The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  But there was one person she never could heal: her own alcoholic husband.

  In Dixon, the family became relatively more settled, moving less often. But if anything the household was apparently more chaotic. Nelle began taking custody of released prisoners, housing them in her sewing room, calling them “her boys.” (Her own boys, meanwhile, slept two to a bed.) One hagiographic biography of Ronald Reagan calls her “an extraordinary woman who appears to have possessed only positive traits.” A more skeptical observer described the constantly absent Nelle’s household as “a surreal Norman Rockwell painting with his alcoholic Catholic father, devout Christian mother, Catholic brother, and ever-changing boarders the family took in.”

  Nelle also loved to perform. Small-town newspapers like the Dixon Telegraph being organs for busybodies, we can follow her progress. In 1922, at Dixon State Hospital, she “entertained the patients with a short and enjoyable program”; in 1924 she played two roles in The Pill Bottle, “a delightful portrayal of missionary work”; in 1926 she was a guest at a Baptist church for a recitation titled “Ship of Faith”; in 1927 at the American Legion for a “splendid talk” on George Washington’s boyhood. “FELLOWS HOME SCENE OF HAPPY MEETING,” Dixonians learned of an April 27, 1927, party she hosted on the status of Christianity in Japan; “MRS. J. E. REAGAN IS HOSTESS TO SOCIETY,” they read four months later of her presentation on “The Large World—My Neighborhood,” where she entertained “questions regarding the newspapers, moving pictures, radio, steamship and airplane, and how they tie the world together.”

  Another sort of item, however, frequently appeared cheek by jowl with the social notes in small-town newspapers: shaming accounts of men arrested for drunkenness. “DIPSOMANIAC AND KLEPTOMANIAC IS THE DOUBLE AFFLICTION OF POOR FRED WEST.” “MAN WHO VIOLATED PAROLE WILL HAVE TO TAKE TREATMENT FOR BOOZE APPETITE.” “SON APPEARS BEFORE JUSTICE ASKING FOR PARENT’S COMMITMENT TO HOSPITAL.” Jack Reagan apparently never showed up in such hometown newspaper accounts, by what miracle we do not know. Maybe it had something to do with the peripatetic manner in which he practiced his affliction. Perhaps it helped that he was a regular pinochle partner of Dixon’s police chief. Maybe editors exercised deference to his teetotaling church lady wife; one of the distinguishing features of Prohibition was its selective local enforcement as a way to exert social control against disreputable outsiders. Or maybe it was just luck. Either way, the anxious uncertainty of life in the Reagan household had to have been awful. Fulton, Tampico, Chicago, Galesburg, Tampico again, Dixon: the next town over the horizon just might bring the family redemption. Or it might bring burning shame. Disorder, futility, and alienation were keynotes of Ronald Reagan’s formative years. It is hardly a wonder that a bright and frightened child might organize his recollections otherwise.

  Take the story of the “oatmeal meat.” His older brother, who grew up an unsentimental man, once told a historian of his Saturday chore when the family lived in Chicago: he was sent to the butcher with instructions to buy a ten-cent soup bone to last the week. He was also to ask for a free chunk of liver for the cat. The punch line: “We didn’t have a cat.” The liver was the family’s big Sabbath meal. When Ronald Reagan recollected his family’s mealtimes, however, he told the story rather differently. “Our main meal,” he wrote in An American Life, “frequently consisted of a dish my mother called ‘oatmeal meat.’ She’d cook a batch of oatmeal and mix it with hamburger. . . . It was moist and meaty, the most wonderful thing I’d ever eaten.”

  Maybe it was. Probably it wasn’t. As an adult, when asked to name his favorite food, Ronald Reagan always said steak. In his speeches, a juicy T-bone always stood for the height of sensual delight—as well as the ill-gotten gains of welfare cheats. In a 1985 private letter to his former boss he fondly remembered the day when he was a lifeguard and they devoured four pounds of spareribs at the beach; another time he lovingly recalled getting a “rib facial” at his favorite restaurant when he was a radio personality in Des Moines, Iowa; indeed, what little primary evidence we have from his childhood suggests an obsession with meat. “I have 12 rabbits and am going to kill 3 and eat them,” he wrote in his earliest surviving letter, which continues in a chatty stream of consciousness until something sensual seems to monopolize his attention in mid-thought:

  “well I will have to close,

  “now Ronald Reagan

  “PS.

  “Smell that meat

  “Ain’t it good.”

  Ronald Reagan was an athlete of the imagination, a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Transforming his life, first in his own and then in others’ eyes, into a model of frictionless ease—and fashioning the world outside him into a stage on which to display it—was how he managed to fly.

  THE PROCESS SEEMED TO HAPPEN with a suddenness, in the two intense years after the family moved to Dixon when he was ten, in 1921. An inner transformation appeared to have taken place—the act of will that turned Ronald Reagan into what he was to become. The evidence is recorded in the photographs.

  There is a picture of Ronald Reagan from the summer when he was ten, a group shot of the caddies for a ladies’ golf tournament in Dixon. Moon Reagan is front and center, posed jauntily with a golf bag beside him, looking confidently into the camera. Dutch is awkwardly off to one side as if eager to escape the frame. Most of the boys are hatless, though some wear those sporty 1920s newsboy caps. Ronald, alone, is covered by a dweebish beanie. He looks distant, hardly present. He looks like the kind of boy he actually was: lonely and a little bit scared, the figure described by one writer on chaotic families as the “Boy Who Disappears.” She writes of quiet and withdrawn children like these, “Because they try so hard to stay invisible, they are often overlooked by people who might be able to help them.” The photograph fitted others’ recollections of him: that he was “subdued,” “shy and retiring”; that he would “sit for hours . . . looking at those glass-encased collections”; that “he was very quiet and he could go for hours all by himself playing with lead soldiers.”

  There is another group photo including Ronald Reagan taken perhaps a year later. Again he is off to one side—but this time it is because the other boys serve as his retinue. Neil and Dutch have joined the new boys’ marching band organized by the Dixon YMCA. All alone in his room he had been practicing baton twirling, just like what he had seen in the Armistice Day parade in Monmouth, with a broomstick or an old brass bedpost. And so the formerly timid boy was chosen drum major. Here he is the photograph’s star—and he knows it. He proudly displays his gold-tipped staff and nifty striped tie—he’s the only boy wearing one. His feet are precisely splayed, hip proudly forward; alone among the boys, he seems to understand that if you cock your elbow in just the right way, the cape that is part of their uniform juts out with jaunty flair instead of lying flat. And then there is the face: It is alive. It is the face of Ronald Reagan. He would never appear lost, forlorn, or empty-eyed in a photograph again. Try to find one.

  There is a picture from when he is about twelve. Again he is with a group of fellow caddies—only this time, he sits, proudly, front row center. His eyes look almost steely. He seems to have carefully posed himself: legs splayed, fashionable basketball sneakers out front, fist out in his chin. He seems, in fact, as aware of the lines his body presents before the viewer as a dancer.

  He had just started wearing spectacles. He told that story, like all the others, in tones of melodramatic redemption. He had been the last boy picked for baseball games: “The whole world was made up of colored blobs that became distinct when I got closer—and I was sure it appeared the same way to everyone else.” (Being the Boy Who Disappears, he made no demand on his parents’ attention by pointing out something was wrong.) Then, once upon a time, the family was out for a drive in the country and he put on his mother’s spectacles as a lark and let out a “yelp that almost caused Jack to run off the road.” He had healed himself; he could see.r />
  But he is not wearing his glasses in that second golf course photo—even though you would think glasses are a tool that would come in handy for a caddy. Until the day Ronald Reagan died, in fact, he was almost never photographed wearing glasses. Here was a constant: if a camera was present, or an audience, he was aware of it—aware, always, of the gaze of others: reflecting on it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it. Modeling himself, in his mind’s eye, according to how he presented himself physically to others. Adjusting himself to be seen as he wished others to see him—until the figure he cut became unmistakable. So unmistakable that in a caricature he drew of himself in his high school yearbook, he presents himself in silhouette—and yet he is immediately recognizable to us, even now, as Ronald Reagan.

  What happened, in those few years between the two pictures of himself as a caddy: the one of a distant, shy boy, the other of a boy presenting himself with the confidence of a hero? Here the evidence is suggested in a story that Reagan recalled in a moment of rare vulnerability—for which he slipped into a distancing third person address. Up until about that age of ten, he said, he used to make up plays in his head and act them out to himself, out loud—until people started making fun of him: “What are you doing, kid? Talking to yourself?” He wrote: “Enough cracks like that, and a sensitive boy . . . begins to feel a little silly. . . . So from then on he doesn’t pretend openly.”

  Instead, he started to pretend inside—a decision that coincides with a singular event he also recalled with striking specificity: being issued, on December 20, 1921, three weeks before his tenth birthday, Card No. 3695 the Dixon Public Library. He began checking out an average of two books a week, books of a very definite description.

  Boys’ adventure books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hewed to rigid genre conventions. They almost always began in the same way: they introduce a boy or man who will soon be revealed as the story’s hero, but outwardly does not appear heroic at all. The boys are fatherless or family-less, itinerant or otherwise without a place in the world. In one of young Reagan’s favorites, the protagonist is the son of a man named Lord Greystoke, who is sent to deepest, darkest Africa to make an official investigation for the Crown. The elder Greystoke’s ship wrecks, and he finds himself and his wife thrown “upon an unknown shore to be left to the mercies of savage beasts, and, possibly, still more savage men.” His wife bears him a son, both the baby’s parents pass away—and our hero has been introduced, as alienated from his circumstances as a human can possibly be: a man among beasts.

  Tarzan of the Apes unfolds the essential lesson embodied in every adventure tale of the sort so assiduously devoured by this Boy Who Disappears: that some souls are born under the sign of grace, and that though it might not look so at first, this grace will always eventually show itself in the fullness of time, whatever temporarily chaotic and isolating accidents of circumstances into which the hero finds himself thrown.

  Young Tarzan, at the age of ten—around the age Ronald Reagan was when he first encountered this story—is described to be as strong as a normal man of thirty. Belonging to neither the world of beasts nor that of men, he takes on the best qualities of both: a “quickness of mental action far beyond the power of the apes,” yet able “to spring twenty feet across space at the dizzy heights of the forest tops.” Deploying these gifts with the “indifferent ease that was habitual to him,” he dispatches one by one the ignoble tyrant-apes who delight in rampaging against their weak and helpless subjects; protecting the weak, strong yet never flaunting strength, selflessly sacrificing—these are the qualities proper to a hero. Boy Tarzan, lonely and apart, turns out not to be inferior to those around him but, simply, to be better. Indeed, it turns out that the very circumstances of his alienation—“the training of his short lifetime among the fierce brutes of the jungle”—is the superior crucible for the shaping of heroes. This was a moral that a boy who hoped to escape degraded circumstances by wishing himself into heroism was exquisitely primed to appreciate. Here was a satisfying story of how the world worked. Or could be made to work in the mind of a lonely ten-year-old boy.

  He read every Tarzan story he could get his hands on. When he found an adventure story he liked, he always read as many sequels as he could get his hands on. Stories by the former Unitarian minister Horatio Alger, for example, were even more useful—because in these the gift of grace was revealed not by dint of aristocratic blood but by its absence: unearned, aristocratic privilege is what villains use to lord over the weak, and the nobility of the true aristocrats—simple, stout-hearted boys of modest circumstance who rise by dint of honest hard work (and the sponsorship of a rich deus ex machina who always arrives in the nick of time when your heart is pure and you love your mother and protect her from the world’s cruel imprecations)—reveals itself by turns via adventure after adventure, overcoming all setbacks, unto the very last page, when the final algebraic equation is magnificently, gloriously solved: “As for Frank, all goes smoothly with him. He is diligent in business, and is likely to become a rich man.” Everything always works out in the end, gloriously.

  We know exactly what kind of books Ronald Reagan loved as a boy because he told us, in details verifiable to anyone with a Dixon map: “I would make what to me was a long trek on foot in the evening after dinner—we called it supper then—down Hennepin Avenue past South Central School, up the hill and across the street to the library. I would usually take out two books. I made those trips at least once a week and sometimes more often . . . the Rover Boys; Frank Merriwell at Yale; Horatio Alger . . . all the Tarzan books . . . the other books that he wrote about John Carter and his frequent trips to the strange kingdoms to be found on the planet of Mars.”

  We also know a book he hated: Brown of Harvard. Its “hero” is an indolent Don Juan from “one of the oldest and best families in Cambridge,” who aspires to be a poet and has “a handsome, almost careless countenance, and a wealth of curly hair which cropped up round about the edges of a woefully unsizeable cap.” (That’s a giveaway: a real hero, the sort Dutch Reagan preferred, carried himself exquisitely. Lord Greystoke has “features regular and strong; his carriage that of perfect, robust health”; Alger’s Ragged Dick “had a frank, straight-forward manner”; another Alger hero “had a pleasant expression, and a bright, resolute look, a warm heart, and a clear intellect, and was probably, in spite of his poverty, the most popular boy in Groveton.”) Reagan liked to contrast Brown of Harvard to Frank Merriwell at Yale, his hands-down favorite. It begins with Merriwell, a freshman of modest family background, finding himself challenged to a fight in which he accidentally shows up some entitled cad’s actual ignobility. (“Barely had the words left the little referee’s lips when—tap, tap, tap!—Merriwell had struck Diamond with three light blows with his open hand. . . . Never had they seen three blows delivered with such lightning-like rapidity.”) It ends with a baseball game between Yale and the hated rival Harvard. The umpire hands the game ball “to the freshman pitcher Yale had so audaciously stacked up against Harvard,” who skillfully holds Harvard to only two runs—then wins the game with two outs in the bottom of the ninth by cracking a soaring home run.

  IN 1972, A LONG ISLAND entrepreneur announced a plan to republish the Merriwell books as an antidote to what ailed America. “We need renewal and affirmation,” he said, “and Frank offers it to us, for he is the democratic ethic in action.” Life magazine ran a patronizing feature on the development, mocking this foolish man who “feels that the U.S.A. jumped the track and lost direction after the era of gaslight and cable car” and who held up a storybook hero as “the country’s guide and measuring stick as national singularity is restored.” Frank Merriwell, the suspicious circles agreed—master football player, tennis player, fencer, wrestler, sharpshooter, horseman, boxer, and oarsman, who once won the Congressional Medal of Honor by lifting his chaste sweetheart to the saddle of his galloping horse just before a speeding locomotive would have smashed her to smithereens—was rid
iculous. So was this “shrewd enough fellow in other fields of endeavor” who was “willing to say he patterned himself after Merriwell when he was growing up, a poor boy.”

  Ronald Reagan would have disagreed. As a child, he had aspired to Merriwell’s world—where virtue and villainy are always visible, revealed plainly in everyday performances (at least to those who also are virtuous; that is how good people recognize each other). Where good and evil are absolutes. Where the point of the story was that, though it might not look that way at the start, these truths became self-evident by the end—with plenty of adventure along the way. As an adult, Reagan unashamedly spoke of Frank Merriwell as a role model. Through Merri-well’s world, he rehearsed what he wished to become, and began searching out ways to display it in the real world.

  ONCE, WHEN RONALD REAGAN RAN for governor of California, a political reporter asked him about his upbringing. He talked nonstop about his mother. He never even mentioned his father.

  It could not have been difficult to cast Nelle Reagan within his emergent moral worldview: sweet but tough, stalwart but saintly, she was like all those mothers in his stories unto whom every sacrifice was due. Her philosophy fitted, too: she had, as Ronald Reagan put it, “a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos.”

  Shortly before he was born she was baptized into the Disciples of Christ, a Presbyterian splinter with elements of both liberalism and fundamentalism: a disdain for liquor but also an expansive role for women and reverence for education. Its rituals became a chaotic family’s bedrock: Sunday school, then services, then “Christian Endeavor” club and a second evening service on the Sabbath; prayer meetings every Wednesday night; all manner of volunteer work through the week. Nelle became president of its Missionary Society. She was also always reading and rereading a book called That Printer of Udell’s: A Story of the Middle West, a novel by a Disciples of Christ minister named Harold Wright Bell.