How an Astrologer Set Air Force One's Schedule for the Reagan White House

For seven years, the takeoff and landing times of Air Force One were set by an astrologer in San Francisco.

Set by a WHAT?

Her name was Joan Quigley. And it starts on March thirtieth, nineteen eighty-one. A man named John Hinckley opens fire outside a Washington hotel, and the President of the United States ends up on an operating table. In the days after, the First Lady picks up the phone.

Okay... that part I actually get. Her husband nearly died. People reach for anything.

In Nancy Reagan's own memoir, My Turn, what she told Quigley was... I'm scared every time he leaves the house. And she asked a very human question. Could you have seen it coming? Could you have stopped it?

And Quigley said yes.

Quigley said yes. Nineteen eighty-one through nineteen eighty-nine. Phone calls nearly every day. In secret.

Who even was she? Some back-room mystic with beads?

Opposite. Published author, national television, a well-known San Francisco celebrity astrologer. She and Nancy had met back in the nineteen seventies... on The Merv Griffin Show.

Of course they did. Daytime TV, the great American networking event.

And park one thing for later, because there's a line that floats all over the internet, attributed to the banker J.P. Morgan. Millionaires don't use astrology... billionaires do. We're coming back to whether he ever said it.

Noted. But what was she actually deciding? Wardrobe? Dinner guests?

The Hoover Institution has now fully cataloged her papers. Her notes. Her charts. What she was timing includes the departures and landings of Air Force One. The right days for debates. Favorable times for summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev. As in nuclear arms talks. The actual Cold War.

As Hoover puts it, a presidential couple famous for courting the religious right was relying on the occult for hugely consequential decisions that touched national security.

So did Reagan believe it? Or was he just letting his terrified wife have her comfort?

Genuinely contested. Honest people disagree. What we have is Quigley's version, and in her memoir she claimed her advice had, quote, absolute control over the President's movements.

Which is only the most flattering sentence an astrologer could possibly write about herself.

She is not a neutral witness, no. But remember, she only wrote that book after the secret blew up. And the man who blew it up was an insider with a grudge.

Go on.

Nineteen eighty-eight. Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff, has just been pushed out. So he writes a book. And in it he mentions, almost in passing, that scheduling at the highest level of the American government was being run past an astrologer in San Francisco.

And the press detonates.

Detonates. And it doesn't stop until Quigley's name is out in the open. Her own memoir lands in nineteen ninety, with a title that was basically the joke the staff had been making for years. What Does Joan Say?

Because that's how aides had to phrase it. Not, can the President fly Tuesday. But... what does Joan say.

What does Joan say. She died in two thousand fourteen, at eighty-seven, still insisting astrology was a real and useful science.

Alright, money question. What does that service cost? Everyone assumes billionaires have a guy.

Here I have to be straight with you. The eye-watering fees you see passed around for celebrity and executive astrologers? I couldn't verify a single one to a source I'd trust on air. So I'm not quoting you a price.

Refreshing. Most people would say a thousand dollars an hour and keep walking.

Same with the J.P. Morgan line. Millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do. It's everywhere. Quote sites, finance accounts, astrologers' own bios. What I could not find is any reliable record of Morgan saying it.

So the most quoted sentence about rich people and astrology might just be... invented.

It might be. And look at what it's doing. It flatters the astrologer AND the client. It says this isn't superstition, it's an edge. The kind only people at the very top can afford.

Which is the real product. Not the stars. The feeling that you know something nobody else does.

That's the whole engine. Power doesn't remove uncertainty, it concentrates it. The more you control, the more unbearable the things you can't control become. A bullet outside a hotel. A market. A summit. And someone will always sell you a calendar that makes tomorrow feel scheduled.

So the horoscope app on my phone and Air Force One's takeoff time are the same impulse.

Exactly the same impulse. One of them just had Gorbachev on the seating chart.

Mine tells me Mercury's in retrograde, so my email came out rude.

The Reagans got mocked for this for decades. But strip away the charts and the headlines, and what's left is a frightened woman asking whether tomorrow is safe... and paying someone to say yes.