A history professor at Monmouth College will be a commentator on CNN for today’s coverage of former First Lady Nancy Reagan’s funeral.
Stacy Cordery is a bibliographer of the National First Ladies Library in addition to serving as Monmouth College’s history chair.
She tells WGIL her background as a historian will lend itself well to the first lady’s funeral coverage.
“I expect that they want me to contextualize Nancy Reagan as first lady,” Cordery says, “and to talk about the various successes and troubles she had in that position and how she reflected the larger status of women in American society during the Reagans’s time in the White House.”
Cordery will join “Newsroom” host Brooke Baldwin and panelists David Gergen and Douglas Brinkley to not only discuss Nancy Reagan’s successes and support of her husband, former president and former Monmouth resident Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, but also the late first lady’s challenges.
“She had a difficult start as first lady,” Cordery says. “And she alienated feminists and other who wanted her to be active in the post-feminist era of the 1960s and 70s.”
CNN’s coverage runs from noon to 3 p.m. today.
