Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

  It’s interesting to speculate how this reserved, complex man, who did not wear his high ambitions on his sleeve, grew up to be a president of such iconic stature and achievement. But clues can be found in his upbringing, with its blend of moral conviction, homespun values, and struggle.

  RONALD WILSON REAGAN WAS born on February 6, 1911, in a modest apartment above the Pitney General Store in the small farming town of Tampico, Illinois. The family legend has it that his father, Jack, took one look at him, bawling his head off, and said, “For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?” Thus his nickname, Dutch, an odd moniker for the son of an Irishman whose ancestors, the O’Regans, hailed from County Tipperary, and a Scots-English mother. The nickname stuck, though it was seldom used after he entered politics. It didn’t fit the rosy-cheeked Irishman all that well. Reagan’s brother, Neil, two and a half years older, also had a nickname, Moon, given him in high school, after the comic strip character Moon Mullins, which stayed with him for life.

  Jack and Nelle Reagan, whom their children called by their first names, were attractive people—Jack was tall, dark-haired, and muscular, and Nelle was small and auburn-haired with bright blue eyes. He was a Catholic, and she was a Protestant (Disciples of Christ), both devout in their religious beliefs and practices. In reminiscences Reagan spoke of an all-American childhood and liked to recall happy times and boyish adventures. He loved and admired his parents, even though Jack, a shoe salesman whose big dreams were frequently dashed, struggled to provide for the family. “He loved shoes,” Reagan wrote, saying his father had even studied about them in correspondence courses. “He might have made a brilliant career out of selling, but he lived in a time—and with a weakness—that made him a frustrated man.”

  That weakness was alcoholism. Jack’s battle with drink was a constant theme of Reagan’s childhood, but mostly it was kept in the background, until the day at age eleven when Reagan came home alone one cold, windy night to find his dad sprawled on the front porch, passed out drunk. “I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there,” Reagan recalled, with some sympathy for that young boy. Instead, he dragged his slumbering father inside and somehow got him into bed. The confrontation with the hard truth of his father’s struggle stayed with him, but he never condemned him. Nelle had taught her boys not to disparage their father for his drinking; it was a sickness, not a moral failing, she said, and they learned to see it that way, too.

  The frequent moves of his early childhood and his father’s alcoholism did not engender the typical expressions of resentment or fear. For that reason, Reagan’s memories of his father were warm and loving. In two memoirs, he went out of his way to highlight the aspects of Jack’s character that showed him in a positive light. But his biographer Lou Cannon observed that those facets of his upbringing might have contributed to his habit of keeping people at an emotional arm’s length. “If you’re the child of an alcoholic, you see things you don’t want to remember, and you certainly don’t want to tell anybody,” Cannon said. “Its main impact on Reagan was to create a kind of inward part of him that was a very, very important part of his character.”

  Although Jack’s dreams went unfulfilled, he was a hard worker who believed that stability was always around the corner. They moved from place to place during Reagan’s early life—six moves in his first nine years. That itinerant life might have contributed to Reagan’s sense of himself as an outsider. Perhaps it was also responsible for his gift for reinvention.

  There was never enough money, even with Nelle supplementing their income with sewing. But Reagan said, “I learned from my father the value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a little something about telling a story. From my mother, I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true.”

  The family finally settled in Dixon, Illinois, on the south side of the Rock River, when Reagan was nine. Dixon was a classic exemplar of the American heartland. The family home at 816 South Hennepin Avenue, a modest two-story white frame house with a wide front porch, where they lived for three years, was later restored and designated by Congress as his official boyhood home, a national historic site. In 1984, President Reagan returned to Dixon on his seventy-third birthday and spoke of his boyhood. “Times were tough,” he told the audience. “But what I remember most clearly is that Dixon held together. Our faith was our strength. Our teachers pointed to the future. People held on to their hopes and dreams. Neighbors helped neighbors. We knew—my brother, Moon, and I, our mother and father, Nelle and Jack, saw to that—we would overcome adversity and that after the storm, the stars would come.”

  Looking back on his childhood, Reagan could never resist casting a rosy glow over the experience. He loved to describe his heartland upbringing as being an essential American story, full of character-building experiences. He even wrote of his early childhood, “My existence turned into one of those rare Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idylls. There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing; those were the days when I learned the real riches of rags.” Most of all, he loved football, which he considered “a matter of life and death.”

  He was also a voracious reader. In a letter to a librarian shortly after he became president, he recalled his love of books. At least once a week after dinner he would take a long walk to the library, where he would spend a lot of time browsing before choosing two books to check out. He enjoyed a wide range of books, from Mark Twain to Horatio Alger to the Tarzan books and the Rover Boys, a popular adventure series. The Dixon Public Library, he declared, was his “house of magic.”

  Those who idolize Reagan as the standard-bearer of conservatism might be surprised to learn that his most important early influences were not Republican—showing that patriotism can transcend party. Not only were his parents Democrats, they became fervent supporters of FDR, who earned their respect with his programs to rescue the country from the Great Depression. Jack Reagan was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) coordinating food distribution to the poor. His father’s son, Ronald Reagan cast his first vote ever for FDR and remained loyal to him and then to the Democratic Party for twenty years. Certain liberal principles were appealing to him. His parents, he said, believed literally in the equality of all people, a progressive ideal in an era when Jim Crow was at its height. Reagan recalled the time when the film The Birth of a Nation came to town. The film portrayed blacks, who were played by white actors in blackface, as aggressive and threatening to white women, while elevating the Ku Klux Klan as a patriotic group. Jack Reagan said, “I’m damned if anyone in this family will go see it.” Regularly, during Reagan’s childhood, his father and mother reached out to blacks, welcoming them into their home and lending them their support. Reagan recounted another incident during his college years when his football team was away from campus, requiring an overnight stay in Dixon. When the hotel manager refused to take a black teammate, Reagan promptly invited him to his house, where he knew he’d be welcome. The moral principle of equality for all and respect for each person’s human dignity was burned into Reagan’s very being, and he carried it throughout his life. He was deeply pained when critics later accused him of racial insensitivity.

  Although many aspects of Reagan’s early emotional life are mysterious, one thing is clear: the powerful influence of his mother. Nelle Reagan, outgoing, generous, and creative, nurtured Reagan’s dreams and helped shape his character. As Bonnie Angelo, the author of First Mothers: The Women Who Shaped the Presidents, put it, “When the credits roll on the Reagan life story, Nelle Wilson Reagan should be listed as director, producer, and head of casting.” Not only did she instill in him the optimistic spirit that made him such an attractive politician, she also trained him for public performances, involving him in the small plays she loved to put on for her church and demonstrating her own theatrical skills in amateur performances. A constantly positive presence desp
ite the trials of poverty and a flawed husband, she became Reagan’s central model for living a life above the fray. In her eyes, anything could be accomplished, no matter how difficult.

  The source of Nelle’s boundless spirit was her deep faith; its payoff was an opportunity for her children to rise. As Reagan wrote, “She had a natural and intuitive intelligence that went a long way toward overcoming a shortage of formal schooling. She had a drive to help my brother and me make something of ourselves.”

  Nelle was also a writer, penning many poems and sonnets, such as this one:

  To higher, nobler things my mind is bent

  Thus giving of my strength, which God has lent,

  I strive some needy souls unrest, to soothe

  Lest they the paths of righteousness shall lose

  In another era and under more fortunate circumstances, Nelle might have been famous in her own right. Instead, she had a son whose star shined on her behalf.

  Like his mother, Reagan had poetic tendencies, and one poem, published in his high school yearbook, The Dixonian, reveals the inner conflict between suffering and joy that he would return to many times in his life.

  Life

  I wonder what it’s all about, and why

  We suffer so, when little things go wrong?

  We make our life a struggle,

  When life should be a song.

  Reagan was drawn to a heroic ideal and throughout his life often pointed to his summers as a lifeguard, which began in 1926, when he was fifteen, and continued for the next seven years, at Dixon’s Lowell Park, a beach on the Rock River, where, he said, he had saved seventy-seven lives. It seemed that he was as proud of that achievement as anything else in his life. As president, he wrote a letter to a woman whose son had reached out to say that Reagan had taught his mother to dive, saying “Just between us I think maybe lifeguarding at Lowell Park was the best job I ever had.” But he also learned a lesson: people didn’t always appreciate being saved. He wryly noted that “almost every one of them later sought me out and angrily denounced me for dragging them to shore.” Perhaps it was a perfect training ground for politics, planting a seed in Reagan’s mind that government “help” wasn’t always welcome or effective.

  As he reached the end of his high school years, Reagan was determined to go to college, a lofty goal in his circumstances. In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, midwestern farming communities were struggling, and certainly Reagan’s family didn’t have extra funds for his education. But he set his sights on Eureka College, seventy-five miles from home, and secured a football scholarship for half his tuition, which was $400. The remainder he paid for with his lifeguarding savings, and he was given a job to cover his board, first washing dishes in a fraternity house. By his junior year, he was working as a lifeguard and official swim coach.

  Eureka was a small college, run by the Disciples of Christ, with only two hundred and fifty students, but it was Reagan’s introduction to a wider world. It was at Eureka during his freshman year that he first found his public voice and had his initial experience with political persuasion. Facing a financial crisis, the college president had announced a plan to make deep academic cuts that would decimate the faculty and leave graduating seniors without enough courses to fulfill requirements for their majors. The college was in an uproar over the announcement. The students threatened to strike, and Reagan joined the strike committee as the freshman class representative.

  When it was time for the students and faculty to vote on the strike motion, it was decided that a freshman should sell the idea, and Reagan found himself standing before a raucous crowd, summoning the courage to speak. “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it, and in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together,” he wrote later. By the time he was finished, the crowd was on its feet, voting by acclimation to strike. “For the first time in my life, I felt my words reach out and grab an audience, and it was exhilarating,” he recalled, noting with satisfaction that the threat of a strike worked. The college backed down from its original plan, and the faculty jobs were saved.

  From then on Eureka refused to let the financial weight of the Depression sink it. In a 1957 commencement address at the college, Reagan spoke of the Depression-era hardships it had endured and overcome. “We attended a college that made it possible for us to attend regardless of our lack of means, that created jobs for us, so that we could eat and sleep, and that allowed us to defer our tuition and trusted that they could get paid some day long after we had gone,” he told the students who were living in more comfortable times. “And the professors, God bless them, on this campus, the most dedicated group of men and women whom I have ever known, went long months without drawing any pay. Sometimes the college, with a donation of a little money or produce from a farm, would buy groceries and dole them out to the teachers to at least try and provide them with food.” He was unabashedly proud of his college, and in later years he would often speak of the courage of institutions such as Eureka that had made the pursuit of one’s aspirations possible even during the nation’s darkest times.

  Reagan wasn’t a particularly good student—he graduated with a C average—but he was fully engaged, playing football, swimming, performing with the drama and debate clubs, and being elected president of the student council. He was learning to put aside self-doubt, to form an identity. By the time of his graduation in 1932, he knew he wanted to be a performer. But how exactly that would happen eluded him. First he needed to get a job. Borrowing his father’s car, he set off on a circuit of radio stations within a hundred-mile radius of Dixon and at one point found himself at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, seventy-five miles away. It was a popular station with the motto “WOC Davenport, where the West begins, in the state where the tall corn grows.” It happened that the station was looking for a sports announcer, and when it tested Reagan it saw he had a knack for bringing the thrill of a game home, creating the visual pictures that kept listeners tethered to their radios. That was no easy task. It required reading the ticker descriptions of a game and then painting a live picture for listeners without seeing the game itself, elaborating where necessary to dramatize every pitch. Reagan was hired for a sum of $10 a game, and over the next four years he gained a following and advanced to WHO in Des Moines, where he secured a good salary for the time and happily immersed himself in the world of broadcasting national baseball and football games.

  That might have been the fulfillment of his dreams. But on a trip to Los Angeles in 1937 to cover spring training for the Chicago Cubs, Reagan was introduced to William Meiklejohn, a movie agent. Meiklejohn took one look at the handsome six-foot, one-inch tall young man with the wavy dark hair and golden voice and was interested in him, although for Reagan the meeting was a blur—literally. He’d been advised to ditch his glasses for the occasion, and he could barely see without them. (When he’d received his first pair of glasses as a child, he’d been amazed to see that trees had leaves!)

  With Reagan sitting there, Meiklejohn picked up the phone and called Maxwell Arnow, a casting director for Warner Bros. He told him, “I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.” Arnow was doubtful, but he agreed to a screen test. Reagan remembered his discomfort during the test, which he compared to being examined like a slab of beef. He wasn’t encouraged. But when Jack Warner, the powerful head of Hollywood’s most prominent studio, viewed the test, he liked what he saw. Before Reagan returned home, he’d been offered the chance of a lifetime: a seven-year contract with Warner Bros. for $200 a week.

  Reagan once joked that his first role might have been called “The Remaking of Dutch Reagan.” The hair, makeup, and wardrobe pros were brutal about detailing his flaws. They said his body was out of proportion: he had a small head, short neck, and large shoulders. The problem was solved by calling in Jimmy Cagney’s tailor, who had devised a solution for the similarly challenged star, a collar design that spread wider than normal. From then on, Reagan wore shirts with broad colla
rs that put his head and shoulders into balance. Not many people would ever remark that Reagan had a small head. With the right tailoring, he appeared larger than life in all respects.

  Reagan brought his parents to California and set them up in a house, where they helped handle his fan mail. They were happy there until Jack’s premature death in 1941, which was attributed to his drinking and two-to-three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Nelle lived on until 1962, when she died at age seventy-nine of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Reagan was glad to have his parents close at hand, and he was as proud as any son could be that he could give them some comfort in their later years after a lifetime of struggle.

  As a contract player, Reagan amassed a respectable body of B movies, most of them forgettable. But there were exceptions, films that gained a revival of sorts once he became politically famous. The first of these was a 1940 movie called Knute Rockne, All American, the story of a great Notre Dame football coach of the 1920s, played by Pat O’Brien. The key scene in the film involved his star player, George Gipp, played by Reagan. Gipp was grievously ill, and as he lay on his deathbed he told his coach, “Rock, sometimes when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.” The line “Win one for the Gipper” became a campaign slogan for Reagan, and he was often referred to as the Gipper during his political life.

  A decade later, Reagan made another movie that captured the public imagination during his presidency, mostly because of the contrast between dignified governance and comedic hijinks. Bedtime for Bonzo was a lighthearted comedy about the efforts of a psychology professor, played by Reagan, to teach human values to a chimpanzee. As president, Reagan would occasionally watch the movie and get a little emotional. Those invited to join him during movie nights at Camp David sometimes balked at his choice of film. Worried that the press would mock him if they found out he’d been watching Bedtime for Bonzo again, Fitzwater once suggested another movie. Reagan called him a coward and insisted on his movie choice. “Marlin, I loved that chimp,” he said, with tears in his eyes.