by Scott Farris
While still at Eureka College, Reagan told his fraternity brothers that he would be earning $5,000 per year within five years of graduation. It seemed an absurd boast. Five thousand dollars annually was an extraordinary income in 1932. It was more than twice what Reagan’s father had ever made during his best earning years. To suggest that such early success was even possible in the middle of the Great Depression suggested tremendous hubris. More importantly, how in the world did Reagan think he could earn such a handsome income? His degree, from a small, out-of-the-way liberal arts school where he had received average grades at best, was in economics, hardly a field bursting with employment opportunities. He had no family connections, no friends in high places. He had little idea what he wanted to do with his life beyond a vague notion that he might become an actor some day. All Reagan knew was that from his time as a lifeguard, an athlete, and a participant in student theater, he enjoyed being the center of attention. “I just liked showing off,” he said.
From the vantage of Dixon, Illinois, “Broadway and Hollywood were as inaccessible as outer space,” so Reagan had slowly developed the idea of breaking into “show business closer to home . . . radio.” He was particularly enthralled with the idea of getting into the new and growing field of sportscasting, something he had enjoyed pretending to do for the amusement of his Eureka teammates.
In telling the story of how this rather vague ambition actually became reality, Reagan credited a number of people with giving him encouragement and opportunity.
A nearly indescribable and unquantifiable personal quality made people not merely like Reagan, it made them want to help him. The same was true of Kennedy. They had some rare combination of cheerfulness and vulnerability that made them seem like boys on an adventure who had become lost and needed a small kindness to get them back on the right path.
In his memoirs, Reagan said the first adult in whom he confided his ambition was a Kansas City businessman named Sid Altschuler, whose family vacationed annually in Dixon and swam at Lowell Park, and whose opinion Reagan had come to value. Altschuler validated for Reagan that his dream of working in radio was not crazy but that he had, in fact, chosen a growing industry that could provide “a great future, once you are in.” The getting-in part was the trick, Altschuler said, and so he gave Reagan this advice: “Tell anyone who’ll listen that you believe you have a future in the business, and you’ll take any kind of job, even sweeping floors, just to get in.”
The twenty-one-year-old Reagan first hitchhiked to Chicago, where a former fraternity brother let him sleep on the couch, and he began making the rounds at the city’s various flagship radio stations. At the NBC affiliate, a secretary (he never got her name) took pity on Reagan and offered more sound advice. Chicago was the big time. He would need experience to win a job in one of the stations there. Better that he start off in the “sticks” and work his way up.
Hitchhiking back to Dixon, Reagan was pleasantly surprised to find his father, who had loved amateur theatricals himself, supportive of his job search. Reagan had mapped out every radio station within a hundred miles of Dixon, and Jack lent him the family Oldsmobile to begin visiting the stations in search of at least a job interview. The first stop was station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, which was on the top floor of the Palmer School of Chiropractic (with WOC standing for “World of Chiropractic”).
WOC program director Peter MacArthur, a Scotsman whose on-air brogue was well known in eastern Iowa (“Where the tall corn grows” was the station tagline), chastised Reagan for not doing his homework. If he had, he would have known that WOC had been searching for a new announcer for a month, but the station had filled the position just the previous week. Upset at his bad timing, Reagan snapped at MacArthur, “How in the hell does a guy ever get to be a sports announcer if he can’t get inside a station?” MacArthur was surprised to learn that being a play-by-play announcer was Reagan’s career goal. He followed Reagan out to the elevator. “Not so fast, ye big bastard. . . . Do ye perhaps know football?” As he had while attempting to win a scholarship at Eureka, Reagan embellished his own experience in the sport, leading MacArthur to direct him to a recording studio with the request, “Do ye think ye could tell me about a game and make me see it?”
As noted before, many would later challenge Reagan’s intelligence when he began his political career. It was not only Clark Clifford who thought him an “amiable dunce.” But there are many forms of intelligence, and what Reagan did next in auditioning for MacArthur, and what he would then do for a living for the next four years, required a type of intelligence that is rare.*
* The author, too, once worked in radio and tried doing sports play-by-play on several occasions. It requires far more skill and mental dexterity than most fans appreciate. To do an engaging play-by-play while not actually seeing the game in front of you strikes the author as a truly incredible skill.
Having only a few moments to gather his thoughts, Reagan realized he would need to know the names of the players, and to engage MacArthur fully he should imagine some moment of climax to give his faux broadcast an aura of excitement. Further, MacArthur had not told Reagan how long the audition would be. He had no idea how long this “broadcast” might go. Quickly, Reagan decided to draw on his near-photographic memories of past Eureka games and replay, with certain alterations, a game Eureka had played the previous fall against Western State University. That way he would know the players’ names and could keep talking as long as he could remember how the game had gone. He picked up the action as the fourth quarter began.
“A chill wind is blowing in through the end of the stadium, and long blue shadows are settling over the field,” Reagan began. “Western still leads, six to nothing, as Eureka—defending the south goal—puts the ball into play on their own twenty-yard line.” Reagan went on for twenty minutes, re-creating the game he remembered, although in this new version Reagan made himself a hero who springs a key block, when in the real game he had missed his assignment. Impressed by Reagan’s performance, MacArthur hired him to broadcast four University of Iowa home football games, beginning with the Hawkeyes’ game against Bradley on October 1, 1932. Reagan did so well, they doubled his pay to $10 per game, and a few months after the season ended, he was hired as a full-time announcer at WOC for $100 per month.
A few months after the promotion to full time, however, Reagan was fired. Never good at reading commercials, he had angered a sponsor by not properly conveying one of its advertisements. But Reagan was almost immediately rehired to work at WOC’s sister station WHO in Des Moines. The net result of Reagan’s mistake was another promotion—that Reagan luck—to a station with a fifty thousand–watt transmitter (the most powerful allowed by law) whose signal could be received all over the Midwest. In 1934, Reagan broadcast 150 games involving the Chicago Cubs or White Sox—without seeing a single one of the games. In fact, Reagan had never seen a Major League baseball game.
Reagan said, “Radio was theater of the mind.” His job was to take spare, hastily scribbled telegraphed notes of the action from the ballpark hundreds of miles away and then add enough color and details to make it sound as if he were broadcasting from the stadium itself. Reagan said the telegrapher at WHO might slip him a note that said no more than “S2C,” which Reagan would translate for the listener as, “It’s a called strike breaking over the inside corner, making it two strikes on the batter,” and then filled in the time with banter in which he made up additional details, such as, “Hartnett returns the ball to Lon Warneke. Warneke is dusting his hands in the resin, steps back up on the mound, is getting the sign again from Hartnett, here’s the windup and the pitch.” Once during a Cubs game, the telegraph went silent. Unwilling to admit on air that he was not really at the game, Reagan had the batter foul off pitches for nearly seven minutes before the line was restored and he could resume, quickly catching up on the real action.
Reagan was untroubled by the ruse he played on his au
dience. The important thing was not the literal truth, but the essential truth. Embellishment was fine if you were doing it for the right reasons. Take a quandary from Reagan’s later role in Knute Rockne, All American, for example. Reagan himself acknowledged that no one knows for sure if dying Notre Dame football player George Gipp really asked coach Knute Rockne to someday ask the Fighting Irish to “win just one for the Gipper”—one of Reagan’s most famous lines from his movies. The literal truth of what was said is less important than why Rockne said it, Reagan believed, which was “to inspire a team that was losing mainly because of bickering and jealousy . . . [to] sacrifice their individual quarrels for a common goal.”
Reagan therefore never hesitated to tell apocryphal stories as president if he thought the message or the moral of the story was more important than its verifiable facts. Reagan was nonplused, during one such presidential incident, when he wanted to demonstrate the value of loyalty and sacrifice with what he portrayed as a true story. In the story Reagan told, a bomber pilot decides to go down with his plane so his badly injured tail gunner will not die alone. “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together” is the story’s emotional climax, though as was pointed out to Reagan, how could anyone know what two men’s last words were to each other when they were alone and when they both then died? It was later determined that the story was likely from a movie starring Dana Andrews. It was not just, as Margaret Cleaver had said, that Reagan had an “inability to distinguish between fact and fancy,” he often felt he had no need to do so.
He had learned in his time broadcasting games he did not actually see that his audience was content to hear the ballgame as Reagan imagined it. As Reagan said, the key for any speaker is to establish his own point of view for the audience so they “can see the game through his eyes.” His audience liked how Reagan saw the game for them. With his light and sunny baritone voice, which carried well over the air, Reagan was more popular broadcasting a largely imaginary game than were many of the sportscasters who were describing the real game from the press box. A Sporting News poll found that Reagan, who went by “Dutch” Reagan as a more masculine-sounding name than “Ronald,” was the fourth most popular baseball commentator in the country who was not working in a big-league town. The Des Moines Dispatch reported: “To millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight middlewestern states, the voice of Dutch Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope.”
Reagan was a regional celebrity. In addition to his broadcasts, he wrote a weekly sports column for the Dispatch, more evidence that he could do more than read a script, though samples of his work indicate he tried too hard to “emulate Damon Runyan as a coiner of original slang.” On behalf of the station, he manned booths at the Iowa State Fair, was a frequent speaker at civic events, and made the local gossip columns, one of which described Reagan as “over six feet tall with the proverbial Greek-god physique; broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, and a face that would make Venus look twice.”
If that sounded like the description of a movie star, it was apt. The occupation of actor remained Reagan’s primary goal. In 1937 the now-twenty-six-year-old Reagan persuaded WHO to send him to Los Angeles to cover the Cubs’ spring training on Catalina Island. He went to Los Angeles by train but took a small plane to Catalina in choppy weather that so unnerved him he did not fly again for nearly thirty years, despite the inconvenience it caused his career and despite being a member of the Army Air Force during World War II!
While in Southern California, with the help of friends from Iowa who had already broken into the motion picture industry, Reagan finagled a screen test. He had been advised to shed his glasses and try newfangled contact lenses, and when he arrived for his screen test, the Warner Brothers casting director asked, “Are those your own shoulders?” He then performed a scene so short and anticlimactic after his years of dreaming of the moment that Reagan assumed he had bombed. But two days later, Warner Brothers offered him a six-month trial contract. Reagan was so certain he would succeed that he moved Jack and Nelle to California before his trial period was up. His optimism was not misplaced. That fall, Warner Brothers offered him a seven-year contract with a one-year option and a salary of $200 per week—twice the amount Reagan had boasted to his fraternity brothers that he would be earning by then.
If Reagan’s relentless optimism in America while president seemed misplaced to his critics, it is at least clear how he came to acquire it. To a remarkable degree since he had read That Printer of Udell’s, Ronald Reagan’s life was unfolding as he had planned it. He had become the lifesaving hero that inhabited his boyhood daydreams by being a lifeguard; he had found at least a modicum of success as a collegiate athlete; he had become a successful sportscaster; and now he was on his way to becoming a movie star, yet another dream fulfilled.
Reagan’s first film, Love Is on the Air, in which he played the familiar role of a radio broadcaster, was released in October 1937. It was the first of more than fifty films in which Reagan appeared. Three months later, Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been an important supporter and financier of Franklin Roosevelt’s two presidential campaigns, was appointed by Roosevelt to be the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.
It is doubtful that one American in a thousand today could name America’s ambassador in London, but in 1937 it was the top diplomatic post available overseas, the illusion being that Great Britain was still the world’s greatest power. The elder Kennedy, too, because of his fortune, his large family, and his ties to Hollywood, was a national figure at home, occasionally mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. As Europe lurched toward war, Joe’s opinions, expressed candidly and often profanely, would carry great weight at home and abroad. Occasionally they even represented the opinion of the Roosevelt administration he was in theory representing.
Jack Kennedy was already familiar with Europe. His father had wanted him to follow in his brother’s footsteps and spend a year at the London School of Economics studying under the famed Marxist Harold Laski. But Jack became ill shortly after his arrival in the fall of 1935 and returned home, not only missing the chance to study with Laski but also missing a planned luncheon with one of his heroes, Winston Churchill. Two years later, in the summer of 1937, while Reagan was beginning his career in Hollywood, Jack toured France, Italy, and Germany with his friend Billings, absorbing as much information as he could about the growing world crisis. His predictions were hit and miss. He correctly concluded that Franco’s forces would win the civil war in Spain but was off the mark when he said Hitler and Germany had too many enemies and too few resources to achieve the Führer’s grandiose ambitions.
By the time Jack joined his father and the rest of his family in London in the summer of 1938, his father had become an adversary of his hero, Churchill. Churchill had been urging Britain to commit to using force to repel Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia, while Kennedy publicly favored Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “waiting to see what happens” before committing to a course of action against Germany. Jack returned to Harvard energized by his growing interest in world affairs and by the graduation of Joe Junior—who had not acquired, it should be noted, any particular academic or athletic distinctions. Out of his brother’s shadow, Jack began to blossom academically, making the dean’s list with a solid “B” average. He requested and received permission to study abroad the second semester of his junior year.
Ostensibly an assistant to his father, Jack was labeled by English newspapers more correctly as “a glorified office boy.” In March 1939, Hitler’s army invaded what remained of independent Czechoslovakia, ignoring a pact to honor Czech sovereignty the Führer had made with Chamberlain six months before in Munich. Distraught that a second world war was now imminent, Joe Kennedy urged his son to tour the European continent now, while there was still time. Jack did, returning to Nazi Germany, then traveling on to Poland, the Baltic republics, the Soviet Union (which he found “crude, backward, hopelessly bureaucratic”),
Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt.
Jack arrived back in London in late August; on September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Great Britain declared war against Germany and World War II began. Nearly hysterical, Joe Kennedy told Roosevelt that “Germany and Russia will win the war and that the end of the world is just down the road.” Roosevelt stopped paying attention to Kennedy’s diplomatic reports.
Like Jack, Roosevelt was more interested in the words spoken by Churchill, whom Jack heard declare in the House of Commons, “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny. . . . It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of Man. . . .” It was a combination of “poetry with politics,” the type of speech Jack Kennedy hoped he might make someday.
A political career, however, was Joe Junior’s purview. The profession Jack Kennedy gave the most thought to while still a Harvard student was writing, perhaps journalism. Back at Harvard for his senior year, Jack would be required to write a thesis in order to graduate. Most seniors were selecting narrowly defined topics that would be manageable to research and write for an assignment that typically ran about fifteen thousand words. Jack first proposed a paper on “English Foreign Policy Since 1731” before limiting it to contemporary English foreign policy in a paper now called “Appeasement at Munich.”
In researching his paper, Jack relied heavily on his father’s position and connections, constantly pestering the embassy staff in London to send him documents, copies of parliamentary speeches, pamphlets, and news clippings. He also hired a staff of young stenographers and typists so that he could dictate the bulk of his paper, the method he typically used, like his idol Churchill, for major writing projects throughout his career.