Lyn Nofziger, who passed away from cancer Monday at his longtime
home in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, was the
epitome of the cliche, “Salt of the earth.” Rumpled, cantankerous,
outspoken, and yet sublime, Nofziger was a witness with a front row
seat to both Reagan Revolutions, the first one that took place in
the 1960s and '70s on Lyn’s native soil, California, and the second
one that took place on the national and then international stage in
the 1980s.
It was Nofziger who fielded reporters’ frantic questions about a
gravely wounded Reagan after John Hinckley nearly took his life
shortly after becoming president. It was Nofziger who knew enough
about Reagan’s Rock of Gibraltar, Nancy, to never cross her. And it
was Nofziger who, in his latter years, never shied away from
challenging a conservative movement that had lost its Reagan values
to return to those rock bed principles.
Late last year, Nofziger took President Bush to task in his
highly amusing “Musings” blog: “I am one of thousands of Americans
who is on what used to be called the president’s Christmas card
list. As a result, a card from George and Laura arrived in my mail
today. Needles to say, I was pleased and honored. After opening it,
I was and am, needless to say, also disappointed. The card was not
a Christmas card; it was a holiday card.”
A confounded Nofziger continued: “Inside there was no mention of
Christmas. Instead, it says, ‘With best wishes for a holiday
season of hope and happiness in 2005.’
“What a shame,” Nofziger mused, “that, apparently for political
reasons, a president who professes to be a strong Christian turns
his back on the celebration of his Savior’s birth because he
doesn’t wish to offend anyone — except maybe his fellow
Christians.”
Right up to the end, when Lyn was dying of the very disease that
had consumed his 38-year-old daughter, he was willing, despite his
condition, to tell me the story of that revolution and how it has
been derailed. Lyn Nofziger, the professional spokesman, right to
the very end.
NOFZIGER CAME TO REAGAN as so many have, by circumstance and
happenstance, but like many who followed one of our nation’s
greatest leaders, he was not just a conservative, he was a
“Reagan conservative.”
As a national political reporter for Copley News Service in the
1960s, Nofziger was even then a rare commodity: a Republican
reporter. When owner Jim Copley approached and finally convinced
Nofziger after failed attempts to get him on board the Reagan mule
train, Nofziger thought the former actor turned political activist
would lose California’s Republican gubernatorial primary in 1966
and be done with it: he was wrong. Reagan went on to win the
nomination and then the governorship. Whether Nofziger knew it or
not then, he was going to become a Reaganite for life and be a
critical part of one of the most successful political careers in
American politics.
Nofziger stayed with Reagan, through the “Kitchen Cabinet” days,
through the Citizens for the Republic days, through the landslide
presidential victory in 1980 and the resulting administration.
Nofziger, unlike so many Republicans of late, stayed with Reagan
beyond his death in 2004 by staying true to the conservative
principles that made both Reagan and America great in the
1980s.
Reagan’s affection for Lyn Nofziger might best be found in his
use of the name “Lynwood” for him. Nofziger told interviewers
Stephen Knott and Russell Riley in their brilliant 2003 interview for the Miller Center for Public
Affairs — which I highly recommend Reaganites and Lynites read —
it was just something Reagan did:
“You’ve mentioned the fact that he always called you Lynwood.
What was that? Did you ever attempt to straighten him out on that
front?” asked Knott and Riley.
Nofziger replied: “No, he called me Lynwood. He did it time
after time after time. My name is Franklyn, which I hate, and I’ve
never gone by it. I know that when someone calls me Franklin, that
they don’t know me. I don’t know. I guess it was kind of a term of
affection.”
Nofziger also spoke to the notion that there was a “veil” that
surrounded Ronald Reagan:
“There was, I always felt — less as I got used to it — but I
always felt that no matter how cordial he was, how congenial he
was, and how well you got along, there was always something there
between him and you. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but you just
never felt that you got really next to him. I would talk to other
people who felt the same way, and Nancy never said this to me, but
I’m told Nancy said the same thing.”
Many accounts of Nancy Reagan’s — some even attributed, perhaps
falsely, to Nofziger — overbearing protectiveness of her husband
portray a woman who viewed people around Reagan as either helping
or hurting him. But it was an often misunderstood Nancy Reagan who
afforded Nofziger what was perhaps his best moment before the
press, when she passed along to him Reagan’s quip after the
Hinckley shooting, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” Nofziger’s conveyance
of that anecdote to the media helped bring humor and hope to a
shocked American public: it was why he was perhaps the finest
spokesman a political figure could ever want to have.
ALSO TO BE FOUND AMONG Lyn Nofziger’s “Musings” was something that
related to another one of my greatest admirations for Lyn: his
common sense sensibility, even if it was contraire to the current
conventional conservatism. As I mentioned, Lyn’s daughter died a
painful death from cancer, one in which she found little relief
from mainstream medicine’s traditional medication. In a
Washington Post in the late 1990s, Nofziger wrote about
something that did work:
When our daughter was undergoing chemotherapy for lymph
cancer, she was sick and vomiting constantly as a result of her
treatments. No legal drugs, including Marinol, helped her.
We finally turned to marijuana. With it, she kept her food down,
was comfortable and even gained weight. Those who say Marinol and
other drugs are satisfactory substitutes for marijuana may be right
in some cases but certainly not in all cases. If doctors can
prescribe morphine and other addictive medicines, it makes no sense
to deny marijuana to sick and dying patients when it can be
provided on a carefully controlled, prescription basis.
Nofziger, who valiantly agreed to participate in a 2002 Capitol
Hill news conference in support of Congressman Barney Frank’s
“State’s Rights to Medical Marijuana Act” legislation, took to task
a “compassionate conservative” Bush over the issue:
“Next week I will participate in a news conference that calls
for an end to federal persecution of persons using or supplying
marijuana for medicinal purposes in states where law permits
it.”
Addressing the president, who as a candidate, seemingly
supported states’ rights when it came to medical marijuana,
Nofziger wrote:
“It seems to me that the very definition of compassionate
conservatism should convince President Bush to support legislation
that would allow states to legalize the use of marijuana for
medical purposes. In fact, if the president understands the meaning
of those two words (‘compassionate conservative’) not to support
Frank is to reject the philosophy for which he says he stands and
on which he ran for president.”
Lyn Nofziger: a conservative, a true conservative, a Reagan
conservative to the very end.
Lyn was a stand up guy in a town full of men who sit down when
they urinate: he will be sorely missed.
