Now here’s a president that I can really remember! Not anything important, mind, but his craggy countenance was certainly a familiar part of my childhood. In recent years, though, I’ve noticed that Ronald Reagan is, to this day, still a controversial figure. Either people loved him passionately or they detested him but there are not many who are truly indifferent. That makes him an interesting case and one I’m really looking forward to cracking.
As a youngster, I have one good memory of our 40th president. Growing up I was aware of who he was and if shown a picture I could have proudly displayed my knowledge. But there came a moment when I—yes, I—was nonplussed by Ronald Reagan. My mother was (and is) a great adherent of old movies (a quality that I take from her, no doubt) and since we didn’t have cable at home, she would watch gads of them during our annual beach trip to Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I have a very clear memory of watching movies with my mom one particular rainy day when the movie Bedtime for Bonzo began.
Suddenly I sat up straight. “Mom, who is that man?” And I’ll never forget her calm voice saying the words Ronald Reagan, our president. Worlds were shifting together, colliding. “But…but…,” I choked, “he’s so…handsome!” The point is this, people: there was a time, decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was the not merely the grandfatherly gent in the White House. There was a time when he was a pretty hot Hollywood actor and it totally Blew My Mind.Now that I’m a bit older I have to admit that it’s still hard to wrap my mind around that concept but after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, and Jesse Ventura all were voted into public office, the idea that Ronald Reagan, B-movie extraordinaire, became the head of our country is not as fantastical as it once seemed. Ah well. God Bless the USA. On the other hand, I was fairly eaten up with curiosity. How on earth did an actor seriously become President of the United States? As I should know, we’ve had an odd myriad of men assume the presidency from its inception but Ronald Reagan is the first of his kind.
It was with a spring in my step that I headed to the library. The details of his rather remarkable presidency are distinctly hazy so it was important that I get a good bio! I really thought that I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a good comprehensive work on the life of Ronald Reagan but when I was faced with the selection before me, I knew that I had been mistaken. Most of the books on Reagan’s life were entitled “Ronald Reagan and the Cold War” or “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.” Where, oh where, was a simple tome focusing on this guy alone!?! Well I found one and it was better and more entertaining than anything else I could have selected. There before me was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris (New York: Random House, 1999). My squeal of delight, however, was less for the actual book and more for the author who had written a truly awesome trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt (I own Theodore Rex—book #2—but for obvious reasons did not include them in the PRP)! Edmund Morris is a masterful biographer and I looked forward with nerdy delight to getting my hands (and mind) on Ronald Reagan’s whole story. Allons-y, y’all!
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911 in Tampico, IL to an alcoholic salesman of a father and a religious, actress-y mother. Almost immediately upon birth, his father nicknamed him “Dutch.” “He weighed ten pounds. Perhaps it was this amplitude of flesh, and the durchkomponierte quality of his crying, that made Jack Reagan compare him to a ‘Dutchman.’ For the next twenty-six years, the boy would be known as ‘Dutch’—and ‘Dutch’ he has remained to all who knew him in his midwestern days” (p. 14). Due to the intransient nature of his father’s work, the Reagans (Ronald also had a younger brother, Neil) would move quite a bit in the coming years. In 1915, they moved to the south side of Chicago and after that it was Galesburg, Monmouth, Tampico (again), and Dixon.
Amidst all the chaos of moving, little Ronnie continued to thrive. “He turned out to be an extraordinarily bright pupil, with perfect marks in spelling and arithmetic, scoring a 97 percent average in his final report of March 1, 1918” (p. 28). By the time, he arrived in Dixon, Reagan was a force in the schoolroom and outside it. In high school, he dated a pretty girl named Margaret Cleaver and he worked as a caddy, a surveyor, a contractor and finally, a lifeguard during the summers. His one true love, however, was football. Unfortunately, he wasn’t Gerald-Ford good at football; in fact, Reagan was routinely picked for Team B but he loved it unrequitedly nonetheless.
In 1928, Reagan was admitted to Eureka College in Eureka, IL. “For the rest of his life he [Reagan] would insist there was no lovelier college in the United States, and even after he let the silks of Notre Dame and Oxford fall on his shoulders, he made plain that the only degree he ever cared for was his B.A., Eureka 1932” (p. 66). While at Eureka, Reagan was something of a BMOC, if you know what I mean. He majored in sociology with a minor in economics and he participated in the school paper, the dramatic society, Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and he was president of the senior class. He also was blessed with a phenomenal photographic memory.
After graduating, Reagan tried getting a job in radio and was hired by WOC Davenport as a sportscaster. He moved to Iowa and by 1933 he working for WHO Des Moines where his voice went national. “Here, over the next three years, he mastered the essentials of radio announcing, with the exception of sight-reading, a process that bother him well into middle age. The natural equipment of a sportscaster he already had: lucidity, enthusiasm, an eye for visual detail, and a mouth that moved as fast as his mind” (p. 117). He got a big break in the summers of 1936 and 1937 when he was sent to Santa Catalina, CA to cover spring training. It was here, in Southern Cal, that he began to dream about being in movies. In fact during his second trip, he even made an audition video and worked with an agent which led to Warner Brothers hiring him on April 2, 1937.
Reagan packed up his meager belongings, put them in his little car, and drove to his new home, Los Angeles. It took him several days to familiarize himself with the Warner Bros way of life. “The giant studio lay like a compressed and teeming city on the far side of the Los Angeles River, geographically separated from Hollywood. In practical fact, it was a city, walled and gated. It had its own police department and fire company and power plant and hospital and school, not to mention four cinemas, thirty miles of streets, a working railroad, and a rather dusty-looking quay, whence a seventeenth-century galleon seemed about to sail for San Bernardino” (p. 134). After sitting around for a bit, Reagan got his first acting job on the movie, Love is On the Air, where he met a young newly-remarried Jane Wyman. He joined the Screen Actors Guild.
On January 26, 1940, Reagan married the newly-divorced Jane Wyman and immediately
began the prime of his acting career with his role in Knute Rockne: All American. Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, World War II began and movies, such as they were, needed to change with the changing times. Since he was legally blind, Reagan was never to see active duty but he was made a colonel, then a captain, with a special unit at Warner Bros that made war movies. By 1943, Reagan was a top box office star.By 1945-46, the years of the Hollywood strikes, things were looking grimmer for our boy. He contracted acute viral pneumonia and almost died while, at the same time, his premature daughter did not live. Reagan was looking noticeably older after all this and his stock as a leading man declined. In the ultimate irony, Jane, also looking older, saw her stock as an actress rise when she won a Best Actress Oscar for Johnny Belinda (1948). It was sad but things had gone rather cold for Ronald and Jane and in 1948, Jane divorced him.
Meanwhile, Reagan had become president of SAG in 1947 and was even made to testify at the House UnAmerican Committee’s hearings in October of that year. (This was before the hearings went very mean.) He was also made Chairman of the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC) and even continued to star in some limp flicks, such as A Hasty Heart with Patricia Neale. It was also around this time that Reagan began to notice a young actress named Nancy Davis.
Reagan left SAG in 1951 and then married Nancy on March 4, 1952. They retired to their newly-purchased ranch, Yearling Row, where they bred and raced horses. However, they needed money. Reagan was used to earning a steady income from the movies but that had all but dried up (In 1957, he and Nancy would star in their only picture together Hellcats of the Navy) so he hired himself out to General Electric as a corporate spokesman. For years, Reagan travelled around the country, meeting GE employees and giving speeches on the glories of electricity and technology. Also he appeared regularly on “GE Theater,” a weekly television show.
All this speechifying gave Reagan a hankering for political life. In fact, the GE speeches at this time held a marked resemblance to a great many political speeches; so much so that Reagan was eventually let go by the CEO of GE. Also Reagan went through a personal political shift at this point. He had grown up Democrat and had greatly admired FDR and the New Deal (not to mention, most people working in movies were Democrat as well.) However, as he grew older, he became increasingly unhappy with the Democratic ideal of Big Government so beginning in 1960 and continuing on, he threw his support behind the Republican candidates of the time. He campaigned for Richard Nixon for Governor in 1960 and then for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. It was due to the Goldwater campaign that a large segment of the population began to see Ronald Reagan as something more than just your average movie star—he had a real knack for propounding political prose in a familiar and easily-understood manner. “The brilliance of his performance [an emergency television address], beamed nationwide on October 27, transformed him overnight into a serious contender for the governorship of California” (p. 329). It didn’t hurt either that a small group of Republican millionaires asked to fund any future political effort on behalf of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s backers convinced him to write a political autobiography during his own 1966 campaign for the governorship of California. The product was entitled Where’s the Rest of Me? and despite its odd title, it helped propel Reagan to victory on November 8. Next move: Sacramento. Reagan had hitherto held very few executive positions so it makes perfect sense that “Dutch’s first remark to his senior staff, when the joined him to take up state business on January 5, has become legendary: ‘What do we do now?’” (p. 347).
During this term in office, he put down a particularly-vicious student strike at Berkeley and he signed a controversial abortion bill into law. He easily won reelection in 1970 where he spent most of his time battling welfare and working with Nixon. Actually Nixon liked Reagan so much that he sent him, as the special envoy to Taiwan in 1971, to try to explain to the Taiwanese (our allies) that the United States was going to change policy and become friends with the Chinese communists on the mainland instead. Reagan complied and even returned to the US in time to campaign heavily for Nixon in ’72. “Reagan emerged as a potent campaigner for Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the West and Southwest…Nixon appreciatively asked Reagan to undertake another roving embassy, this time to Europe in July, and afterward to serve as chairman pro tem of the Republican National Convention” (p. 379).
Reagan decided not to run for a third term as governor in order to run for president of the United States. In 1975, he announced his candidacy and began campaigning in the primaries against Gerald Ford. Ford won the Republican nomination and so Reagan “retired” to his new ranch, Rancho del Cielo in Malibu, CA (helped paid for by the ‘backers’).
Carter beat Ford in the next election and created a situation ideal for Republican candidates in 1980. Economic, political and international problems simply abounded during the Carter presidency and it allowed a growing conservative majority to finally nominate Ronald Reagan to confront Big Government. “From that moment on, as the hostage crisis worsened, there was an inevitability to Reagan’s forward motion. The liberal press, incredulous that a man so old, so Western, so quaintly sure of himself could sweep this far, cited poll after poll to show that President Carter would hold him back” (p. 408-9). Unfortunately, Carter was unable to solve the hostage crisis in time for the election and so Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide. Next move: Washington, DC.
On March 30, 1981, only months after assuming office, Reagan was caught in a spray of bullets in an attempted assassination. He had been leaving the Washington Hilton
after giving a speech when John Hinckley (to impress Jody Foster) began firing while several men around Reagan were hit. One bullet lodged itself near Reagan’s heart as he was thrown into his limo. It says something for medical technology that Reagan was able to walk out of the hospital just eleven days later. (See James Garfield for more information on this topic). Afterwards, and back in the presidential saddle, Reagan thought up the idea of the “Program for Economic Recovery” which included trickle-down economics. “And so he committed the American economy to eight years of self-compounding deficits, and a trillion-dollar shortfall, greater than the entire debt of the past two centuries” (p. 447). He engaged in the G7 summit between all the major democratic leaders of the world (aka Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Canada’s PM, etc), broke the air controllers strike, and sent ships to Libya. He signed National Security Directive 13 which “authorized a menu of nuclear-war plans for him to choose from in the event of strategic attack” (p. 453). There were also American soldiers, under the Multinational Force (MNF), dying in a war in Lebanon (241 died total). And there was the American invasion of Grenada, a small British-affiliated island in the Caribbean. Grenada was flirting with the Communists so several neighboring island nations begged the US to do something about it or communism might just overpower the whole area. “’Operation Urgent Fury’ was an embarrassingly clumsy success. The world’s ranking superpower, hampered by old tourists maps and incompatible radio frequencies, needed two full days to overcome the resistance of an island not much bigger than Washington, DC” (p. 504).
Reagan won the 1984 presidential election versus Walter Mondale with ease.
In 1985, Reagan, on the advice of the West German prime minister, scheduled a visit to Germany to visit an old Nazi cemetery at Bitburg. Of course, this situation enraged the Jewish community because Reagan was not also scheduled to visit a concentration camp. In the end, he went to Bergen-Belsen to quell the furor (no pun intended. Ha!) Upon his return, he found that he was suffering from colon cancer and so he went under the knife for prostrate surgery.
Also internationally, it was leaked that the hitherto-indomitable USSR was in a fix. Occupying Afghanistan was draining their treasury while decades-long mismanaged farming practices were leading to a severe economic crisis really, really soon. Gorbachev, the young new leader of the Soviet Union, was certainly feeling the pressure and so announced not only perestroika, or reconstruction of the whole system, but also a meeting with Reagan to be held in Iceland. The subsequent meeting did not finalize a whole bunch of stuff but many people site it as a key event in the end of the Evil Empire.
The next year was a serious one in terms of deadly incidents. There was the explosion of Challenger and the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in the USSR. The Libyans bombed an American disco in Berlin and, of course, we followed that up with a retaliatory strike. Reagan visited Tokyo. 1986 was also the year that saw the Iran-Contra scandal blow up.
Ooo, this was one doozy of a scandal too (and I think that I have the authority to make that remark). Reagan and, let’s be honest, all his senior advisors, were obsessed with the idea that Central America could possibly become Communist Any Minute Now. In order for Nicaragua to remain safely pro-West then, the Reagan administration, beginning in 1981, secretly funded the contras to subvert the ruling pro-Communist Sandanista government. “Initially set at twenty-million dollars, to allow Argentina to train a Honduras-based guerrilla band, this commitment had now, in 1983, escalated to twenty-six million dollars in support of an army of nearly eight thousand insurgents, including not a few nostalgic Somocistas” (p. 482). Confused yet? Just wait—you will be. Ok, add to that the fact that Americans in the Middle East kept getting kidnapped and you’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So, also secretly, Reagan, in desperation, decided to trade missiles for the release of the hostages. It was only later that he found out that some of the money the US received from the missiles had magically found its way into funding the contras in Central American. “If we are to believe Donald Regan, a man of generally accepted honesty, the blood drained from the President’s face when Meese told him at 4:30pm that some of the money paid by Iran for TOW missiles had been siphoned off from Israel by Colonel North and funneled, through a Swiss bank account, to the contras” (p. 615). Classic! Let me break it down for you: missiles for hostages in Middle East + money received from Iran - missile money to support dubious anti-Communistic coup in Central America=1 effed up situation. Ha! Now you know.
In 1987, Reagan declared that AIDS was Public Health Enemy #1. Nancy Reagan was diagnosed with breast cancer, Gorbachev visited Washington DC and signed the INF Treaty and the stock market crashed. The very next year Reagan, in a reciprocal visit, went to Moscow and upon returning to the United States, handed the reins of government over to his former Vice President and the newest President of the United States, George Bush.
The Reagans retired to their ranch in Malibu and soon dedicated Reagan’s presidential library. Unfortunately, it was clear the Ronald was not well. In fact, in 1994, he was diagnosed with “degenerative cognitive dementia,” otherwise known as Alzeimer’s. It soon became so bad that he had to distance himself from public life and lived the next ten years in self-induced obscurity. He died of pneumonia in 2004.
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