion to running the country. The 1984 Olympics in Atlanta, for example, was orchestrated into a pageant of American triumphalism resembling a Busby Berkely movie, complete with synchronised swimming as a medal-winning sport.

Nothing was quite what it seemed with Reagan. Elected as a champion of  budget-balancing economics, he ran up the country’s biggest ever budget deficit. He built ‘peace missiles’, made ‘freedom fighters’ of the murderous Nicaraguan Contras and financed them by selling arms to  Iran, a country he publically vilified.

Yet despite the turbulence that often surrounded him, despite his age (at 69 he was the oldest President ever elected) and his limited intellectual prowess, Reagan sailed through, turning in the bravura performance of an otherwise undistinguished thespian career,  winning re-election and smiling through while the careers of his staff went down in flames. This was ‘the teflon presidency’. Nothing stuck to Ronnie.

Joan Quigley was quite clear why. ‘Astrology was the teflon in the teflon presidency,’ she declared in her 1989 book, What Does Joan Say?, its title borrowed from Ronnie’s customary enquiry to Nancy when confronted by fresh political  developments. Quigley may even have a point. As easy as sneering at the Reagans’ reliance on astrology is to consider that  Ron and Nancy’s astrological exactitude helped them survive where more sophisticated political minds predicted they would founder.

Quigley claims she wrote her book chiefly in response to Nancy’s disavowal of her astrologer’s role in White House affairs. Nancy had vigorously downplayed the Reagans’ astrological interests from the outset of Regan’s revelations, and in her rapidly completed1989 autobiography, My Turn, claimed she had only turned to astrology in concern for her husband’s safety. ‘No-one was hurt by it – except maybe me,’ she simpered.

Nancy also accused Donald Regan – one of many White House staff with whom she had clashed and whose dismissal she had engineered - of  ‘twisting’ the story to ‘seek revenge’. Regan responded by repeating his accusations in a review of  Nancy’s book. ‘My description of White House life would have made little sense if I had omitted it (astrology). All those schedule changes, when laid out in black on white pages, would have looked downright senseless in the absence of an explanation…It was a daily, sometimes hourly, factor in every decision affecting the President’s schedule.’

Joan Quigley’s account affirmed and amplified Regan’s assertions. For seven years Quigley had toiled over her ephemeris and computer charts to ensure the success of the Reagan regime. Without her approval, the presidential jet never lifted off, nor did the leader of the world’s leading superpower attend a summit or engage in political debate without his birth chart’s transits and progressions first being monitored by astro-control in California.

The operation had been shrouded in Plutonian secrecy, using telephone hot-lines and codewords for Nancy and Joan to stay in communication and an intermediary to pass along the $3,000 monthly payments from the First Lady's personal account to Quigley.  Knowledge of the Reagans’ astro-adviser was restricted to a handful of trusted White House confidants, the main one being deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, whose job it was to juggle the demands of state and high office with those of the cosmos.

Deaver had worked for the Reagans for many years, and as Nancy’s chief fixer had become used to her astrological proccupations, which were only known to a couple of other aides.  Trouble only arose when Deaver left the administration in 1985 and Donald Regan became Chief of Staff.

The less accommodating Regan was appalled when he was let in on the Reagans’ little astro-secret, as was presidential aide William Henkel, who took over firstline responsibilities for the President’s schedule. Arranging the presidential timetable required marathon planning sessions, with details batted back and forth over the telephone between Nancy, her astrologer and Henkel, who then handed the completed schedule to Regan, the Secret Service and others. The process drove Donald Regan to distraction.

He resorted to keeping a colour coded calendar with green for good days, red for bad days, and yellow for ‘iffy’ days, in line with Joan Quigley’s prognostications. The pages of Regan’s book fairly steam with indignation at having to rely on an unknown ‘seer’ (a term to which Quigley objects) to know ‘when it was propitious to move the President of the United States from one place to another, or schedule him to speak in public, or commence negotiations with a foreign power.’

Small wonder that, after Nancy had levered him unceremoniously from office, Regan would choose to expose her astrological fancies.
Long before Donald Regan’s revelations, America’s astrologers had guessed what was going on. Throwing onto their computer screens charts for Reagan’s initiatives, whether it was a trip to China or for the Invasion of Grenada, they noted that Ronnie swam uncannily in tandem with the cosmic tides.

The timing of his announcement that he would seek re-election for a second term in 1984  clinched the issue; after all, 10.55 on a Sunday night (29th January) was not the customary time for such a declaration, even if it was handy for the late night news. The Bulletin of the American Federation of Astrologers was in little doubt the time had been carefully chosen by a skilled practitioner of the celestial art. Who that was remained unknown, however.

In retrospect, the outing of the Reagans’ astrological fixations should have come as no great surprise. Ronnie had caught the astro-bug back in his post-war days as ‘the Errol Flynn of the B-Movies’ while Nancy had consulted an astrologer with her mother while in her teens and presumably renewed her interest with Ronny early in their relationship (the pair were married in 1952). Even after his political career took off, Reagan continued to steer by the stars in blatant fashion.

After winning the Governorship of California in 1966, he opted to hold his swearing-in ceremony in Sacramento at midnight on January 2nd 1967 rather than wait until daylight, as California’s previous 32 Governors had (because new year’s Day fell on a Sunday, the ceremony was put back to the 2nd).

Though the Reagans’ blustered that the timing of the event was to avoid ruining the New Year celebrations, and to get down to business, the real motive for their bizarre timing was obvious enough, at least to the outgoing Democrat Governor, Edmund Brown; ‘My only guess is that it’s because he believes in astrology.’

Extract from 'As true as the stars above' Copyright Neil Spencer.
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