Behind the Bastards - The Astrologer Who Managed The Reagan Presidency

Episode Date: July 26, 2018

Was Ronald Reagan's Astrologer a Bastard? In Episode 14, Robert is joined by Molly Lambert and Tess Lynch (Night Call Podcast) and they dive into Joan Quigley's career as The Reagan's Astrologer.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans. My guests this week are Molly Lambert and Tess Lynch from the wonderful podcast Night Call. They're also writers and people about town-izz-izzes, golden-gloves boxers, I think we settled on. Just more accomplished people. And this week we're talking about someone who might be controversial on this podcast.

So I want to lead in here before we introduce the subject by talking about my methodology, because we're about a dozen episodes or so in so far. The focus on this podcast has always been the worst people in history, which I define as the shittiest 1% of human beings in history. Now, there's about 107 billion people in the total estimated human population, which gives us a big pool to draw from, which is how I can internally justify covering Adolf Hitler one week and Harvey Weinstein the next, even though they're not, you know, quite on the same spectrum of awful. So our next subject today hasn't killed anybody.

She didn't cause a genocide, she's not a man. I still think I can justify putting her in that top 1%, although she's probably near the bottom of that 1%. Have y'all ever heard of a lady named Joan Quigley? No. Sounds familiar, but I don't know why. I thought you were going to say like Margaret Thatcher. No, because she's got blood on her.

Yeah, for sure. Once you said in the bottom of the 1%, I was like... There's totally a Margaret Thatcher episode, but she's more in the middle of it. She's up there. Joan Quigley. Now, Joan Quigley does have a little bit of a connection to Margaret Thatcher, because Joan Quigley has a very deep connection to Ronald Reagan,

because Joan Quigley was Ronald Reagan's astrologer. Really? Yep. Oh, this is so great. Yeah, can't wait. We're in. So we're talking about her today because I read her book and it made me really hate her. And I don't know, some people may disagree that she's terrible.

So we'll get into that too. Part of this podcast will be y'all telling me if I'm a crazy person, judging her unfairly, or if you guys think she's awful too. But regardless of what we conclude, I've named this episode, Joan Quigley, History's Greatest Monster. So let's dive into it. Joan Cecile Quigley was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 10th, 1927, at 4.17 p.m.

That time is critical because if you don't know the exact minute of someone's birth, you can't properly cast their horoscope. This is something I learned by reading 400 pages of Joan Quigley explain astrology to me. You read the whole thing. Oh, yeah. No, of course. Is she a good writer? No.

Oh. I'll give it in fairness. She's not bad. I was never distracted by the writing quality of the book. How did you decide to read that? I realized that Ronald Reagan's astrology had written a book, and then I bought it. How did you find out Ronald Reagan had an astrologer? I was drunk and browsing the internet at some point, and I came across some little

listical article talking about wacky facts about US presidents. I remember that she was also an astrologer to several other notable people. Was she an astrologer to the stars? Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah, I know a little bit, but I don't know enough. Keep telling us.

Yeah. So, Jones' father, John, was a former lawyer who moved to San Francisco and bought a fancy hotel. His wife is named Zelda, which is like, if you know the 1920s, that's the name to have if you're a rich lady. It's like, that's Zelda. It's like Jackson is today. Jackson?

Is everybody called Jackson? You mean so many Jackson's with an X, and we're just Jackson. They're all club promoters. Yep. Okay. Yeah, so he and his wife, Zelda, raised their daughters as high society ladies. They had a penthouse on Knob Hill in San Francisco and went to a private school. The Quigley Girls, as they were known, had chauffeurs to take them to school parties,

generally in Rolls Royce's. In her obituary, the Los Angeles Times said that she had, quote, come from the creme de la creme of San Francisco gentility. And her fancy rich lady Bonafides would prove critical in earning her Nancy Reagan's trust. Joan went to Vassar. She got a degree in art history. Her mom was apparently an astrology nerd, and that's where Joan caught the bug. She spent a year as a secret apprentice to a soothsayer named Jerome Pearson.

Her dad hated astrology, and so she had to hide her chartmaking and star-watching while publicly doing normal aristocratic stuff like whatever the junior league is. I don't know what the junior league is. Probably dance with people, dance with other rich people. Like Catillians, but with a sportier-sounding name. Yeah, that's my guess. Catillian is the only word that came into my mind when I read Junior League. I don't even know what one is.

It's a club for rich people to socialize. I wonder if it's only women. Like, the picture in my head is that scene from Gone with the Wind, where the lady in the big dress descends the staircase. Yeah, it's something rich people do so they can hang out and wear fancy clothes. You have to wear a bustle. Yeah. It's probably kind of racist.

Oh, definitely. There's no comparison. Yeah, yeah, okay. So once Joan is out of college in Junior League or whatever and moves out of her dad's house, she starts writing an astrology column for Seventeen Magazine, which I didn't realize went back that far. And what year is this? Like the 40s?

Yeah, this is in like the 40s. Seventeen was back in the 40s. Yeah, yeah. Because they had just invented teenagers. Right. They were like, now they need a magazine. Oh, people who live in past 12, I guess we got to figure a thing out. Her gig at Seventeen didn't last long though because she didn't like writing horoscopes

for tabloids. She wanted to read the stars of the rich and famous and was kind of disgusted by the idea that poor people might use astrology. I should ask you this point, are either of y'all into astrology? I mean, tangentially, we've done a couple of night calls where we talked about astrology a bunch and sort of why it's interesting whether you believe in it or not. I personally do not believe in it, but I've also said it's probably because I'm a Virgo and the boring is certain.

And I love Virgos and I specifically aimed for a Virgo with one of my kids, got locked down that Virgo, very pleased. How do you aim for that? You calculate the nine, well, it's really more like 10. What do you think about astrology? I'm not into astrology, but I like a good friend of mine from back home in Texas who's like an accountant is really into astrology. She's just one of the most grounded people I know, so I don't have an issue with this.

Well, what's your sign? It's entertaining. If I may. I don't know. What's your birthday? March. March what? 22nd.

I think you're a Pisces. Maybe I'm wrong. I have no way to know. A true astrology nerd would know. I know, but I'm, you know. We talked about this a night call. They redefined it. It's like even though I don't believe in or like astrology, especially if you live in

Los Angeles, you meet a lot of people that maybe are into astrology. There's also a thing I don't like where people are sort of like misogynistic about like, oh, women are so dumb. They believe in astrology. Plenty of men believe in astrology. Well, yeah, there's plenty of dumb men who believe in astrology. There's plenty of dumb men who believe in it, like trickle down economics. That's exactly.

I think it's like sports or something. It's just like a thing to keep life more entertaining than it is. I'll tell you, I believe in it way more than I believe in chakras. When people get their horrors read and I'm just like, wow, they took you for a fool because astrology you can entertain yourself with for free, so it can't actually be that bad. Yeah, I think that's what we've decided is as soon as you're spending money on it, then it's a scam. And it's bad.

Yeah. And that's kind of how I feel about it. I don't have any issue. And I tried to, as I edited this podcast, make sure that I was not just attacking people for like astrology. Just being a hater. Because I don't have like, it's whatever you get to get through the day. I've been superstitious about stuff when I've been in whatever, when you need it sometimes.

It's life. It's something you're into if you're doing it for Ronald Reagan, you're on the wrong side of history. Well, that may be one. And I'm also, I'm trying to be fair to the Regans in this, although I'm not a Ronald Reagan fan. Don't be fair to the Regans. You do a podcast about history's greatest monsters.

Oh, and we're going to cover, we're going to hit on the Regans on this, but I think they're victims of Joan Quigley in this. And we'll get to that in a second. Maybe we like Joan Quigley now. Who scams the scammers. This is a complicated one. If it was just one other person sitting here, that wouldn't, that wouldn't, but two other people, I feel like we can, we can make the historical judgment.

I think, I didn't finish school, so I don't know how historians make judgments, but I think this is it. I'm absolutely positive that this is exactly how it should be done. Fantastic. Okay. So Joan didn't like doing horoscopes for poor people, and didn't like doing horoscopes for anyone who could just afford to buy a magazine. Her obituary in The Economist notes that quote, she did not make forecasts or cast up horoscopes

for ordinary people, only for corporate figures, celebrities, and those who guided the destinies of nations. I wish The Economist was exaggerating about that, but the sad truth is that Joan Quigley was probably the most influential astrologer of the 20th century. Now Donald Reagan was Ronald Reagan's treasury secretary starting in 1981, and the White House Chief of Staff from 1985 to 87. And it's real funny that Donald Reagan worked so closely with Ronald Reagan. Were they related?

No, their last names are spelled differently. What? That's R-E-G-A. There's a Donald Reagan. Yeah. Donald Reagan. I'm going to call him Donald. Yeah, I should call him Donald Reagan.

It's still confusing. So yeah, Donald Reagan was the Chief of Staff, which is like, that's a big job. That was Steve Bannon's job until like a year ago now, Jesus Christ. Okay. So Donald Reagan was the White House Chief of Staff from 85 to 87. He was a big trickle-down economics guy. He was very important to the administration, but he was forced to resign in 1987 because he couldn't protect the president from the fallout of the Iran-Contra affair.

So in 1988, he published a memoir called For the Record, where he revealed to the world the White House's, quote, most closely guarded secret. No, not Ronald Reagan's growing senility, not the fact that we'd been selling missiles to Iran. Joan Quigley. This is a quote from Donald Reagan. Virtually every major move and decision the Reagan's made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes

to make certain that the planets were in favorable alignment for the enterprise. He continued. I would that there had been some other explanation, but there wasn't. Astrology was it. It was a daily, sometimes hourly factor in every decision affecting the president's schedule. What? What?

I didn't know anything about this. I didn't know the depth of this. Was she like living at the White House or was she just, was he calling her all the time? She did it all from San Francisco. It was Nancy who would call. Wow. Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit about how it worked.

Yeah, like she notes a number of times in her memoir and Donald Reagan backs it up. She had absolute control of her when Air Force One took off and landed. She could make it circle in the sky if she wanted it to land at a different time because the stars said that was better. Well, hey, she went to Vassar. She had her art history degree. She obviously knew a thing or two. Yeah.

Yeah. No. The, and Vassar is famous for its Air Force. That's what I'm thinking. Like that's an undergraduate. Military training. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know the Reagan's had like a Rasputin. Yeah. It's very rasputin. They did. Like a lady Rasputin. So I'm also, maybe I like respect her as a history scammer.

If Joan quickly had moved to D.C. and been fucking all of, I guess the husbands in D.C. of all of the powerful government people like Rasputin did to the ladies in the noble court in Russia. This would be a very different podcast. In fact, yeah. She had to do so much less work. Yeah. I know.

Working remotely. Yeah. Understated how great that is. Draw up the stars. Yeah. Yeah. And she was not shot and drowned in the vulgar, which is a spoiler. Sorry.

But you probably should have been. Yeah. It wouldn't have been the worst thing. So far, I'm not really hating this lady, but let's keep going. Let's get into it a little bit. So Donald notes that nobody other than some people very close to the president knew about this relationship, including his secret service to tail. He even sort of mentions that he thinks they'd be kind of pissed to realize that after all

their years of carefully guarding the president, like Nancy had been talking about his moves ahead of time with this astrologer over an unsecured phone line. He said, quote, surely they would think that posed a security risk, which it did. And that'll be a thing later and actually kind of led to a grand Soviet U.S. astrology duel. But that's a that's a moment for I'm yeah, that's for later in the podcast. I'm getting ahead of myself. So when Mr. Regan dropped the truth about President Reagan's astrologer, it hit Capitol

Hill like a bomb. The story sort of faded to just a general political fable now, like I think most people vaguely hear that the Reagan's were into astrology, but they don't know much about it. But at the time, it was as huge a story as it would be now. Other now would only be a story for a day and a half that best. Maybe not even that. So Nancy Reagan insisted that it hadn't been a big deal.

She claimed that her use of Joan had just been a silly affectation, nothing serious. This made Joan very angry. In her mind, not only had she not hurt the Reagan's, her astrology had been the secret power behind the throne. So Joan decided to write a memoir of her own. And on March 1st, 1990, she published, What Does Joan Say? My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan. This is the book that I read for this podcast.

What does Joan say? What does Joan say? How long was this book? About 300 something pages. Wow. She had a lot to say. She had a lot to say. I don't think it sold well.

I wound up having to order a very old hardcover copy of it that had never been opened. There's no Kindle edition of it, so I had to underline the words the old-fashioned way. It was terrible taking notes on books before Kindle. Strenuous. Yeah. Anyway, Joan made me work because her book wasn't a success, and I may hate her for that. She opens her memoir by saying, This is a book I never thought I would write, which I think is a lie, because she published it really quickly after Nancy Reagan's memoir.

Joan claims that when Donald Reagan spilled the beans on her existence, quote, I rejected all suggestions that I document my Reagan years. I said as little as possible to the media. I tried above all to keep from damaging the president I had admired and served for seven years with total dedication. But then she claims that Nancy Reagan's memoir might turn forced her to reconsider. She said it reads like fiction and much of it is evasive. That is the beginning of what would become several hundred pages of throwing shade at

Nancy Reagan. To my eyes, Joan's memoir serves two purposes, number one, to allow her to take credit for every achievement of the Reagan era, and number two, to shit on Nancy Reagan. Now I know at this point you might be wondering how credible is this lady, and obviously she's an unreliable narrator. But multiple people do back up the fact that she not only advised the president, she was actually the arbiter of his schedule. Donald Reagan, who was again chief of staff and would know, admitted in his memoirs that

Joan had total control over when Air Force One took off and landed. He wrote that he, or in this case she, who controls the president's schedule, controls the workings of the presidency. Which seems accurate. In his book The Acting President, CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer related a story that also backs up Joan's importance. This is Bob Schieffer. The only real hitch the campaign team had to deal with during those weeks of planning

in the fall of 1983 was a conflict over when the president should formally declare his candidacy. Lee Atwater, in particular, wanted it done right away, but he was repeatedly told that Ms. Reagan did not feel the time for that announcement was propitious. I think it's propitious. Propitious. Thank you. That baffled him.

And when he finally continued to press for an explanation, Michael Deaver took him aside and disclosed that Nancy's reluctance was based on an astrologer's warning. So there's a number of people, you can find stories of saying, like, yeah, we had to change the time at the last minute or we had to do something like midnight or three in the morning or whatever. And when they would trace it back, it'd be because Nancy Reagan said, no, he can't go out at that hour. Like he has to go out now or he has to do this now.

Was this because Joan was insinuating that he would be assassinated if he, okay, spoiler, sorry. No, no, no, this is like immediately the next paragraph. So no, you landed on it. So I'm going to get into how this weird little relationship started. It kicked off in the 1970s because Joan was on the Merv Griffin show. Merv Griffin was, I don't know, it'd be fair to call him like a late-night host, right? Like Jimmy Fallon of his era, but probably more talented.

Yeah. I'm sorry if there's Jimmy Fallon fans out there. I mean, history's greatest monster. Yeah, at this point. But yeah, Merv Griffin was one of those really connected people. So he liked Joan quickly and she did his astrology a bunch. And he also knew an actress named Nancy Reagan, and he knew her back when she was an actress and her husband was an actor.

And then he continued to know them after her husband became the governor of California. Merv knew that Nancy believed in astrology. Joan claims he asked if he could give her a number to Nancy, and she said yes. This is from Joan. The first time Nancy consulted me mostly about personal problems, she had given me her exact birth time, so doing her horoscope was easy. I remember I described to her in detail the matter that she intended asking me about before she asked it from the beginning, my accuracy impressed her.

So Joan did her work on Nancy, and Nancy was astonished at how well it worked or whatever. And so they had a little relationship going on for a while. The Reagan's had always been superstitious in 1967 when Ronnie was inaugurated as governor. His inauguration was scheduled for 12.10 a.m. in the morning at the advice of a different astrologer. So this has been a thing in their life for a while. So in 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president in one, and her memoir Nancy claims that Joan volunteered her services, which just amounted to a few phone calls and advice on when to

time certain events. Joan, however, claims that she advised the Reagan's extensively, particularly during then candidate Reagan's first presidential debate with a guy named John Anderson. Anderson has been forgotten and buried in history as we all will be some day, but he was Ronald Reagan's opponent in his first debate, and this was important because Ronald Reagan was a very old presidential candidate. No one had ever been 69 and running for president before, so it was important that he looked good and not seem old.

Joan took great care in timing their debate. She also claims that she warned Nancy that the stars had told her that someone was going to tamper with Ronald Reagan's microphone. And apparently, according to Joan, Nancy found that the microphone had been tampered with and turned down. And Joan says that if Ronald had used the microphone without fixing it, he would have sounded weak and therefore old. What?

It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of age-shaming to say that weakness and age are correlated, but I guess she's not necessarily wrong. I mean, we also saw how that can be wielded very powerfully in a presidential campaign. Weakness and age and, you know, fallibility. Yeah.

Like, that's that. This is one of the ones where I want to, like, attack her, but she may not be wrong about that. Right? I mean, what if the mic wasn't turned down and they just turned his mic up, you know? So he was louder than the other guy. Smart move. That's what I'm saying.

Still a smart move. Yeah. And Nancy doesn't say anything about this, so we kind of have to take Joan's word that this microphone thing happened. She does, however, take credit for Ronald winning his debate against Carter. Or rather, she says, I cannot claim any credit for his winning the Carter debate. However, I was definitely responsible for Carter's losing that crucial contest because she claimed she picked an astrological time that made it impossible for Carter to win.

This is sort of the inauguration of her taking credit for everything that happens during this time. So Ronald Reagan was elected and Joan stopped hearing from Nancy Reagan because at this point, you know, Ronald Reagan's the president and all the president's advisors are saying, don't associate with astrologers. That's going to end badly for us politically if, you know, where people find out that you're consulting an astrologer on things. It's just not going to be good.

But then on March 30th, 1981, some guy shot President Reagan in a vital area, his body. President Reagan nearly died. I don't really like Nancy Reagan, particularly her involvement in the war on drugs, but one thing you can say for her and her husband is that they were very much in love by the reports of everybody who knew the two of them. The assassination attempt sort of broke Nancy Reagan. Most people would turn to something comforting, either drugs or God, or drugs made out of God after that kind of shock.

Nancy turned to astrology. So this is where we get into the thing that I think makes Joan kind of a monster. And so we're going to delve into that. But first, do you guys like products and services? Who doesn't? Oh, we love them. Oh, man, in currency? Oh, yeah.

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, this has been a long opening. So far, nothing bastard-y inherently about what Joan Quigley's done. She's just been doing astrology for people who like having astrology done. Whatever.

It's fine. We're getting to where I think she does something awful. So Ronald Reagan is shot on March 30, 1981. Nancy Reagan freaks out in exactly the same way anyone whose spouse gets almost assassinated would freak out. Now both Nancy Reagan, because I read Nancy's memoir or two or at least the chunk that deals with this, both Nancy Reagan and Joan agree that the aftermath of President Reagan getting shot is when their working relationship in the White House started.

They both have a different recollection of how that happened. So I'm going to read excerpts from both Joan's memoir and Nancy's memoir and y'all can tell me which seems more credible to you. So I'm going to start with Joan. This is what she said that day. I remember it verbatim. First she asked, could you have told about the assassination attempt? Yes, of course I could had I been looking.

However, I haven't been following your charts or tracking the mundane material for Washington. I'm sorry. Had I been looking, I would have warned you. She then said, and this is Nancy talking to her, I'm getting terrible press. It's so unfair. I'm really a very nice person. Can you tell me what to do? I'm willing to pay you.

So in Joan's version of events, Nancy Reagan asks, could you have predicted my husband's assassination attempt and then immediately asks after that, can you make me popular? Alright, so that's Joan's recollection. Here's Nancy Reagan and her memoir, My Turn. And now it is her turn. That joke wasn't even a joke. I said it and you can't take it back. Here's Nancy Reagan.

I remember as if it were yesterday, my reaction to what Merv told me on the phone, Merv Griffin. He had talked to Joan, who had said that she could have warned me about March 30th. According to Merv, Joan had said, the president should have stayed home. I could see from my charts that this was going to be a dangerous day for him. Oh my God, I remember telling Merv, I could have stopped it. I hung up the phone, picked it up again, and called Joan. Merv tells me you knew about March 30th. I said, yes, she replied.

I could see it was a very bad day for the president. I'm so scared, I told her. I'm scared every time he leaves the house and I don't think I can breathe until he gets home. I cringe every time we step out of a car or leave a building. I'm afraid that one of these days somebody is going to shoot at him again. So who do you guys think is credible here? Which story do you believe?

So Joan is basically like, I wasn't looking, so I don't know. So I didn't know ahead of time. And then Nancy kind of comes back at her being like, well, I'd like you to sign on for my own purposes to give me better publicity, you know, to kind of milk the stars, if you will. And try to stop my husband from getting shot again, but they're equally important. And then Nancy is like, she just wants to protect her husband. She'll do anything. Joan saw it coming, reached out via Merv.

Exactly. I find Nancy's more credible. And if... It depends on how much money Joan was making, I think. If Joan needed the income from Nancy Reagan, then I kind of believe in her reaching out. But if she was really doing fine, it sounds like maybe she had a trust fund, I don't really know why she would, especially because even though I do like astrology, I wouldn't put any stock in it.

It seems like a big risk for her to take, you know? I think, and I get the feeling from the memoir and from the stuff we're getting into, I think Joan wanted to feel close to power. Yeah, I think that's what it is, is Joan wanting to be influential. She wanted to use her powers to direct the progress of history. And what I think is, if Nancy Reagan's version of things is true, and Merv Griffin didn't counter her, at least when she recalled this, then this lady reached out to Merv because he knew that Merv was going to talk to Nancy.

Joan reached out to Merv and said, oh, I predicted what happened to President Reagan. I saw it coming, in which case one of two things is true. Another astrology does work, and this lady legitimately saw that President Reagan was in mortal danger, had the First Lady's phone number, and didn't reach out and call her. Or astrology doesn't work that way, and Joan just lied to Merv Griffin because she knew Nancy would hear from him. Wasn't she just saying I could have predicted it if you had had me on the job already? That's what her memoir, that's what Joan says in her memoir.

Nancy's like saying that Joan called Merv Griffin and was like, I could have stopped it. Yeah, according to what Merv said to Nancy Reagan, Joan told Merv, the President should have stayed home, I could see from my charts that this was going to be a dangerous day for him. I'm going to go ahead and believe Joan. Yeah, me too. Because, yes, because I think that it's way more credible that she would say I wasn't

looking if I had been, than I could have predicted it. Because why would, you know, yeah, I think that that's way more likely. Because if she had known, she would have also tried to reach out because she. Because it would have achieved the same purpose. But okay, the reason I believe Nancy's account is because they both admit that Nancy stops calling Joan after Ronald wins the presidency. But after the assassination attempt, wouldn't you think that Nancy would kind of start reaching out?

But I think Nancy would start reaching out if one of her friends says this astrologer tells me she predicted. I think Nancy was probably just looking for clues. She was admittedly in freak out mode. She was admittedly in freak out mode, but it also, she's presented with a solution, which is that this lady predicted the assassination, and I could have stopped it if I kept talking to her. But don't you think that it also makes Nancy seem like a more reasonable person if she

claims that, well, then Merv, who everyone loves, called me and said, you know, like astrology's not bullshit. As opposed to having to admit, I was so freaked out that I reached out to my old astrologer that I only had to drop because it was like kind of tacky. Well, she doesn't say that she dropped Joan because it was kind of tacky. She's actually totally positive about Joan. Like Nancy Reagan's never anything but nice, like when she writes about Joan. Because Joan knows where the bodies are buried.

I mean, I don't know, like Joan never talks about the bodies being buried. Because she got paid off to just take this money for this memory. Look, you invited two pro-Jone people. Well, yeah, no, no, no, no, this is what I want because... I can't be mad at somebody for like scamming Nancy Reagan because Nancy Reagan sucks so bad that like she... But tell us more. If there was only money at stake, I wouldn't care.

If it turns out that Joan was like, Nancy Reagan, like the stars say you should like pretend the AIDS crisis isn't happening, like then I'll turn on Joan again. Not quite that, but it does tie into the war on drugs. I think some of that is just Nancy Reagan. Yeah, some of that's Nancy Reagan. I feel like, I think she called Merv so that she could get Nancy because she knew that if Nancy heard from her, like she would be like, oh, I could have stopped this. That rings truer to me than Nancy Reagan calling Joan and being like, could you have predicted

it and can you make everyone love me? I still believe Joan. I don't know. I know people who are very obsessed with their astrologers and I think sometimes true that they'll get sort of like not great readings and then something scary happens and they reach out almost like a therapist. That is plausible too. I just have trouble believing, number one, that the conversation immediately swung from

can you stop my husband from dying to can you make America love me? No, I don't think, I think they're the same thing because she's like, if my husband dies, I'm not First Lady anymore. So like, I both need my husband to stay alive and then to be the most, you know, because she's an actress. She just wants to be playing the part of the First Lady that everyone loves. Yeah, I guess part of it comes down to whether or not you believe. And she's a shitty actress, which is why.

Well, and Ronald wasn't a great actor. Right. They were both not good actors, which is why they're not believable. I mean, in fairness, there were like two good actors back then. Yeah, but they were the not good actors who snitched on people at the Blacklist Trials. So we knew that we've been new. They're bad. Yeah.

I don't know. So okay, so we're, you guys are coming down on Joan was just responding to a legitimate job offer. And I'm thinking Joan was trying to like sneak her way back into the Reagan's life by taking advantage of an assassination attempt. So that's where we are right now. All right. So we'll see where everyone's opinions line up at the end of this story.

So I should probably note right now for the sake of completion, Joan does claim at another point in her memoir to have foreseen something terrible and not told Nancy Reagan about it. She claims that she predicted Nancy Reagan's cancer and said nothing. Nancy's horoscope had indicated to me months in advance that she would develop breast cancer. I didn't want to alarm her by coming right out and telling her I knew all too well what a warrior she was. So I did what I always do in such cases. I advise her to have monthly checkups and frequent mammograms, certain that the doctors

would discover at the minute it developed, which strikes me as a little bit of a dick move. But I don't know. Maybe that's astrologer standard practice is to, I mean, the odds of it of getting breast cancer if you're a woman are so high that it's a pretty safe bet to say at some point you'll get cancer. But I mean, if she told Nancy Reagan, I see that you're going to get cancer. What could Nancy Reagan have done other than exactly what she advised her to do?

I mean, what can you do if you know you're about to get cancer other than see a doctor? Yeah. And I think this, again, may tie back to the fact that I don't think she first saw any of this. And she's just claiming later after the fact to have foreseen someone's cancer to make her sound good. It doesn't make her sound good, though. No, it makes her sound terrible because there's no way to say I knew you were going to get

cancer didn't tell you. But again, I'm not surprised that the Reagan's would take all their advice from an amoral scammer because that's what they are. Yes. And we're in that already. Amoral California scammers. I also feel like they were coming from California where it's 1980, like who doesn't have a personal scholarship.

It's true. Well, yeah, which is part of the thing. She's always got all these pictures in the book where it'll be like someone, some senator or whatnot. And she'll be like, Senator, such and such didn't have an issue with my astrology because he had an astrologer. That's what I'm saying. And it's like, OK.

If she had had like a priest on call or whatever, you know, it seems like it's kind of the same thing. Yeah. I mean. But maybe more acceptable to Middle America if she's got a priest than if she's got an astrologer. Middle America? Don't they love horoscopes?

Yeah, who doesn't? Evangelicals might not. The difference between a priest and a horoscope is that a priest, and I'm not into religion either, but a priest doesn't claim to be predicting the future for you. A priest can just be like, like the priests that most presidents talk to, they're not like being like, hey, what time should I take my plane off? Right. Like, should I do this meeting?

They're like, what does God say about bombing people in the Sudan or whatever? And apparently God's fine with it. But yeah. Anyway, we've gotten past the assassination attempt and Joan's prediction of Nancy Reagan's cancer. So yeah, after the assassination attempt, Joan gets the offer to become the astrologer for the Reagan White House, and she decides to take it on. She says that, you know, she knew that if she took the Reagan's on, quote, I would be

giving up all my time and effort like those who take part in any administration, sacrificing the rewards they command in the private sector in order to serve their country. Was she exclusive to the Reagan's? No. Oh. No. This is nonsense. This is just one other client and she was paid extraordinarily well.

Do you know how much? Yeah. Do you know? Yeah. $3,000 a month in 1988, which is today $9,000 a month. What? Who else were her clients? That's what I want to know.

She doesn't go into much detail. Merv Griffin was definitely one of them, but she was like a lot of famous San Francisco socialites and stuff, wealthy people. And this is a big trend in the book is Joan bragging about how selfless she is for working for the Reagan's. She claimed that Nancy begged her to take them on for free because the Reagan's didn't have much money, but they eventually settled on a sum, which again, Joan claims were basically poverty wages, but which was about $9,000 a month in modern money, which is in my mind

a lot of money. She remarks regularly like pretty much every chapter, how heroic she is for taking just this pittance, quote, I charged Nancy a monthly fixed fee because she needed much more of my time than she could afford. This was very generous on my part because I often worked longer than a full time for a while when an emergency would arise. I was working as long as nine hours uninterrupted. Oh my goodness.

Oh my God. Yeah. And this is, I guess another call out to the Doritos people if they want to sponsor the podcast, but I will work nine hours uninterrupted on a Doritos themed monster podcast. We're trying to get the Doritos people to support us. Doritos come through. Yeah. I feel like they're the perfect chip for dictator based comedy.

There's a lot of we do here. I mean, Muncho's might be in the running, but I think Doritos is more of like the, you know, crème de la crème as you might say. Yeah. Yeah. Someone on Twitter came up with a great hashtag, nachos not Nazis, which I think, yeah, yeah, we can sell some Doritos. Anyway, back to the Regans.

So yeah, in Nancy's version of events, which again, nobody's credible here, which is why I'm grateful to have y'all's perspective on the matter because I just wound up hating Joan in this book. But you're right. Nancy Reagan does not deserve to be taken seriously or literally at her own word either. So Nancy claims that Joan became a crutch and something of a therapist, but nothing more. You know, she would call her when she was anxious about something or a meeting that

Ronnie was going to have. And I can't not call him Ronnie now because I read that a thousand times. And I think that Nancy is lying about this. I don't think she's lying about using Joan as a therapist. That does not seem out of the pale at all for me. But I do think that Nancy's fibbing about Joan not having a big role in the administration because Donald Regan's account backs up Joan's claim that she was important and she was making major calls.

It is interesting to me that Nancy is only nice to Joan in her memoir. She says Joan was sweet and emotionally supportive and expresses admiration for how she handled the press when the story broke. It's interesting to me that Joan spends her whole book attacking Nancy Reagan and making her look like a monster with quotes like Nancy was almost totally innocent of history. I was often surprised by how little she knew about it. She was in no way an intellectual or deeply reflective, which I don't disagree with, but is not a nice way to refer to the person who's the only reason that you're noteworthy.

Well, maybe she thinks it's not the only reason she's noteworthy. Yeah. It also is the difference between a politician and a psychic. Yeah. Yeah. One's a plain dealer. Yeah. Yeah.

And Joan makes a big point about how much Nancy Reagan hated Elie Wissell, the Holocaust survivor and author, and what he won. Was it a Nobel? I think. Yeah. She says that Nancy Reagan hated Elie Wissell because he made a big fuss when Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at a cemetery where Nazis are buried, which is a reasonable thing to be angry about if you're a Holocaust survivor.

When Wissell became vocal about it and sparked an outcry, Joan claims that Nancy said he acts like he's crazy. It's his fault. He's a fanatic. And after this point, Joan chimes in to say that she doesn't think Nancy was a racist in the most racist way possible. To be fair, Nancy was not a religious bigot. She liked her wealthy Jewish friends as well as her friends of other religions.

Oh, no. But is that a way to know? It's just terrible. It's just. It's just terrible. And that's one where I feel like Nancy's, I'm sure Nancy's awful about this. Well, that, I mean, that's the thing is I'm like, is she just trying to like call attention to how awful Nancy is while still retaining?

I don't think she recognizes it. No. I think she she legitimately. She probably doesn't know anyone that isn't an anti-Semite. Fair. So she's like on a scale of anti-Semitism. This was just, you know, we, she just hated him. But, you know, her, her wealthy Jewish friends, as long as you're rich.

Yeah. And I don't think Joan quickly ever talked to anyone who wasn't rich in her life. That's what I'm saying. So she's never met a non-racist person in her life. Yeah. It's telling that she doesn't consider the Reagan's to be rich because like they had a ranch in Santa Barbara. Right.

But they're not old money. Yeah. Yeah. They're new. That's what she, that's the line for her because she's, you know, San Francisco, old money. And I'm sure some East Coast people would be like, well, that's California. Right.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. The Asters are really raking her over the coals and they're all making fun of the Reagan being president is so good. It's the talk of the junior league. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaking of the junior league, I am pretty sure those wealthy Jewish families. There aren't a lot of the Cattilians. Yeah. I was going to say they're definitely not allowed in the junior league. Yeah. So yeah, Joan Quigley claims her first big job was to make Nancy Reagan likable. Nancy was being pilloried by the press from the White House China. She planned to buy to her expensive clothes.

Her every movement was ridiculed and criticized. Every word she said brought more public disapproval. So Nancy was embarrassed at being a political liability and begged for Joan's help. I want everyone to love me where Nancy's first words after I agreed to work with her on a professional basis, I had to smile. The words were so typical of a person with her kind of horoscope. Dude, now I'm going to go home and look up like what Nancy Reagan's sign was because based on that, what am I thinking, Scorpio?

I'm going to find out while I keep going. Yeah, research. Okay. This is important extra research that I didn't do because I'm a hack and a fraud. Yeah. So Joan claims that she asked Nancy what charities Nancy wanted to work for. Nancy kind of vaguely expressed an interest in drug rehabilitation programs and the foster grandparents program, and Joan claims that she's responsible for focusing Nancy Reagan.

I told her that these two charities would be what she would be known for from now on, that she would talk about them whenever she granted interviews and make them her personal crusade. She must be a kind of ministering angel of mercy, a sort of super national mother figure. I told her to set her staff to ferreting out appealing letters from children, for instance, and make a point of answering them. Or she could respond to some needy person, making sure at the same time that the story would be well-publicized in the media.

Oh, man. Which is such a rich person, ready to talk about some needy person, like what do you mean by needy? That was a foster grandparents thing too, I wonder. I mean, that sounds like, I guess it's a program to help connect underprivileged kids to older men and women who could be like, no. So she really wanted to just focus on issues that you can put on a mug. Yeah.

She just wanted superficial things that she could be beloved for. And Joan Quigley was like, yes, but you can't be casual about it. If you're going to talk about drugs, you've got to be a drug warrior. You've got to be like lecturing the nation. And claims basically to be why Nancy Reagan became the face of the war on drugs during the 1980s. Well, apparently Nancy was a cancer, that's what I just learned. That's for sure.

Ronald was a Aquarius. It's the age of Aquarius. I mean, the cancers, cancers are, so they're water signs and they're very, they do need a lot of approval and they're very sensitive to being rejected. So they're two water signs together. What does that mean? Two water signs together. Well, water signs are, you know, they're fluid.

Like there's, you know, I'm just now I'm speaking personally about the water signs. I know. But they're kind of mercurial, like their temperament can change on a dime. They have moods. They're moody people. Molly and I are earth signs. I don't fuck around. It's interesting that you say that water signs are fluid because Nancy Reagan, the water

sign was a major factor in the escalation of the war on drugs, which is why so many people have to take piss tests to prove their sobriety. And while you're all reeling from that connection, we have to break for some more ads. So please pull out your credit cards and spend some money. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Joan Quigley, history's greatest monster, or maybe not. We'll be deciding that by the end of this podcast. One way or the other, it fits into the Behind the Bastards theme, either Joan Quigley's a bastard or Ronald Reagan is a bastard. Which in a way makes her less of a bastard.

She's the power behind the throne and the throne is evil. The war on drugs thing I don't love right now. Nancy Reagan is remembered for like, just say no. She's criminalizing all that stuff and also for being a horrible homophobe. Super homophobic. Because Joan is very conservative, that comes across in this thing. She doesn't say there's not a word about gay people in this, there's not a word about the AIDS crisis in this.

I can't say anything about that because Joan didn't consider it worth talking about. That's what they did. Yeah, and neither did the Reagan's. And if you're an astrologer and you saw the AIDS crisis coming and did nothing, then I'm going to go ahead and say. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's a monster too. And again, if you're like taking all the credit for making Nancy Reagan the person she is,

then like you're taking credit for a lot of garbage. Actually I'll say this in Joan's defense. I don't think she could have predicted the AIDS crisis because that would have been doing the horoscopes of a bunch of low income gay people and Joan quickly did not work for poor people. Astrology too is seeing world trends. Yeah. You know, you can focus on an individual chart or you can focus on the planetary alignment.

Throughout her book, she's very inconsistent about what astrology can do because sometimes she'll say when something goes badly for Reagan, she'll say like the stars were just so fucked up with that thing that there was no way that anything anyone could have done could have affected her. Right, no intervention. But she'll also claim that like you can make anything successful if you pick the right time. That's all.

Well, which is it, Joan? That's all new age bullshit is like it's infallible except sometimes. Yeah, but in this case, nothing could be done. Control, right. Yeah, so there's a lot of inconsistencies within it. But again, I don't have any issue with astrology until you start determining when the president speaks to national tragedies and stuff at which point maybe stop. Do you guys think Alex Jones is the Joan Quigley of the Trump administration?

Oh shit. You know? That's not a bad point. I saw him give a speech at the Republican National Convention like outside of the main convention floor. I have never seen a human being get that read because he was screaming and it's like it was terrifying. But I feel like with Trump too, it's like he also like he cribbed so much from Reagan

and he also does so much based on what he sees on TV. He's also the president who just watches TV all day. And he's superstitious. Yeah, he's definitely superstitious. And I'm sure they've got Alex Jones on a hotline. And I gotta say, I'm glad that Trump does not have. One of the things Ronald Reagan had is personal charisma. Like if you ever talked to anyone, even people who didn't like him, who had face-to-face conversations,

he was very good. He was good at charming people. That's so weird because I never got that from him ever. When you guys hung out? When we hung out. Yeah. With those times when you all talked. Well, there's like stories like when he got shot and he was like dying and being

willed in for surgery, like he like looked up at the surgeon and he said, oh, I sure hope you're a Republican. It's like little folk like. That's not funny. Trump would. Is it? I think it's endearing in the moment. I don't think.

I don't know. I mean, look, he's not as bad as Trump, I think. No, he's totally. Totally. Relationships. Maybe. I think Trump, Reagan to me, like his charisma is, I don't know, I think it was more like the same thing with like George W. Bush, where it was like people were like, oh, his folksy

charisma. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like I don't see that. He just seems like an idiot. But I think Reagan was more like George senior. You know, he seemed like an old man who used being old to like fake, convey statelyness and being rich. That's an aspect of like one thing.

Old white man. It's hard to say how much of Trump's unpopularity is due to the media cycle and like if Trump had been president in 1981, would he be more popular because we just wouldn't have as much focus on it. But Reagan was more popular than Trump, which I don't know. I mean, imagine Reagan, though. That was, I mean, that's one of the things about, you know, making a very like vanilla joke of like, I hope you're a Republican as opposed to like firing off some crazy ass tweets

where you're just so offensive. Exactly. Well, I guess it's more like if Reagan were president now, he'd be tweeting some crazy racist shit all the time. I don't think he would because I think he wouldn't know how to use Twitter because he's too old. I think he might be mutton dressed as lamb on Twitter, you know. But I'm saying he at least for sure was saying crazy racist homophobic shit behind closed

doors. Behind closed doors. But I think that's the, I mean, not that it makes it any better, but that it makes it easier to be a charming person in the, you know, public perception. Yes. That's like what people think is charming about you, which is obviously Donald Trump's voters are like, I love when he talks about, he grabs them by the pussy and that's what I like, you know.

But I do think there's different kinds of racism and they're all toxic. But like with Trump, you've got this more like, I'm going to be like explicitly call people vermin. But news organizations are still like a racially charged incident, you know, like they still won't say he's being a racist, even though he's like using racist terms and saying racist things. People still are like, but he's the president. So we're going to treat it with like the import of like the president saying something.

Right. Yeah. But it's all the same platforms the Republican party has always had, which are like homophobia, racism and like hating poor people. Well, and I think more to the point which you're getting at, which, which is interesting in that it ties in here is one of the things that has been so dangerous regarding the intersection of the press and this presidency is that we traditionally treat the presidency as this august position.

There's like something special about the president, like that there's a certain level of respect that you should have for the president. And that's obviously nonsense as it occurs to Donald Trump because he's just an asshole on Twitter. Well, it's nonsense in general, I think. It was nonsense then. Yeah. This guy had a fucking astrology telling us plenty to circle in the sky.

Totally. The stars weren't right. Like the great presidents of history were like slave owners, so like they were not keeping their racism secret either or. Or rampaging alcoholics or too fat to get out of a bathtub. Like they're just. Or wouldn't be. They're just dudes.

Which is just disgusting. Right. And I think the thing about Reagan was it was like we're casting a guy who looks like he should be the president to play the president on television, but he doesn't actually like know or care. Well, that's where the astrologer becomes an important piece of the puzzle. Where it becomes back in. Let's get back to her.

Let's get back to the astrologer. When we were last talking about the astrology stuff, we were getting into the fact that yeah, Joan Quigley insisted that Nancy Reagan make drug policy be like her big thing. And of course, Nancy becomes the face of the just say no campaigns during the Reagan administration. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses increased from like 50,000 to several hundred thousand, like 400,000 by 1997. So yeah, Nancy Reagan wasn't making policy on that, but she was the face of it. And she had a significant role in setting public opinion.

And some of that's on Nancy and some of that's on Joan Quigley. Some of that's on Ronnie. Most of it's on Ronnie because Joan and Nancy weren't making policy. Well, I feel like it's also it's always like frowned upon for the president to like listen to his wife, you know, and make policy based on that. But she gets her little pet projects, right? Like incarcerating drug, incarcerating everybody, yeah, the homie things. Yeah.

Uh, so yeah, in addition to urging Nancy to make anti drug policy, a cornerstone of her first lady ship, Joan insisted that Nancy avoid doing any interviews with fashion magazines. I think she mainly includes this part, so they can take, take, take another shot at Nancy. Or another shot at 17 magazine. She doesn't mention in magazine by name. She's just like screw magazines, magazines, poor people can afford those. Got to watch TV. I only read gold.

But yeah, she says that not talking to fashion magazines was quote, the hardest thing for her to give that up. She tried to weadle me into letting her do it, but I was firm. Joan claims at the time she picked for Nancy to do her public appearances and her anti drug speeches and stuff were as perfect as possible. She's very proud of this work and says it's the reason that Ms. Reagan's reputation improved throughout her husband's time in office. Here's Joan again.

Quite typically when Nancy thanked me for turning her image around, I said, and it was something she was already aware of. Nancy, Joe Kennedy paid between one and two million dollars in 1960 for what I have done for thousands in 1981. She claims Joe Kennedy had to pay publicists to make Jackie O. popular, which everybody would have loved Jackie. No matter what she did, she was fucking Jacqueline Onassis, like go to hell, Joan, quickly. And then she said to Nancy, really, you must admit it has been a present.

And again, she was getting $9,000 a month in modern dollars. It's so hard because when you're paying for astrology, any number seems both ludicrous and completely sane. Yeah. How do you know? I mean, $9,000, if someone's giving you $9,000 for this, it seems easy to argue that that's a tiny amount. And if they're saying, I'm the only person who can give you this information.

Right. Also, I mean, Joan Quigley does not sound like a feminist, but in a way, advising the first lady to not push her cause in fashion magazines is kind of a feminist stance. And you'll be taken way more seriously if you avoid that channel entirely. Like I'm kind of behind that. Yeah. I'm not against that part. But also, Nancy Reagan just wanted to be in fashion magazines.

That's why she wanted to be first lady, so she could be on the cover of Vogue or whatever. And if she'd just been on the cover of Vogue and not been talking about drugs, maybe we'd be in a better place. She should have stuck to fashion. Yeah. And I guess more to the point what irks me is just like, I'm sure that two Joan Quigley, $9,000 a month was a pittance, but like that's just further makes me disliker cause it's like like three families could have lived on what you were getting just for this one

job. If Doritos wants to pay us all to do astrology. No. And you know, as horrible as Joan Quigley is, is as good as Cool Ranch Doritos tastes after a hot day of not eating Doritos. Okay. Let's, let's move back on. Can we co-opt this for our podcast too?

So now I like really want a Doritos. If you guys get a Doritos sponsorship for me, I'm gonna be super angry. We're going to try our best. I interviewed an influencer and I was like, how do you get brands to sponsor you? And she was like, I just like at them and I'm like, Hey, sponsor me. And I was like, that works. And I was like, I'm going to start. Yeah.

Shouting out brands all the time. Listening this should hashtag at Doritos and the podcast and try to try to make this happen. And thanks to Reagan's for putting us in this hell world where we all need to be sponsored by brands to exist. Hell world. Don't you mean nacho tastic world? I mean a cool, a cool ranch where the, a cool Santa Barbara ranch, where the Reagan,

you brought it back there. I brought it back. Yeah. I, I salute you for that. Uh, so yeah, Joan claims that her advice made Nancy Reagan more popular and it's hard to argue with that, at least in the fact that Nancy Reagan did get a lot more popular. She started with like a 57% approval rating after her first year, but rose to 71% by 1985. So whether or not it was Joan's doing, Nancy Reagan was a lot more popular by Reagan's

second time. Maybe she was right about not doing the fashion magazines too, because the fashion magazines would have just been a list of like what expensive things she was doing and wearing, but also it was the 80s. I thought that's all anybody wanted. No, I think, I mean, I think she's trying, I think Joan was trying to create the illusion of substance where she found none. Well, you know, the main way to create, that's what Joan would say.

Yeah. Right. True. The way to create the illusion of substance is to not talk that much. That's true, or to just appear, I mean, when she had Nancy kind of choose her projects and then mention those all the time, she's also kind of editing out anything else Nancy might want to say. Totally.

They would go over way less well. She's giving her talking points. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and Joan's work started with Nancy Reagan's image, but it did not end there. As the months and years went on, Nancy came to rely on Joan more and more. It's hard to say what influence her husband's worsening health had on this, but Joan's involvement in the Reagan administration became extensive.

She's a quote from Joan. I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the state of the union addresses, the takeoffs and landings of Air Force One. I picked the time of Ronald Reagan's debate with Carter and the two debates with Walter Mondale, all extended trips abroad, as well as the shorter trips and one day excursions. In other words, Reagan did not leave the White House without Joan's say so. She also helped the Reagan's make major health decisions. Quote, I delayed President Reagan's first operation for cancer from July 10th, 1985

to July 13th and chose the time for Nancy's mastectomy. So she's got an unbelievable amount of influence. Did anyone think it was weird that they were having press conferences at 12.25 or something? They did. That's one of the quotes from earlier people talking about it. It was weird the times they would set for things and nobody really knew exactly why, but there would be myths. That's why.

Nancy said this isn't a good time. That seems like some smoking gun of that Joan was picking the times, that they were weird times. That's just one of those things. It's definitely like, no one who was close to the administration has refuted any of this. Nancy said it wasn't that big a deal, but Donald Reagan's like, no, it was a thing. It sure was a thing.

It's important that you understand Joan Quigley never claimed to be clairvoyant, which is how Donald Reagan described her. I don't think Donald Reagan was an astrology guy. She claims that a clairvoyant is a mystic or a psychic while Joan sees herself as basically a scientist and this is her view of astrology. I base my astrological analysis on the data provided by astronomers and charts calculated by computers. My conclusions are based on this accurate scientific material in the same way your doctor

supports this diagnosis by the laboratory reports or an economist bases his predictions on statistics. So Joan didn't have a computer of her own. This was the 80s. She would send a lot of the information that she was calculating off to third party companies who had computers, which means that in addition to the unsecured phone call she was having with Nancy Reagan about the president's secret schedule, she was also sending off that information to strangers.

Was she saying in her, was she like sending postcards basically saying the president wants to have Air Force One launching it to this place on this date at this time? All she says is that no one could have figured out what they were talking about based on the info she gave those people, but we're having to take her word from it. So I'm just setting that up that there's a severe breach in the president's information security as a result of this astrology thing that's going on. So Joan is a serious lady. She had nothing but contempt for astrologers who write for newspapers and magazines like

she used to do when she was young and needed the money. She rages that there are present no forced standards for astrologers and that unworthy people cannot be prevented from assuming what should be a respected title. So she's very angry about popular astrology, which is the astrology that people can afford if they can afford a newspaper. Miss Quigley spends a large chunk of her book trying to convince us that astrologers have been historically necessary in government. She points out that most great kings had astrologers, that Isaac Newton believed in astrology, that

Einstein believed in astrology. So she spends a lot of her book trying to convince you that it's fine for an astrologer to be advising the president. Now in her view of the world, every achievement of the Reagan era and also every human achievement in general was made possible by the combination of the stars being in the right position. She credits the miracle of flight to the fact that Neptune and Pluto were together in the air sign of Gemini in the early 1900s. That's true.

Okay, good. Good to know. I thought it was like people flinging metal into the air and dying until they got it right. No, no. It's magnets. Stars. Yeah. Stars.

I could go back and forth about all the different things Joan believed. I wound up putting a lot more of that in the first year after this that I trimmed out just because like, let's keep it to the Reagan's. It is important you know that she claims to put in a huge amount of work to the charts that she was doing. So for example, exact birth times are necessary for good horoscopes. Since Ronald Reagan was born back in the olden times, before people kept track of when babies were born, Joan had to rectify him, which is the term she uses for some reason for figuring

out someone's birth time using backwards math. So she claims to have calculated both Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan's birth times down to the minute. Did she tell you what backwards math is? Like I'm dying to know about backwards math. I think it's a little bit of magic. I got that quote. When you don't know what time of day an individual was born and for serious astrology the exact

birth time is indispensable, you must figure it out from such clues as the known events of that person's past, their appearance and psychological and physical characteristics not already explained by the other factors in their horoscope. She claims to know the exact minute Ronald Reagan was born. He seems like he was born in around 1225, so it seems like an afternoon or something. Seems like a 413. She's using his personality to be like, okay, sure. And everyone who could have proved her wrong on this has been dead for decades because

Ronald Reagan was born in the teens. We didn't have clocks then either. So we have to cut for some, what are those things? Were people sell stuff and other people learn about products and services? Doritos. Doritos. We're having a Doritos break now. So you guys have a crunchtastic time listening to these taste ads.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

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Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we were just talking about how Nancy Reagan figured out what she claimed to be Ronald Reagan's

exact time of birth and also Gorbachev's exact time of birth so that she could do their charts which comes up later. But let's veer back right now and talk about the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster. I ran across some unverified Twitter comments by people claiming that Ronald Reagan's astrologer had picked the time for the Challenger Shuttle launch. I found no evidence of that. But Joan does claim that she's the reason the president ordered an investigation of NASA after the Challenger Disaster.

According to Joan, the president had Nancy ask her whether or not the stars said NASA should be investigated after seven astronauts died in an explosion. Which, yes, regardless of what the stars say someone should investigate. But yeah, Joan says that she analyzed the charts for the launch and the astronauts and said that there ought to be an investigation. The 12th House indicated that sabotage at worst or at least inexcusable negligence had been involved in the crash, which is obviously true because space shuttles aren't supposed to explode.

That seems like an easy get for... Where was Joan before the launch? She's so interested in flight. Yeah, well, get close to the stars. Yeah, it's weird that she didn't call that one at that time. She doesn't know when bad things are going to happen. She only knows that she could have predicted that. Yeah, if only I hadn't been doing...

If only you gave me more money, I would have known that this would happen. So yeah, she's the reason there was an investigation in NASA after this. Now older listeners may remember that Ronald Reagan was known as the Teflon president because many, many scandals during his presidency didn't seem to stick to him up until the very end. Joan quickly claims credit for this too. In a chapter of her book titled, Astrology was the Teflon and the Teflon Presidency. Beautiful.

It's great. It's a work of art, really. First Joan, for almost six years the president dominated his press conferences partly because he was well-prepared and finally because the times I chose for his press conferences enabled him to appear at his best. She repeatedly insists that my control over the departure times of Air Force One when the president was aboard were absolute. Her most vivid story of sort of deflecting a scandal for the president came during the

run-up of his trip to Germany in 1985. He was going to help shore up Helmut Kohl, the German prime minister in a reelection campaign. There was a big photo op opportunity that was supposed to be important to the German public where the two men were going to go to a cemetery in Bitburg, where they'd laid to rest a wreath commemorating the dead of World War II. It was a lovely gesture, but the president's team failed to account for the 49 dead Waffen-SS men buried there.

This became a huge issue in America. I just talked about kind of if he was ill, was very angry about it. People marched in the streets. Israeli and American Jewish leaders were outraged, but Helmut Kohl insisted the visit was necessary and most Germans seemed to agree. Germany needed to support Kohl because his reelection was critical to Reagan's Cold War strategy, something about where he wanted to put missiles. So bereft of good options, Ronald Reagan turned to Joan Quigley.

She claims to have suggested that the administration basically make a visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before going to Bitburg and that they would publicize that a lot more. She also claimed that the timing on when they visited Bitburg was critical, so she picked an exact like minute and like this is the minute that Air Force One has to land. And what mattered was not the context of the president's visit or that he was laying a wreath at a cemetery that included dead SS men. What mattered was that astrologically the right time was chosen. Joan's time didn't work out with the president's existing plan.

They were supposed to have a picnic or something, so she canceled the picnic. And then she had the Air Force One fly around in circles for as long as it had to in order to land at Bitburg at her chosen time. So she just had Air Force One just circling for hours, waiting for the right astrological time, burning jet fuel. How did the public receive this visit? They didn't know. No, it was actually a disaster.

Michael Moore, one of the first times he shows up on TV is at a crowd of protesters at Bitburg holding a sorry. Really? Yeah, yeah. But Helmut Kohl was reelected and the controversy did eventually fade, which Joan credits to the fact that she had Air Force One burn enough fuel that they were able to land at her specifically chosen astrological time. So again, people noticed at the time that the Reagan's had really weird timing issues

because they were like White House correspondents that had worked with other presidents who didn't use astrologers. Joan notes that like. Or who did, but their astrologers gave them like times, you know, an hour. Normal people time. Yeah, because Joan, it's always like 20 minutes past the hour with Joan. Yeah, because that's how you make it seem like it's a special time. Yeah, no, 12.25.

Yeah. I feel like we all keep saying 12.25. Well, there's probably an astrological reason. Yeah, it's when the seventh house is in the night house. Yeah, well, it's also Christmas. When the moon is in the seventh house. 12.25. Wait, what?

Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's when George Christmas was born. See, you should be an astrologer because you just did a whammy on me. I was like, wow. You know, I played it being an astrologer on AOL Instant Messenger when I was in like

junior high and almost got to charging people money and I was like, no, I can't do this. Well, dream big. You should have. I know. You could be the presidential astrologer. I mean, not this president. But I'm saying what if you did and then you like were able to bring it down, you know, because if you have that much power, right, you could be like, you know.

So you're saying I'm in the wrong field? Also, definitely. Donald Trump reads everything on the teleprompter like an anchorman, you know, you could just get him to say anything. Yeah. So I'm just saying. So maybe I should be the presidential astrologer. Yeah.

As long as he doesn't listen to this podcast. If you can get that job. Here I am. I know. Yeah. There's a Quoting Jones book from Bill Plante of CBS, which is fascinating to me because he was basically talking about how the White House correspondents will always wonder why the timing was so weird.

We wondered if there was any strategy involved and we're relieved to learn that the obvious reason was astrology. Which is to keep being closed. We're just like, why were you relieved at that? Like what was going on in the 80s? Could be something even weirder. Yeah. Yeah.

God, yeah, you're right. Yeah. Just, I mean, I would have just assumed panic attacks. Like every time someone's late, I'm like, oh, it's a panic attack. Or I would have thought it was like to throw off the rhythm of the press corps or something. Yeah. Just to like keep people on their toes. Yeah.

But you make people wait. It's like a power move. Yeah. So yeah, Joan takes credit for being the Teflon in the Teflon presidency. She also takes credit for the being the only reason that Ronald Reagan stayed alive through his term. Quote, the fact that the cancer did not reoccur is due to the excellent time I chose astrologically. So she claims to have been the reason his cancer didn't come back, which I would give

to the doctor, but whatever. She also takes credit to the fact that Ronald Reagan was not assassinated during his time in office. While Reagan had times where he could have been assassinated, I was always able to protect him by warning him not to appear in public at vulnerable times. Now I'm angry at her for stopping Ronald Reagan from being assassinated. Oh. Save your assassination once for other more worthy people.

It's, you know, there's a lot of people. I got so into just hating her in the book that I was just angry at her for taking credit for everything. Yeah. But again, is it, yeah. You're right. The thing she's taking credit for, like, was that good? Yeah.

Well, it's just, it's like, she talks about like the invasion of Grenada and like there's no discussion about like whether it was morally right or like the people who died. It was all about like, I had to make sure Air Force One landed at the right time when he gave his speech about like the Grenada invasion. I was like, that's not the thing to be concerned about, Joan Quigley. Well, that's varsity league. He's in junior league. It's totally different.

He's handled different things, you know. It's very frustrating. So yeah, Joan takes credit for everything good that happened during the Reagan administration. The only mistake she admits to making is in picking the time for Reagan's first debate with Walter Mondale during his 1984 reelection campaign. Mondale is generally seen as winning that debate, but Joan actually kind of takes credit for this too. So when she was charting it, she put his son in a prominent position in the location chart

for the time and place in the debate. A reason that he had so little charisma and personality that the son, normally indicative of these traits, would simply emphasize his deficit characteristics. Unfortunately, she claims that putting the son in that position in his chart in the time she picked actually made Mondale unstoppably powerful in the first debate, which is why Reagan lost. So that's good to know for Walter Mondale, if he's listening to this podcast. Maybe he had an even more powerful astrologer who just died before the second debate.

Yeah. Dueling wizards. Yeah. We're going to get to some dueling wizards in a little bit here. Well, maybe. She's also responsible for hiding President Reagan from the public during the days after his biggest scandal, Iran Gate broke. For those of you who don't know, the Iran Contra scandal started in 1985 when a group

called Hezbollah in Lebanon kidnapped seven Americans. America went to Iran and was like, hey, could you guys get Hezbollah to chill out and give us these guys back? And if you do, we'll give you missiles, which you can use to shoot at Iraq. Iran and Iraq were at war at the time. We were also giving Iraq weapons so that they could shoot Iran. But President Reagan was like, why not arm both sides of the conflict and free some hostages at the same time?

So we had Israel sell weapons to Iran, and then we paid back Israel in more weapons. And then there wound up being a bunch of extra cash left over after this. And a guy named Ali North was like, oh, you know, we've got all these far right-wing rebels in Nicaragua fighting the socialist government there. And there's an act of Congress called the Boland Amendment that says we can't give the Contras more money. But what if we just keep selling more missiles to Iran and give the money to the Contras now?

And so anyway, that's what they did. And it's different from what gangs do because everyone wore suits. So that's the Iran-Contra scandal in a nutshell. The story broke in late 1986, and Americans got very angry that the president and his men had illegally funded a terrorist group linked to 1,200 attacks. Joan claimed that the stars were too bad for her to help with this scandal. The major cosmic forces had so turned against Reagan that what I had been able to do earlier was impossible for me to do then.

So she just advised Nancy Reagan to not have the president talk to anybody. And Donald Reagan criticizes her during this for limiting the president's exposure to the media and the public during this period. People were yelling basically for President Reagan to say something about this gigantic scandal, and he wouldn't say a word, which apparently all due to Joan quickly saying don't talk to anybody. Which I don't know, maybe President Reagan would have made the choice to shut up no matter what, but I'm sure Joan telling him it was too dangerous for him to talk to the press

about all these missiles he had sold people did not help matters. So I think that goes in the Joan Quigley bad pile, if you're keeping track. But I mean like if he had said something, we don't know what he would have said. Sorry would have been nice. Maybe she knew him so well at that point that she knew that what he would say would be even worse than just nothing. Yeah. Maybe Joan puts this as the media was crying out for press conferences, which in my opinion

would have been disastrous to the president's interest and during which he would have been at a disadvantage. Which again, she doesn't express any care for the nation's interests or for the fact that an actual crime had been committed. It's just, this is bad for the president and that's my only concern. And he's famous and that reflects on me. Yeah. Well no one knew about her at this point.

Right, but to her she knew she was the power. She didn't want it to go bad. She also claims to be responsible for beginning the end of the Cold War. Yeah, no, that's a big one to take credit for. I was heavily involved in what happened in the relations between the superpowers, changing Ronald Reagan's evil empire attitude so that when he went to Geneva, so that he went to Geneva prepared to meet a different kind of Russian leader and one he could convince of doing things our way.

See Joan claims she did Gorbachev's chart and figured out his birth time and figured out that he and Ronald had the potential to be best friends and bring peace to the world. Best friends. Yeah, best friends. You remember Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev? You remember when they brought world peace? Yeah. That's why we have world peace.

It's so good right now. Yeah, it's great. That's how everything's perfect now. Yeah, so Joan saw that there was the potential for an incredible collaboration between these two. She just had to cool Ronald Reagan's hot heart. So she incepted the idea of peace with the USSR into Ronald Reagan by bringing the idea up to Nancy Reagan.

I'm going to read this verbatim because it's just charming. Do me a favor, I told Nancy. Ronnie can be so charming and persuasive, get him to exercise his super salesmanship ability on Gorbachev, get him to sell arms reduction, democracy, human rights, and free enterprise to the secretary general. She added, it only makes sense for both sides to agree to reduce the grandiose military expenditures that are causing the national debt to rise in the USA and the Soviets and the business standard of living.

Ronnie will be able to reason with Gorbachev and convince him of doing things our way. You know, freedom and free enterprise. Yeah, wait, am I siding with Joan because she wants to curb military spending now? I mean, it's hard. It's just the way she phrases it. It's a goof. Just get him to sell arms reduction. It's easy.

I like how she says it like it's a horoscope though. Yeah, yeah. She's like, don't go on a trip tomorrow. Yeah. No, I don't disagree with like, I mean, that's obviously not what happens. It's the only good policy thing she's said so far. Yeah. It's not that good.

It's just like better than. Yeah. Is that in the fashion magazine? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not bad.

I have trouble believing that that's what convinced Ronald Reagan to deal with Gorbachev. Oh, do you find it? Do you find it difficult? You know, freedom and free enterprise. You have to give her the wins along with the losses. You're right. You're right. You're right.

That's fair. So Joan wound up, there was a big secret meeting in Reykjavik between Gorbachev and Reagan. It was a big deal because, you know, the fucking cold, this is like red dawn years. So the fact that they were actually sitting down and talking was a big deal. Joan did this in spite of the fact that she had no idea where Reykjavik was. Nancy mentioned their meeting to her and asked if the president should go and Joan's first question was, where on earth is Reykjavik and how do you spell it? Which maybe ought to be like your, your sign that you shouldn't be weighing in on this.

To be fair, what's that J doing in there? It's true. It's a confusing ass J. And the Y is a little weird too. Yeah. But Joan still did the work and while the Reykjavik meeting didn't end with anything conclusive because President Reagan wasn't willing to give up his Star Wars missile defense plan, it was a big step towards thawing in the Cold War and it led eventually to the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty or the INF Treaty.

This treaty basically pulled a lot of short range nukes out of Europe and led to the elimination of something like 2,600 missiles, which regardless of your politics is a good thing, 2,600 less nukes in the world because of this treaty. The negotiations for the INF actually had been ongoing through back channels and shit since like 1981, but by 1987 Gorbachev was ready to fly over to America and sign the treaty. The decision for when and where to host the meeting of course was Joan's. So she plotted everything out and sent her recommendations.

The Russians agreed at first, but then they kept switching around the times and changing their plans often at the last minute until the dates for the summit and the times for the signing were fixed at according to Joan, close to the worst possible astrological time to do it. Oh shit. There was a lot of coincidence. In fact, it was almost certainly the result of a great untold duel between a U.S. astrologer and the Soviet Union.

Nancy had been using Joan for years at that point, informing her about secret meetings with Soviet Premier months before they actually happened. There was zero informational security in this meeting. So not only is Joan sending off information about this to random computer people to have it computed, but like they're talking on an unsecured line. They did sometimes talk through the White House switchboard and I'm going to quote from Joan's recollection here. Nancy always chided me for refusing to leave my full name and number with the switchboard.

I told her it made me uneasy. I told her operators talked. She said I was silly to worry about something like that. I know she said all White House operators are secretive and reliable. Nancy told me she would give me an assumed name so that I could always get through to her through the White House switchboard. She would choose the assumed name for me and put it on a list. This would automatically give me access.

The name she chose was Joan Frisco Joan is convinced that their conversations were intercepted by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union changed the times of the treaty meeting in order to favor themselves and hurt Ronald Reagan as much as possible. Very well maybe what happened. Now astrology was illegal in the Soviet Union. Really? Yeah.

Religion was illegal. Yeah. It was illegal on superstition in the Soviet Union. Right. And they are which is why it has to be banned. Yeah. Yeah. You forget astrology science.

Well I was saying maybe Rasputin was still alive. I think it does tie back to Rasputin. Yeah. I mean that's probably a big part of why it was illegal. For sure. Yeah. So it seems like one of the two, either the Soviets found an astrology they hadn't imprisoned and had that person pick the worst times or they just made sure to always

fuck with the timing once Reagan said it because they knew that it would upset him that he wasn't doing that. I think that's what happened. But it's funner to think of it as like a, I could sell a screenplay on an astrology duel between the Soviet Union and the United States. So there's any producers on or if Doritos wants to back. The first Doritos feature film about dueling psychics. Oh Doritos original content.

Yes. My favorite streaming platform. This is going to make us a lot of money. I'm so excited. Okay. 9000 a month you think? I hope so. Yeah.

I mean that would just be a pittance but I'll take it. I'll do that work on her. You'll do that Rito. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, damn it. Watch out. We're going to take your sponsorship.

No, you're so much better at this than me. Yeah. So Joan, Joan blames the information leaking on Nancy's cutting Ruse calling her Joan Frisco. I think it's just as likely that it happened because she was, they were talking on home phone lines or she was sending stuff off to computer people either way, clearly wasn't a secure situation. Joan found the best time of day to do the signing even with all of the Soviet fuckery and she warned Nancy Reagan that since they weren't signing on a great day she had to

be super careful to use the exact time that Joan suggested for the day that they did sign it. But Nancy messed up and they signed like 20 minutes later. Joan suggests this is because Nancy had just said cancer surgery, you know, from the cancer that Joan claimed she foresaw it didn't warn Nancy about and then adds under such circumstances she can't be blamed for not arranging the signing with her usual foresight and precision which is nice. The only break she gives Nancy Reagan in her whole book.

So the INF treaty is probably one of the most inarguable accomplishments of the Reagan era. Thousands of nuclear weapons were destroyed, both sides were allowed to send advisors over to inspect the process. The whole world was made a little bit safer by the implementation of this treaty. Here's what Joan said about it. The execution of the INF treaty signing time was flawed. The exact time I had asked for would have had the effect of filling up a teacup nearly to the brim at the same time ensuring that the teacup would not fill up too fast or spill

over. But then Joan mixes the shit out of her metaphors. What we now had in effect was a car whose brakes had failed, she even checked through crowded intersections. Just a classic filled teacup car, speed through intersection. So Joan claimed that either the treaty was going to end disastrously for the world because she wrote this in 1990 before all the effects. The treaty was going to end a disaster or it was going to be like a thoroughbred racing

unchallenged towards the finish line. She only hedges her bets when she's talking about the future. Whenever she talks about a prediction she made in the past, it was always very clear to her. But Joan's not consistent is what I'm saying here. So yeah, to this day, I don't know how safe that treaty is for us or the world. I haven't had the heart to progress that signing chart as I did the other. It was fine.

I haven't had the heart and also they're not paying me anymore. Yeah. They're not paying me anymore. So yeah, Joan quickly wasn't sure that the INF treaty was a good idea, but she's damn sure that Nancy Reagan is a monster. At times she writes about Nancy Reagan like Nancy was a vampire basically. I mean, is she wrong again? I guess not.

No. She's not wrong. Two people can both be monsters. Yeah. Two people can both be monsters. She claims that Nancy grew stronger as Ronald Reagan grew weaker as if she was like feeding off of Ronald's essence and stuff like a vampire. Maybe she knows she was close to Nancy.

Yeah. When I say she knows where the bodies are buried, I mean, because she's a vampire. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, like, to me, I get frustrated because I'm like, even if you're within an awful administration, you got to be loyal to the people who are the only reason that you're noteworthy. Right. And like Nancy Reagan is the reason you got it brought into this.

She was very nice to you in her shitty memoirs. You should be not a monster to her in your shitty memoirs. But again, the astrologer's job is to tell the truth and the politician's job is to, you know, try and make everybody happy. And that's, that's fair because certainly Nancy Reagan doesn't deserve any equivocating here. That's right. Yeah.

Okay. Just be real about Nancy Reagan. She's polite but bad. See, I get too drawn in when I read someone's terrible memoirs and I don't, I don't hate Nancy Reagan as much as I ought to because her memoirs are better written. Yeah. Probably she had more money for a good ghost writer. That's why.

Yeah. So I don't want to defend Nancy Reagan anymore. I do want to make it clear that Joan Quigley was terrible at predicting the future. Yes. And she usually equivocated between, you know, two points that would say like, oh, the treaty is either going to be a disaster or fine to kind of like, sometimes she did make specific predictions in her memoirs about things that were going to happen in the future. And they are all wrong.

Here's one. Aiding the Contras wasn't popular in many circles. History will one day prove that Ronald Reagan was strategically correct. The Contras signed a peace treaty with the government in 1987. The leader they were fighting, Ortega, is still in charge of Nicaragua. Joan Quigley said that if this remained the case, all of Latin America would fall to communism. Still waiting on that. She also includes the text of a letter she sent to Ronald Reagan saying that development

of SDI, the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, was a brilliant strategy. So you said he would go down in history with Lincoln and Roosevelt as the best American presidents. But he would be known as the greatest of America's presidents because while Lincoln just solved slavery and Roosevelt just solved World War II, Ronald Reagan would quote, bring peace to the world. Oh man, what if only she'd been right? Yeah, well, she wasn't right about any of that because the Strategic Defense Initiative

was scrapped in 1993 for being expensive nonsense. World peace still has not happened. Yeah, but also Trump brought up the Star Wars thing like yesterday. So it definitely made an impression on him. So she did conduct the course of history. Yeah. Well, in a way. She was a charlatan, but she was working for charlatans.

Yeah. So in a way. If she'd been working for the good guys, she probably would have done good guys stuff. I mean, just anything to advance her own interests, right? Yeah, she just seems like a self-interested person. Yeah, she's definitely a self-interested person. Most of my distaste for her comes from, I feel like she was taking advantage of a scared lady whose husband had just gotten shot.

Yeah, but who cares if it's Nancy Reagan? Yeah. She's not just a scared lady. Yeah, come on. Maybe that's why Nancy got so bad. No. She was a bad person. She was bad forever.

She was bad. I mean, I think like a lot of it probably comes from the fact, too, that if you don't view astrology as in any way legitimate, which I'm barely saying I even I do. By the way, Rob is an Aries, not a Pisces just to make that clear, but he is on the cusp. So I wasn't that far off. But I mean, I think it's easy to see people who do believe in astrology or who charge to make astrological predictions as manipulative. But I mean, they're different than clairvoyance.

It's true because they're actually looking at something that they believe they can interpret. Yeah, they're looking at math and they're trying to apply logic to an insane world to make people comforted by the idea that there's like a structure and a flow to things and that you can predict what it'll be. I think they believe in their own abilities. Well, yeah, and see, this is one of the things that I question is whether or not because Joan isn't entirely consistent. Number one in her claims about what astrology can do because there will be times when she

was like there's nothing that could have changed the outcome of this. And there's other times where she's like, you can guarantee the success of any endeavor if you do this and this and this. She's a scammer, but she wasn't like giving the advice she was giving them was mostly about what time to do the bad things they were going to do as opposed to being like do this bad thing. Yeah, they were like, when you make the announcement about the horrible thing you're doing, do it at 12.25.

The only thing she claims that she was specifically giving advice that would be on timing is for Nancy Reagan's war on drug stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think you've done a great job of convincing me again that Nancy Reagan is one of his greatest monsters. We're getting behind a bastard here. Yeah. I think also she really used the fact that she was like, you know, the first lady to hide the fact that she was a horrible person and should be remembered as such.

And just because she was insecure doesn't mean that she didn't, I mean, everything she did. Yeah. The Reagan's legacy has benefited so much from nostalgia with conservatives that they look back on it as like the last great time. They were on Coke at that time, too. For sure. And also, you know, people were maybe like not so cogent during points of the presidency

and somebody, maybe it was Oliver North, you know, somebody was in their ear being like, do this horrible thing. And they were saying yes. So, you know, you still have the president, you can say like, no, I don't want to. So I don't think we should put too much on the people that influenced the Reagan's. I think we should really just lay the blame at the feet of the Reagan's for being such assholes. Well, there's definitely a lot of blame to go around for the Reagan's.

I guess my- I don't think Joan was the, I don't think she's the one to blame. I think if we're going to blame anyone, let's blame Oliver North. I think she gets some blame, though, because I think number one- Just for the war on drugs? Not just for the war on drugs. I still think that Nancy's recollection of how Joan came back into her life rings truer to me than Jones does.

And I think Joan was taking advantage of that. And I also think, I think Joan knew that her st- she was not as, I think she, whether and I think she must have believed in astrology to some extent, obviously. But I think she knew that it was not as cut and dry and clear cut as she claims in her book. And I think getting involved in global geopolitics to the extent that she did with no qualifications- Yeah, but again, that's what the Reagan's did. That's a good point.

I mean, especially Nancy. Definitely for Nancy. He'd been a governor at that point. But he wasn't a good governor. And he got cast in the role because he was like some, you know, he was like Trump. He was somebody that really evil people were like, this guy will make a good face for our evil white supremacist. And he seemed able to be manipulated.

And he was able to be manipulated, which made him a good, you know, and I think people do kind of use the excuse of like, oh, maybe he was senile and there's rumors he had Alzheimer's at a certain point in the presidency. And he definitely did. But again, it's like, he still thought it was a good idea to be president. He wasn't like, hey, maybe I'm not the most qualified person. He like led all those people to gas him up to be president. To be fair, if you have Alzheimer's or you're senile, you can't be held accountable for

your decisions, even if they're terrible. Right. But I'm saying, I don't think he had Alzheimer's when he became governor. I think he had ambitions, but you know, if your ambitions are like, I'll do whatever it takes to stay in power and get into power, you probably shouldn't be in power. I don't disagree with that when it comes to Ronald Reagan or for Nancy, but I don't think that the fact that a number of unqualified people got into national leadership excuses what Joan did either.

But I don't, I don't, I just think if you're scamming the Reagan's, like the Reagan's deserve to be scammed, you know? And when I add it up, it's like she, she's mostly culpable for like being a bad friend. Yeah. As opposed to really, she's a bad friend and you're not really a someone's friend if they're paying you to be their friend. But it's like compared to info wars, for instance, I mean, when you, when you think about the statements she was actually making and the way that she was wielding the power

that she had, she could have been so much worse. She could have been so much worse. She was saying what time to land the plane. She wasn't saying like everybody who you think is like a child in a cage is an actor. You know? That's, that's true. And like that person is in the ear of Donald Trump and he believes that stuff, even though he's making the policy, which is like more insane.

Well, I will say though, if you start comparing people from anyone from the Reagan administration to anyone from today's administration, all of the people from back then are going to look better. What did she do? What did she do that was so bad? Just cause the gloves are off. They were doing the same shit. It's just Nancy was going to choose a bad policy to get behind.

And I think that Joan was correct in saying that the war on drugs was a way to play the public and to create a cause and fabricate a solution that wouldn't be effective, but would have the illusion of being this really incredible, like we're all going to be so happy this was passed. But what if Nancy Reagan, what if she was like, all right, choose like ABC and everything was even worse. But what if Nancy had just done a bunch of fashion magazine interviews and nobody, she'd never gone on.

Well, that's stupid though. Why should she? Just cause she's the first lady because I think that what Joan was saying is that people need to take you seriously. You don't have the knowledge. You don't have the gravitas to be able to make people like you because they're just going to think you're crossing. And also because you're a bad person who has no substance.

And you're just like a homophobic, horrible, socially, but isn't it bad to tell someone who has no substance and horrible opinions on things to make their opinions count by becoming a serious force of politics? She was first lady. Yeah. But she just wanted to talk about fashion. Well, that wouldn't have ever made her popular. Being first lady is to talk about fashion and also pretend to care about some pet issue.

It's like being a socialite on a super scale. So it makes sense that a socialite would have the best advice on how to be like a socialite. Yeah. Well, I guess this is not something we're going to settle to either of our, anyone's mutual agreement. I think she took advantage of Nancy Reagan in a moment of weakness and light about having predicted her husband's assassination. Y'all are on a different side of that and think that Nancy probably just called her

up. Nancy definitely called her up. I was going to say, I think our side, our platform is fuck Nancy Reagan. I don't disagree with fuck Nancy Reagan. And fuck Ronald Reagan. But I add fuck Joan quickly to that. Fuck all the Reagan. Nah, Joan gets off scot-free.

We're pro-Jones. We're pro-Jones. So you, the listeners at home, will have to decide for yourselves who you think the bastards in this story were. But I think we can all agree there were a lot of bastards talked about today. And Donald Reagan, by the way, is also kind of a dick, but we'll get into that another time. Yeah.

I think we should be at the people whose names we don't know yet. Yeah. Those are the real games to watch out for. Alley North should take a lot more flak. That's what I'm saying. And we're going to blame someone for the Reagan's that's not the Reagan's. It ain't the psychic. It's not the psychic.

I mean, but she's not. She's not a psychic. She's a scientist. She's a astrologer. She's a scientist. A planetary scientist. Maybe the stars, maybe the stars were misaligned, and that's why they were all such terrible people.

Yeah, because she's definitely just the way she writes things. I'm not saying she's likable. I'm just saying she's not as bad as the Reagan's. And maybe I'm not saying she's as bad as the Reagan's. I am saying she's history's greatest monster. Okay. This has been enlightening, and I'm glad y'all had a different opinion on all of this than me because it's hard for me to have much perspective after 300 pages of the 12th house and the

7th. By the way, I want to add one last thing. So the end of Joan Quigley's book is just a bunch of stuff on how astrology works in politics. And so she talks about all the different houses, which I don't understand what any of that means, but there's like the 12th house in politics is apparently all the poor people, but also journalists and saboteurs and like she loves poor people. All the homeless drug addicts and journalists in the same house.

So she sounds a lot like Nancy Reagan. No, she's the right astrologer for the Reagan's for sure. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, you guys want to plug your plugables? Yeah, sure, come listen to Night Call. It's on the Audio Boom Network of Podcasts. And if you have a question, a comment, an astrological prediction, you can give us a call at 2-4-0-4-6-Night.

You can also text us at the same number, or you can email us at nightcallpodcast.gmail.com. Yeah. We've got some cross coverage. If you've got thoughts about the Reagan's and astrology, please send them to Night Call and we will talk about them there too. Thank you so much for having us on. Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Thank you guys for being on. You listeners at home, if you have an opinion over whether or not Joan Quigley is history's greatest monster or if I'm being too hard on her, drop us a line at atbastardspod on Twitter and either yell at me or agree with me, whichever is your preference. You can also find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com. We'll have some pictures up there. Joan Quigley commissioned a drawing of a presidential seal with astrological symbols on it.

It's super kooky. We'll get a picture of that for you. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. Please check us out. We're back every Tuesday. So next Tuesday, we will be talking about someone probably with millions of deaths on their hands.

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