Nancy Clark Reynolds, a Player in Reagan’s Washington, Dies at 94

Nancy Clark Reynolds, whose life as a Washington insider stretched from the Nineteen 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 best-connected lobbyists within the Eighties, died on Might 23 at her house in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 94.

Her son Clark Wurzberger confirmed the loss of life.

Ms. Reynolds led a Zelig-esque 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 change into certainly one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest aides and later led the Movement Image Affiliation of America.

She was greatest associates with Nancy Reagan, but additionally 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 totally different from in the present day’s hyperpartisan battleground. In her time, congressmen with decidedly totally different politics may nonetheless clink glasses at a Georgetown reception and hash out a deal over canapés. Ms. Reynolds was certainly one of a fast-vanishing breed of D.C. fixers — identified typically pejoratively as hostesses — who knew methods to create the social situations to make these breakthroughs occur.

As a part of the Reagan transition crew, Ms. Reynolds provided a essential 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 legal professional common. 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-Nineteen Sixties grew to become one of many first ladies to anchor a serious nightly information program, in San Francisco. She was identified for touchdown high-profile interviews, together with with Sonny Barger, a founding father of the Hell’s Angels motorbike gang, and 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 hard-charging gubernatorial workers, and turning 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 instantly, proper?” Ms. Reynolds informed The Washington Submit in 1980. “Nicely, she’s pleasant and heat, however there’s an excessive amount of reserve. It’s not simple to know her effectively 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 provide President Reagan studying suggestions, together with a 1984 thriller by Tom Clancy, a not broadly identified creator on the time. Reagan beloved the novel, “The Hunt for Crimson October,” and his very public endorsement of it made it one of many decade’s greatest sellers.

Ms. Reynolds parlayed her political expertise and connections right into a profession as certainly one of a brand new breed of Washington superlobbyists, opening D.C. places of work for main companies and later cofounding Wexler, Reynolds, Harrison and Schule, among the many strongest lobbying corporations of the Eighties and one of many first to be led partly by ladies.

“What serves you effectively through the years is simply the outdated intestine response,” she informed The New York Occasions in 1983. “Expertise and contacts assist, however in the long run it’s an intuition, an antenna. This metropolis is an incredible 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 Value Clark, was a lawyer who gained a particular election in 1935 to change 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 shopping for a house may seem presumptuous. Mr. Clark needn’t have nervous: He gained 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 Nineteen Thirties was a really totally 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 along with her father. Although the household returned to Idaho each summer time, 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 faculty newspaper, she obtained a job as a reporter for a Baltimore TV station, WBAL.

She met 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 Good Day for Bananafish.” She suggested him to alter the title. He didn’t.

Quickly after, she married Invoice Wurzberger, had three youngsters and settled down within the suburbs. Once they divorced in 1961, she determined to begin over, shifting again to Idaho along with her boys in tow.

One other marriage, to Frank Reynolds, a journalist, Republican marketing campaign aide and lobbyist, additionally led to divorce. Alongside along with her son, she is survived by her companion, Bob Kemble; her 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, and some years later 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 Corp., 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 instances to Africa. She fell in love with the continent and particularly its prehistory; after turning 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.