Special: Remembering Nancy Reagan and the Role of Protesters on the 2016 Campaign Trail

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL : Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill. I’m joined around the table by Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal , Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times , and in Miami tonight Ed O'Keefe of The Washington Post .

We begin by casting back to the Reagan years, as Nancy Reagan was memorialized today in Simi Valley, California.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES BAKER: (From video.) I can just imagine how Saint Peter might let the president know that she had arrived: “A beautiful lady is at the gate, asking for you,” he said, “with a jar of jellybeans” – (laughter) – “a shopping bag full of letters, and a suitcase filled with hand-knitted socks.” We love you, Nancy. We miss you. But we will see you on the other side.

MS. IFILL : Mrs. Reagan was at once a beloved and a controversial figure during her husband’s presidency, and since, Doyle.

MR. MCMANUS : Yeah. And just to talk about her role during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, I think you can make a case that Nancy Reagan saved her husband’s presidency and made possible one of his greatest achievements: the end of the Cold War. There was a titanic struggle through that entire administration between the real hardliners and the plain old conservatives. President Reagan used to joke that the right hand didn’t know what the far right hand was doing in his administration. And Ronald Reagan had a real struggle to deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. Not everybody was happy about that in the White House in his administration and the – and the party. Nancy Reagan made an alliance with George Schultz, the secretary of state, and pushed back against the hardliners and made that rapprochement possible. That, I think, in the very short version, is how the Cold War ended.

MS. IFILL : Think about how different this was from Rosalynn Carter. There was such a big dustup when it was suggested there was pillow talk going on between a husband and a wife that involved her sitting in Cabinet meetings. By the time Nancy Reagan got there, her hand was not concealed, her role in policy. And even though she had some pushback from people and there was questions about her consulting astrologers – there wasn’t all great news – she is now looked back on as someone who completely changed the role of the first lady in not only the East Wing, but the West Wing.

MS. CUMMINGS : I think that that’s all true, and I do think that Rosalynn Carter did some – the spade work and took the bullets – the first set of bullets. And Nancy Reagan’s involvement, indeed, was criticized quite a lot in the 1980s as she injected herself into foreign affairs and into domestic issues. But what she had and what people around her soon learned was she had the complete loyalty of her husband. And if they were going to come after her, they were not going to survive because she had built enough allies. I think coming out of – and you’d know better, Doyle – but being a young woman in that kind of Hollywood, you needed to learn how to survive and survive among men. And so she brought a skillset of her own into that White House.

MS. IFILL : You know, Ed, there is so much discussion on the campaign trail about the glories of Reagan and the glories of the Reagan administration, but not as much about the glories of Nancy Reagan’s role.

MR. O’KEEFE : No, you know, it’s funny, I remember hearing Senator Rubio just the other night talk about meeting her back in I believe it was 2011, when he gave a speech at the Reagan Library. And there was actually an interesting incident because at that dinner that he spoke at, she nearly fell over and landed on her face; he reached down and grabbed her, and essentially saved her from serious injury. So it was one of his – one of his more notable moments early on as the buildup was beginning for his potential presidential run.

There was a lot of praising her, of course, this week. You know, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, especially those three talk a lot about meeting Ronald Reagan. Kasich does as well because he had some history with him. But certainly it is amazing how you can’t go a day on the campaign trail without hearing about at least Ronald Reagan, and this week of course about Nancy Reagan.

MS. IFILL : Well, we send our condolences, of course, to the family.

I want to cycle back a little bit, folks, to what else was going on this week on the campaign trail. And I’ll stay with you, Ed, because you’ve witnessed some of this. There seems to be a sense of – an appeal for unity, but at the same a defense of violence, especially in the Trump camp, where there have – where protesters going to Trump rallies have been kicked out, punched in one case, and the – and the leading frontrunner defends them.

MR. O’KEEFE : Yeah. I’ve only been to a few Donald Trump rallies this cycle and haven’t witnessed, frankly, the violence that has played out at several of these events now. You know, it used to be it was hecklers who were just escorted out or an immigration reform advocate who started screaming at him. I saw that, I remember, in Iowa just before the caucuses. But what’s happened recently is sort of beyond the pale, especially when it comes to the treatment of reporters. We’ve seen a photographer accosted, essentially, by a Secret Service agent. They had a bit of a scuffle, and there may have been some fault on both sides of that. And then there’s the dispute about what happened the other night at an event that Trump held here in Florida, whether or not one of his aides – actually his lead aide, Corey Lewandowski – actually touched or sort of forcibly pushed a reporter out of the way of the candidate. He’s saying he didn’t know about it. I can tell you with certainty none of that happens at anyone else’s events that I have been to this year or that my colleagues have been to. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And frankly – and I don’t think anyone around the table here would disagree with me – it has to stop. You know, it’s just gotten to the point now where the treatment of the press in these situations is not good, and I should hope that the party and that other news organizations and the campaigns realize that this is something that needs to be addressed and needs to stop as quickly as possible.

MS. IFILL : You know, it’s true that there has been – the press have been roped off and there have been these incidents, but I find it almost more disturbing to see protests, which is protected by the Constitution, shut down the way it’s been shut down, Doyle.

MR. MCMANUS : Yeah. Look, there are two ways, essentially, for any candidate to handle the situation when someone is heckling. The graceful way is to say, you know, the First Amendment protects that person’s right to speak, but not to disrupt this, and will someone please take that – will the security personnel please take that person out. Donald Trump does it the other way, which we have rarely seen. He essentially heckles back and says things like, you know, somebody really ought to – ought to knock that person down.

MS. IFILL : Punch him in the face.

MR. MCMANUS : Punch him in the face. Whether he understood it –

MS. IFILL : Get him out of here on a stretcher.

MR. MCMANUS : Whether he understood it or not, Donald Trump has encouraged this kind of behavior toward both hecklers and reporters because he also turns anger at reporters who are – simply, they’re doing their jobs.

MS. CUMMINGS : Well, I would like the cerebral, the reader, Dr. –

MS. IFILL : Thinker.

MS. CUMMINGS : The thinker, Mr. Trump. I mean, he says – he says he’s not even aware these things are happening, and yet he’s shouting from the stage encouragement.

MS. IFILL : Yeah, he’s – he is completely unapologetic about this.

MS. CUMMINGS : And you know, the – things are escalating because what we’re – we saw the students in Georgia that were thrown out, and then when he went to North Carolina after that the student protesters grew, and this is building. And you have two sides now that feel wronged – one side feels wronged. I mean, that’s not the first punch. That was just a sucker punch. So they are feeling wronged, and the people on the other side are feeling enabled.

MS. IFILL : Well, it’s an ugly turn. And we hope that, in the interest of unity and calm and adulthood, we can turn this corner. Thank you, everybody, for watching. Thank you, Ed in Miami.

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