When it comes to naming infamous people connected with the White House, Joan Quigley doesn’t r

When it comes to naming infamous people connected with the White House, Joan Quigley doesn’t really rank as high as some, but if her account of events is accurate (and according to former Chief of Staff to Ronald Reagan, Donald Degan, it is), she definitely had a much larger impact on a presidency than you’d expect for someone in her role. Her role?

She was the Reagans’ astrologer.

As Degan put it in his 1988 book, For the Record: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco [Quigley] who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”

Initially working with the Reagans in the 1970s, Nancy cut ties with her when the couple concentrated on getting into the White House, but following the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Quigley inserted herself into Ronald and Nancy’s business by implying that if she had been working with the couple on their horoscopes, she could have warned them it was going to happen.

Y’know, with star charts and things.

Later in her memoir, My Turn, Nancy explained her decision to give Quigley enormous control over decisions made in the White House (from dictating when Air Force One can land to the War on Drugs to the Iran-Contra Scandal) thusly: “Very few people can understand what it’s like to have your husband shot at and almost die, and then have him exposed all the time to enormous crowds, tens of thousands of people, any one of whom might be a lunatic with a gun…. I was doing everything I could think of to protect my husband and keep him alive.”

And as Quigley herself put it in her own book, What Does Joan Say: “Not since the days of the Roman emperors, and never in the history of the United States presidency, has an astrologer played such a significant role in the nation’s affairs of State.“

According to the podcast, Behind the Bastards, Quigley herself was the person who suggested that Nancy Reagan use the War on Drugs as the thing to make her more popular in the eyes of the public (this being due to the Reagans’ bizarre negative obsession with the Kennedys*, with Nancy in particular being kind of fixated on being seen by the American public in the same positive light as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).

Quigley suggested that the best means to boost her popularity would be to choose a particular cause to champion and stick with it, with an anti-drug message being one of the options she suggested to Nancy. This was the one the First Lady ultimately adopted, leading to DARE, raised penalties for drug offences, and a massively inflated American prison population.

Quigley was eventually ousted from the White House following the publication of Degan’s book (the pair frequently fought when he worked with the presidency, over the unreasonable amount of control she had over policy) in 1988, and while Nancy and Ronald Reagan were both terrible, TERRIBLE people, the possiblity that they had someone effectively feeding them policies seemingly at random which went on to hurt thousands of people wasn’t great either (even if she was potentially scamming them).

Alternatively, Quigley control over policy may have been overstated somewhat (although her dictating when the presidental planes could land and the timing of a visit to a German graveyard both happened)… But really, what’s worse: Someone who is feeding suggestions to bad, powerful people which effect the lives of thousands of people in a harmful way, OR a scammer who TAKES CREDIT for policies which harmed thousands of people as a means of inflating their own impact on history.

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* The Reagans hatred of the Kennedys boiled down to a combination of jealousy and Ronald’s irrational belief that JFK was the reason his acting career had tanked (even though Ron’s acting career had dried up long before Kennedy became president). In the Dollop’s episode(s) on Reagan, they recount how the day JFK was assassinated Ron and Nancy were holding a dinner party, only for it to morph into their weird celebration of Kennedy getting shot when some of the guests tried to cancel.