#40 Ronald Reagan Part 2

Really Cool Stuff about Ronald Reagan
1. During his tenure as lifeguard at Lowell Park, Ronald Reagan saved 77 lives. “But a delegation of men and women who owe their lives to ‘Dutch’ was on hand to present him a clock bearing the simple message, ‘From 77 Grateful People’” (p. 184).
2. Reagan loved horseback riding and because of it, joined the Cavalry Reserve. “So on March 18, 1935, ‘Ronald W. Reagan, Civilian’ enrolled at 322d Cavalry HQ, Des Moines, and began to take extension courses toward a commission in the Army” (p. 123).
3. There are rumors that Reagan, at one point, tried to join the Communist Party. “So what if Dutch, young and ardent in 1938, thrilled to the message of Marx for a few experimental months? Minds colder and clearer than his fortunately he saw that he was not socialist material” (p. 159).
4. I thought it was so cute that, during the war, Reagan was enlisted by the First Motion Picture Unit. “Jack [Warner] told Hap that what the Air Corps needed was ‘a very effective propaganda department’ to stimulate recruitment by means of movies. What could be better than a special military production unit at Warners, headed by himself in full uniform?...Undertook to produce at least 6 big pics and 18 to 26 shorts a year—all inspirational & educational & instructional” (p. 190).
5. As governor, Reagan pushed through the legislature an extremely extensive welfare reform program. “The California Welfare Reform Act finally became law on August 13, 1971. Reagan did not exaggerate when he called it ‘probably the most comprehensive’ such initiative in American history…While fully compatible with AFDC (a reluctant concession on Reagan’s part), it would save three hundred million dollars a year through sheer operational efficiency” (p. 376).
6. Reagan has the largest presidential library in the United States. “The largest archive of its kind, it is also the least patronized by serious scholars” (p. 381).
7. Gerald Ford tried time and again to get Reagan on his side by trying to appoint him to important posts. “President Ford, suspicious of Ronald Reagan’s future intentions, kept trying to distract him with appointments. He asked him to serve on the Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities during the Watergate era, and offered him another Cabinet job, this time, Secretary of Commerce” (p. 391). The original offer was for Secretary of Transportation.
8. As president, Reagan sent through a revolutionary budget bill. “There was no doubt, however, that Reagan and his economic aides had brought about the largest spending-control bill, and the largest tax reduction, in American history. Their budget was revolutionary in that it reversed—or, more properly, inversed—an economic theory dating back the final days of the New Deal. Hallowed by Franklin Roosevelt, intellectualized by John Maynard Keynes, trumpeted by John Kenneth Galbraith, and codified by the social engineers of the Sixties and Seventies, the theory called for high, progressive tax rates, manipulative government spending, welfare-state ‘entitlements’ centering around Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, plus forcible downward redistribution of wealth and capital” (p. 446).
9. Reagan was the first to place a woman on the Supreme Court. “Polls and media commentary showed a tendency to regard the Administration as a club for rich white men, notwithstanding his widely praised appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court” (p. 451).
10. The 1983 bombing of an American barracks in Beirut is one of the worst in our history. “That total was finally drawn at two hundred and forty-one, making the barracks bombing the worst surprise attack on a US military installation since Pearl Harbor” (p. 502).
11. The election of 1984 held a couple of interesting moments. First of all, Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president of the United States and secondly, he received one of the largest electoral votes in American history. “Had the Speaker been in government since 1800, he still would not have witnessed such an electoral-vote landslide. Reagan had swept every state but Walter Mondale’s own Minnesota, and, even there, the popular majority could barely have filled a football stadium. Every age group in the national franchise had voted four more years for the oldest President in history” (p. 512).
12. He won the Medal of Freedom. “Four years later Ronald Reagan returned to the White House, at the reluctant invitation of President Bush, to receive the Medal of Freedom before William Jefferson Clinton took office” (p. 655).

On page one, I fell completely in love with Morris’ magical prose. I’m not even kidding. Right then and there, I knew that I was reading a biography that was completely beautiful and masterfully well-written. But then I had to put the book down. It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for good writing and that a well-turned phrase can seriously spike my endorphins but I didn’t want to be hypnotized into loving Ronald Reagan. I wanted him to stand on his own merits and not because Edmund Morris spoke luscious poetry into my ear. Hmmm…

It didn’t help either that, for this particular book, Edmund Morris came up with an interesting new style of biography. I’ll admit that it took me several chapters to pick up on it but when I did, I was absolutely blown away with the possibilities of it. Morris decided to write himself into the story. Not necessary himself but…well…let’s just call him the “narrator.” In this biography, aptly named a memoir, the narrator knows Dutch Reagan from childhood and therefore can describe scenes and events as if he had been there himself. It is deftly done. What’s fun about it is that Morris even includes the pictures that he used to describe scenes in such detail. I enjoyed this treatment of Reagan due to the fact that Morris, through his use of fictitious people and events, is able to give both sides of the story. The narrator, for the most part, restrains judgment over Ronald Reagan but there are numerous ancillary characters of the book that dislike Dutch or are surprised by him. Initially I thought it odd that Morris used yin-yang symbols to break up chapters instead of the usual bullet points or dots. At first, I thought the yin-yang symbol referred to Reagan’s famously difficult personality to understand but after finishing the book, I’ve determined that the yin-yang stands more for the author’s ambivalent and uncertain view of Reagan. Even now, and like Edmund Morris, I’m not quite sure whether Ronald Reagan was a truly great man or simply in the right place at the right time.

Another bonus about this biographical style was the oodles of local color and historical background that Morris effortlessly pours into each moment of Reagan’s life. From his humble beginnings in mid-west of 1911 to the war years in Hollywood to the tumultuous Sixties and life in the governor’s mansion, we, the readers, are a part of it all and not only from Reagan’s perspective but the narrator also has his own opinions on each matter. For instance, the narrator’s son, Gavin, is a student at Berkeley for the riots in 1969 and he writes letters to his dad that include all the odd phraseology and slang of that time. “All this I learned later, since Gavin, like most young destructors, was more interested in pulling down pillars that pondering the rights of women, let alone babies. He delightedly reported that some armed Black Panthers (‘bad cats I dig in Oakland”) had managed to bluster their way into the State Capitol. His only regret was that they had not gotten into the Executive Wing ‘and scared the shit out of Reagan’” (p. 354).

Morris also makes some fascinating connections, such as the abortion bill that Reagan signed as governor of California. It was called the Therapeutic Abortion Act and “he [Reagan] signed it into law nevertheless, comforting himself that he had helped purge it of eugenics and that no abortions of any kind would be permitted without strict medical or legal review. Only as time went by and abortion became an extension of welfare, would he wish he had paid more heed to the bill’s manipulative language…Before the end of his first term as Governor, some eighty-two thousand souls would be debited to that signature, as against the seventy-seven he took credit for as a lifeguard” (p. 352). I also thought it significant that out of all the presidential biographies I’ve read, this was the first to mention the MLK riots in Washington DC. How did those other biographies miss something like this!?!

As you may imagine, Morris had plenty to say about Reagan himself. In fact, I loved the detailed daily routine that Morris included as a real means of getting to know this guy. And not only that but it was awesome to get a picture of what a president of the United States is faced with on a daily basis. Also I knew that Reagan did not care for Ford at all but it was neat to finally figure out why. “Pressed again, he [Reagan] explained, ‘The people never voted for him; he was appointed to that position for two years’” (p. 391).

This next quote is actually about Jimmy Carter and his administration and not Reagan but it’s so well-said that I had to include it. “Contraction, or the state of self-withdrawal Germans describe as innigkeit, was indeed the characteristic of the Carter years, at least what I perceived of them as I labored to complete my Roosevelt book. An obsession with allegedly dwindling national resources; a smallness of outlook, from the cancellation of supersonic transports to the issuance of bills for White House hospitality; public lights dimmed, cardigans unbuttoned, hemorrhoids proclaimed, human rights called for, the Panama Canal forfeited; fifty-two American hostages taken hostage in Iran; eight helicopters sent in to rescue them, in a demonstration of dragonfly wrath; and finally, a front-page image that burned itself, I should think, onto the retinas of every citizen who saw it: two bearded hostage-holders using the Stars and Stripes to carry garbage out of the US Embassy in Tehran. The flag’s heavy curve represented the nadir (nadir-es-semt, as they say in Arabic) of American prestige in the post-Eisenhower era” (p. 407).

I’ll leave you with a cute little story about Reagan. In 1985, Reagan flew to Switzerland for a meeting with Gorbachev and while there, he and Nancy stayed in a private residence (Masion de Saussure, Prince Karim Aga Khan’s lakeside villa) where it was up to the President to feed the young son’s fish. On the last day of the conference, tragedy struck. “He [Reagan] shamefacedly confirmed the death of one of young Hussain Aga Khan’s goldfish, despite his conscientious feeding. An urgent search of Geneva pent shops had yielded two identical replacements, who were now happily swimming at Saussure. Any normal head of state would have decamped without further notice, but Dutch had felt impelled to leave behind a not explaining the mysteries of death and transfiguration:
‘Dear Friends
I put the white half dome in the tank according to the directions and fed them with 2 good pinches morning and night from the big food container.—Now and then I added some of the colored flakes…
On Tuesday I found one of your fish dead in the bottom of the tank. I don’t know what could have happened, but I added 2 new ones (same kind0. I hope this was alright.
Thanks for letting us live in your lovely home.
RONALD REAGAN’” (p. 575).