The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

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  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Before I start the discussion, how many members here actually served with Ronald Reagan? Anybody? How many were appointed to jobs by Ronald Reagan?

  MR. H. W. BRANDS (HWB): How quickly time flies.

  DR: So let’s have a good conversation about Ronald Reagan. You spent five years researching him and working on this book. Is that right?

  HWB: Yes. But I have to say that because I teach American history, I’ve been thinking about Reagan and lecturing about him since he was president. So I had a long head start on writing the book.

  DR: In the latter part of the Reagan administration, a great historian, Edmund Morris, was appointed as Reagan’s official biographer. He traveled with him and stayed with him for two years or so.

  Then he wrote a book, Dutch, that was criticized because he inserted himself into the book as a character in Reagan’s life, when he obviously wasn’t. He said he did that because he just needed to liven up the book. He couldn’t really get his hands around the Reagan personality.

  Did you have that same problem? What was the difference between your assessment of Reagan and Morris’s?

  HWB: The first thing I have to say is that I have the greatest admiration for Edmund Morris as a historian, as a writer. He’s a brilliant writer.

  I found his book to be very useful. But a lot of people didn’t.

  I found it useful as a source because I was willing to take the time to tease through the stuff that he writes and the notes to figure out what was true and what was not. It was a fictionalized memoir. I have heard Edmund Morris confess—or admit—that he finds politics boring.

  Morris got the job of being Reagan’s authorized biographer on the strength of a book that he wrote about young Theodore Roosevelt, who is a compelling character for a biographer. Morris wrote a great book called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was a best seller. On the strength of that, he was brought on board to do the authorized Reagan biography. But the difference is—and I think Morris figured this out in doing the research—that Theodore Roosevelt was a compelling character separate from his political career.

  I spent a lot of time on Ronald Reagan, but I will say that if he had not been president of the United States, nobody would have written a biography of him. The importance of Reagan and the interest in him lies with his political career. If you don’t find politics interesting, then you’re probably going to find Ronald Reagan kind of boring.

  I think what happened is that Morris found himself in this cul-de-sac, and that Reagan was an enigma to Morris. To me, the enigma of Ronald Reagan is not what made him tick, but what made him successful. Those are two separate things. I don’t think Reagan as an individual was any more puzzling than any of us are.

  DR: You start your book with a very interesting part of Reagan’s life. In 1964, Barry Goldwater is running for president on the Republican ticket. He isn’t doing that well. The campaign decides to put Reagan on TV, and that speech launched his political career. For those who aren’t familiar with that speech, what did he say? Why was it so significant that you started your book with it?

  HWB: This was the turning point in Reagan’s life. He was fifty-three years old. He had had a film career that fizzled out. He couldn’t get any roles on the big screen. He had become a TV host, which wasn’t really much when TV was really the small screen.

  He had earlier developed a certain interest in politics, but he had no visibility. People in Southern California were aware that for a couple of years Reagan had been speaking on behalf of political candidates. If you weren’t from Southern California, you would never have connected him to politics. But the people who saw him saw that this guy had potential, and they wanted to get him before the American public.

  Reagan’s political philosophy in 1964 was essentially interchangeable with Barry Goldwater’s. What Reagan’s supporters saw in him that they didn’t see in Goldwater was an attractive personality.

  Goldwater was a staunch conservative, but he was stern. He was off-putting, even scary, and he was trailing badly in the polls. There was a week left before the election. It was clear he was going to lose badly. So the campaign was willing to throw a Hail Mary pass—not that they really expected he would win, but they were hoping to close the gap a little. So they were willing to put Ronald Reagan on TV.

  It wasn’t a national show. They recorded a speech of Reagan’s in Southern California and aired it in various markets around the country.

  It’s a striking moment, because Reagan realizes that his career is on the line. His career as an actor has essentially ended, and he doesn’t know what he is going to do next. He is in his early fifties. He is not sure if he’s going to have a job.

  In some ways, this speech was Reagan’s second screen test. He’d gone to Hollywood in 1937 and had a screen test there.

  He gives the speech, and he knocks it out of the park. Republicans all over the country were smacking themselves in the forehead afterward saying, “We nominated the wrong guy.”

  By the next morning, there were Ronald Reagan for President committees being formed in various states around the country. It would take him another sixteen years to actually get the nomination, but that speech was the beginning of his political career.

  DR: Some people say that if he hadn’t been married to Nancy Reagan, he would never have been president, because she was very interested in his running for that office. Do you think that’s fair or unfair?

  Acting the part: California Governor-Elect Ronald Reagan riding a horse, 1966.

  HWB: I would take issue with that. Nancy Reagan was interested in the success of her husband. She had no particular political agenda, and no real interest in politics.

  When he became governor and when he became president, she would promote whatever seemed to promote whatever he was promoting. But when he was president, for instance, Nancy had no particular notion of what the top marginal rate on personal income taxes should be. She had no particular idea of how American relations with the Soviet Union should unfold. What she wanted to do was to make sure that her husband was successful.

  She was ambitious for him. But if he had chosen a career in the business sector, I think she would have been just as energetic in promoting his career.

  I will say this for Nancy. She was a better judge of character than he was. She was a better judge of who could get in his way.

  He was a notorious softy when it came to administration and management. He would let people hang around in his administration long after they had stopped doing any positive good—in fact, even when they became a hindrance to what he was trying to accomplish. Nancy was often the one who would have to work behind the scenes to get them fired.

  DR: After five years of researching and working on Reagan, do you admire him more or less now?

  HWB: I was a college student in California when Reagan was governor. Then I was teaching American history to high school students by the time he became president. Like a lot of other people, I was wondering where this Hollywood actor got whatever he got to make him as successful as he became.

  Some of it was natural. Okay, he’s an actor, and he knows how to read lines, and he knows how to give speeches. That was the facile explanation for Reagan’s success.

  But I realized eventually that I had really underestimated Ronald Reagan. You think of an actor as somebody who reads somebody else’s lines. Reagan wrote more of his own lines probably than any president since Woodrow Wilson, who wrote all of his own speeches. Reagan was intimately involved in the development of every important speech that he gave.

  Partly that was easy, because he gave essentially the same speech again and again. From that first speech in 1964 right up until the end of his political career and his farewell address in 1989, it’s the same message: The government is too big. It needs to be reduced in size. Communism is evil. It needs to be defeated. The rest was details. But the thing that I came to appreciate about Reagan was that he re
ally did change the world.

  The Reagan book that I wrote was in some ways a sequel to a biography that I’d written of Franklin Roosevelt. I concluded, in the course of doing the research on Reagan, that these were the two most important presidents of the twentieth century. What Franklin Roosevelt was in the first half of the twentieth century, Ronald Reagan was in the second half of the twentieth century.

  In certain respects, each one tried to correct what he saw as an imbalance between the private sector and the public sector. When Roosevelt became president, the private sector amid the Great Depression was on life support, and it needed an injection of government energy. By the time Reagan became president, most American voters—at least the voters who first elected him and the 60 percent of the American electorate who reelected him in 1984—concluded that the government had gotten too big.

  I teach undergraduates at the University of Texas. I boil things down for them. I say, “In American politics, if you think that government is the solution, you’re a liberal. If you think that government is the problem, you’re a conservative.”

  DR: Let’s go back to Reagan’s beginnings. He grows up in Illinois. His father is an alcoholic—not a very good provider, you would say. His mother is the bulwark of the family. He has an older brother, Neil. How did Reagan go from a small town—Dixon, Illinois—to Hollywood? What was his career path?

  HWB: When he was very young, Reagan discovered that applause, the laughter of audiences, could alleviate the anxieties of being the son of an alcoholic father, of being someone who didn’t know whether his father on one day was going to be his best friend and the next day was going to be utterly unreliable.

  His mother became the rock of the family. His mother, who was active in her church, Disciples of Christ, took the younger child in the family, Ronald—Dutch, as they called him—along with her to church.

  DR: Where did the nickname Dutch come from?

  HWB: The family didn’t have any money, so his mother would cut his hair by putting a bowl over his head and just trimming what the bowl didn’t cover. So he looked like a little Dutch boy. That’s the origin of the name.

  Reagan trailed along with his mother to these church events. Among the various events that his mother undertook at the church were plays and musicals and skits. He was a cute kid. He was a good-looking kid. Something inspired her to put him onstage when he was four or five years old. He got up there and he did what cute kids do, and the audience applauded and they laughed.

  Reagan, writing his memoirs at the age of eighty, looks back and remembers how it felt. He said he could still remember the music of the applause.

  The reason Reagan went into acting was very similar to the reason he went into politics. He reflected on this again in his memoirs. He said the reason a lot of people go into acting is precisely because when they’re onstage, people will laugh and applaud. As uncertain as their personal lives might be, their lives onstage are very satisfactory because they get these positive strokes.

  He goes from Eureka College into radio. He intended to go to Hollywood from the time he was in college, but thought that was going to be a step too far. He said he wasn’t willing to admit to his college classmates that he wanted to become a Hollywood star. To say instead that he wanted to go into radio, that was more acceptable.

  He’s always looking for a bigger audience: first at these church performances, then his high school, then his college, then in radio. Then, after a few years in radio, he does a screen test and goes to Hollywood, and he’s got a new audience.

  DR: He’s on the radio in Des Moines, broadcasting Chicago Cubs games. He isn’t able to watch them, but he reads the ticker tape, broadcasts the games, and then goes with the team to California. He gets a screen test and gets hired. He’s a handsome guy, a nice guy. Why did he not become Clark Gable or Errol Flynn? Why did he not make it to the top?

  HWB: Reagan interpreted it as a case of bad timing. He did okay. He did what B actors do. These were the days of B films. He did his introductory work—played in the farm league, so to speak. Just when he was going to hit the big time, just when he was going to make the major leagues, World War II breaks out. That interrupts his career.

  In fact, that wasn’t it, really. The thing was that Reagan—I’ll backtrack a little bit to his childhood—grows up with this alcoholic father. The person on whom a son is most apt to rely, the one that he’s likely to look to for modeling what kind of person to be, is someone who’s utterly unreliable.

  When I was writing the book, I was on tour for a previous book, and I did an interview with a radio host in Chicago. At the end of the interview he asked a question that often comes up in these kind of things: What’s your next book? I said, “I’m working on Ronald Reagan.” He put his hand over the microphone and said, “As soon as we get off the air, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  I’m all ears. We get off the air, and he says, “If you want to understand Ronald Reagan, you need to keep in mind that his father was an alcoholic.” I didn’t know exactly how to react to this bit of intelligence, because I knew perfectly well that his father was an alcoholic. Reagan writes about it in his memoir. Was I supposed to be surprised? I didn’t say anything, and I let him continue.

  And he continued, “I speak as the son of an alcoholic father.” He said, “I will tell you that when you grow up in that kind of environment, you develop a kind of emotional shield around yourself, because this person that you want to look to for guidance, the person you want to lean on, the person you want to model yourself after, is quite unreliable. One day he is your best friend and he’s telling you funny stories and throwing the ball around in the backyard, and the next day he’s beating the living daylights out of you.”

  Now, this is not Ronald Reagan exactly, but you’ll see where I’m going with this. I’d done a lot of research on Reagan by that point, and I thought, “I’m not going to take this guy’s word for it that this explains Reagan.” But I was on the lookout for various manifestations of this mind-set.

  One of them came from the memoir of Nancy Reagan. It’s a wonderful memoir, in part because it is so candid. It is one of the most open and revealing memoirs of somebody in American public life in the last fifty years.

  Nancy Reagan was Reagan’s closest—I’m tempted to say only really close—friend. She was almost the sum of his emotional universe. But she acknowledges in her memoir that there were times when even she didn’t know what was going through his head and his heart—that this wall would come up and she just had to wait for it to come down again.

  She realized this was something deep within him. So this is part of the story.

  Another bit of evidence comes from Ronald Reagan’s own memoir, describing a moment when he’s walking home from an after-school activity at the YMCA in Dixon. It’s in the winter. The temperature’s below freezing. There’s snow on the ground. It’s starting to get dark.

  He turns in to the walkway leading up to the house, and sees his father passed out in the snow. He says, “And I stood there for a moment and I asked myself, ‘What should I do? Should I simply walk on by and go into the house and leave him there?’ ”

  He doesn’t spell this out, but the obvious conclusion is that he is thinking, “Okay, I’ll just leave him there. He’ll die in the snow.” Reagan is writing this from a distance of nearly seventy years, and he still remembers this moment when he was eleven years old.

  In the next sentence, he says, “I decided to pick him up and drag him.” But for a kid that age to entertain the thought that his life might be better if his father were dead—that’s a pretty heavy thing. This is what Reagan is trying to get away from by going into acting.

  DR: He goes into acting. He’s a B actor, doesn’t get to be Errol Flynn or John Wayne. World War II breaks out. He does training films, later becomes the head of the Screen Actors Guild. Why was he so involved in that?

  HWB: I didn’t quite answer your question about why Reagan didn’t become
Clark Gable. This is my inference, and you’ll have to take it for what it’s worth. It’s because Reagan was so reluctant to let down this emotional wall.

  If you’re going to convey deep emotion as an actor, you have to have someplace in yourself where you can go to feel that deep emotion. Reagan never let himself go there.

  So Reagan, by the mid-1940s, had reluctantly come to the conclusion that he was not going to make the top of the marquee. When Reagan announces he’s going to run for governor of California, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers hears about it and says, “No, no. Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend.”

  That was the kind of role that Reagan was good at. The leading roles, the ones where you really have to dig deep, those were the ones he wasn’t good at. He couldn’t quite go there.

  He realizes that he’s not going to make it as a top-level actor, so what else can he do in Hollywood? He discovered an interest in politics. First he goes into the politics of the film business, which is how he gets involved in the Screen Actors Guild.

  DR: He becomes the head of SAG for a while. In those days, he’s an active, visible Democrat. He campaigns for FDR. He campaigns for Harry Truman. What converted him to being a Republican?

  HWB: One of the most difficult questions that I had to answer in writing the book, and I’m not sure that I quite got it, is how exactly to explain this. Reagan was a Democrat from his youth. I think of him as a legacy Democrat.

  He was a Democrat because his father was a Democrat. His father got a job as a low-level functionary in the New Deal at a time when the family really needed for his father to have that job. Like very many people who benefited from the New Deal, Reagan developed a certain feeling of gratitude toward Franklin Roosevelt.

  But there was more than that. Reagan grew up in the age of radio. His first job was in radio. He was learning how to become a radio personality when Franklin Roosevelt was using radio to connect with the American people.