Lessons My Father Taught Me

by Michael Reagan

  How far might your humility take you? How will you humbly change the world?

  8

  Put Others First

  MY FATHER WAS SIXTEEN years old when he began working as a lifeguard on the Rock River at Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois. Every summer for seven years, from 1927 to 1933, he worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, all summer long. Over the course of those seven years, he was credited with saving seventy-seven lives—and he never lost a swimmer.

  In fact, the very first time Dad was on the front page of a newspaper was when he saved a young man named James Raider on August 2, 1928. The next day, the Dixon Evening Telegraph carried an above-the-fold headline: “James Raider Pulled from the Jaws of Death.” Beneath the headline, the story told how “lifeguard Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan,” age seventeen, had just rescued his twenty-fifth swimmer from death-by-drowning. From that point on, the Telegraph kept a running tally of “Dutch” Reagan’s saves.

  If you asked my father what his favorite job was, you might expect him to talk about the presidency or being governor of California or being a Hollywood actor or a radio broadcaster—but that’s not what he would say. He would always answer, “My beloved lifeguarding may be the best job I ever had.”

  One time, after he told me some stories from his lifeguarding days, I said, “Dad, you’re really proud of those seventy-seven lives you saved.” He leaned closed to me and said, confidentially, “Some of those seventy-seven lives were young ladies who just wanted to meet the lifeguard.”

  Even after my father left the banks of the Rock River and pursued less heroic lines of work, he continued to save lives. As a radio broadcaster at WHO Radio in Des Moines, he saved two people from drowning in a public swimming pool, though details of the incident are sketchy.

  Another incident occurred during his time in Des Moines: One autumn night in 1933, Dad heard a commotion on the street below his second-floor apartment. He picked up his .45 caliber revolver, leaned out the window, and saw a mugger attempting to rob Melba King, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student. Dad pointed the gun at the mugger and shouted, “Leave her alone or I’ll shoot you right between the shoulders!” The mugger fled, and Dad walked the young lady home. Decades later, when Dad was in Iowa during his reelection campaign, Dad and Melba King were reunited onstage at a campaign event. Dad told her—and the crowd—“This is the first time I’ve had a chance to tell you the gun was empty. I didn’t have any cartridges. If he hadn’t run when I told him to, I was going to have to throw the gun at him.”

  And there was yet another incident in the late 1960s, when Dad was governor of California. He saw a girl fall into a swimming pool at a political reception—and when she didn’t come back to the surface, he dove into the pool with his clothes on and saved the child’s life.

  If I had to name the two greatest concentrations of narcissistic, self-important, self-centered people in the country, I would say Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Yet my father was able to easily navigate his way in Hollywood and D.C. as a man selflessly devoted to others. When he went to Washington, determined to restore the economy, topple Communism, and advance the cause of freedom around the world, he was just doing what he had already done seventy-seven times in the swirling waters of the Rock River outside Dixon, Illinois, on a much grander scale.

  Putting others first—that has been one of the themes of my father’s life for as long as I can remember. Where did his devotion to serving others come from? Again, I think we have to give a lot of credit to his mother, Nelle. She raised my father and his brother in the Christian faith and taught them to put others first. She wrote plays that were performed in church, many of which dealt with values of compassion and serving others—and she often wrote acting parts for young “Dutch” Reagan. Nelle also exemplified a devotion to helping others and often invited homeless men and ex-convicts into their home for a hot meal and a Gospel sermon.

  Dad was always putting others first, always saving lives, always confronting the muggers and helping the innocent feel safe. From the age of sixteen till the end of his days, Dad was a lifeguard and a hero. To him, saving and serving others was all in a day’s work.

  The Unforgivable Sin

  My father said that when he was growing up, there was no more grievous sin than uttering a racial or religious slur. Dad’s father, Jack Reagan, told him how Irish immigrants were looked down upon, and some stores had signs that read “No Dogs or Irishmen Allowed.” Nelle taught my dad and his brother the Golden Rule. Though segregation was widely practiced in Dixon in those days (e.g., whites sat in the floor seats of the theater, blacks in the balcony), Nelle encouraged her sons to invite their black school friends into their home.

  When Dad played on the Eureka College football team, the team once traveled by bus to dad’s hometown of Dixon. The bus pulled up to a hotel and Dad went into the hotel with the football coach to help check the team into their rooms. The hotel manager said, “I can take everybody but your two colored boys.”

  Angered, the coach said, “Then we’ll go someplace else.”

  When the manager said that no hotel in Dixon would take black people, the coach was ready to have the entire team sleep on the bus. Dad offered another solution: let the rest of the team stay in the hotel. He and the two black players would stay at his parents’ house nearby. Dad didn’t even have to call ahead and ask if it was OK. He knew that Nelle and Jack would welcome his teammates.

  Dad was raised not merely to be “color-blind,” but to go out of his way to show acceptance, fairness, and compassion to others. Yet because of dad’s conservative values, he has often been unfairly smeared as a bigot. It’s untrue, but as a political tactic, it’s often effective.

  In 1966, when my father entered the primary campaign for governor of California, his fiercest opponent was George Christopher, the liberal Republican ex-mayor of San Francisco. Christopher’s strategy was to brand my father an extremist. The two men debated each other in several public forums, including a convention of African American Republicans. At this event, Dad spoke first, followed by Christopher, who repeatedly implied to this mostly black audience that my father was a racist.

  Dad fumed as he listened to these assaults on his character. Finally, he’d had enough. He got up in front of the audience and demanded that Christopher stop defaming him. Then he stormed off the stage, leaving the audience in stunned silence.

  At that time, Dad was no seasoned politician. He was unaccustomed to the rough-and-tumble of hardball politics. In his mind, Christopher’s false accusations were so outrageous that he couldn’t stay in the same room with the man.

  Two of Dad’s campaign aides followed him and convinced him to return to the hall. Dad cooled down and agreed to go back inside. He got up on the stage before the crowd and explained his outburst. He said that he had been raised by Jack and Nelle Reagan to treat everyone as an equal. He described the Christian home where he was raised—a home in which bigotry was the unforgivable sin. And when he had finished, the audience gave him a huge round of applause, along with their support—but the phony charges didn’t stop.

  When my father ran in the general election, his opponent—incumbent Democratic governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown—leveled over-the-top accusations at him. Brown called Dad’s supporters “shock troops of bigotry, echoes of Nazi Germany, echoes of another hate binge that began more than thirty years ago in a Munich beer hall.” Dad calmly, reasonably replied, “Extreme phraseology from one who professes to deplore extremism.”1

  Next, Brown went to an elementary school classroom and filmed a commercial in which he told two African American girls, “I’m running against an actor. You know who shot Abraham Lincoln, don’tcha?”2

  My father trailed in the polls until the commercial appeared. But when voters and pundits saw the outrageous ad, with its message that an actor equals an assassin, Dad vaulted over Brown in the polls and he never looked back. On election day, my father beat Brown by a 58 to 42 percent margin.3


  The Brown ad violated common decency, and decent people rejected it. Today, however, half the country would find nothing wrong with such a dishonest ad and such blatant character assassination. The political climate in America has changed—and not for the better. Accusing one’s opponent of racism or comparing one’s opponent to John Wilkes Booth would hardly raise any eyebrows today. It would be considered politics as usual.

  The character assassination of my father continues even after his death. The 2013 motion picture The Butler, produced and directed by Lee Daniels, is based on the life of longtime White House butler Eugene Allen, an African American who served under eight presidents, from Truman to Reagan. Inexplicably, the filmmakers changed Allen’s name to “Cecil Gaines.”

  After Eugene Allen retired, Dad and Nancy invited him and his wife back to the White House as guests for a state dinner in honor of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In interviews, Eugene Allen always spoke of his fondness for Dad and Nancy. Yet Lee Daniels defamed my father as racially insensitive and portrayed “Cecil” as resentful toward the Reagans.

  My father was raised to see all people as equals. His mother, Nelle, taught him to love everyone, regardless of race. His father Jack refused to let him see the movie Birth of a Nation because it glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

  At Eureka College—a school founded by abolitionists—Dad was friends with an African American coed, Willie Sue Smith. In fact, Willie Sue sometimes passed notes between “Dutch” Reagan and his girlfriend, Margaret Cleaver. Dad and Willie Sue kept in touch throughout his Hollywood years and on into his political career. She died in 2011 at age 101, the last remaining member of the Eureka College class of 1932.

  In 1952, as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), my father made news by calling upon Hollywood studios to provide more opportunities for African Americans in the film industry. I could go on and on. When it comes to my father’s attitudes on race, the truth is far more interesting than any left-wing propaganda film.

  And it’s not just the left that has misrepresented Ronald Reagan’s character. Many candidates and commentators on the right have tried to co-opt my father for their own purposes. Some have claimed that Ronald Reagan would be quick to deport the children of illegal immigrants. Though Ronald Reagan tried to solve to the problem of illegal immigration when he was president, he would not hold children accountable for the sins of their parents. Anyone who believes my father would do so doesn’t know him and doesn’t know what he stood for.

  Dad once wrote about his frustration that he was unable to convince more people of color of his concern for their problems. It hurt him deeply that he was often falsely portrayed as racially insensitive. “Of all things that were said about me during my presidency,” he wrote, “this charge bothers me the most personally. I abhor racism.”4

  I know that politics is a blood sport, but I’ve never gotten used to the notion that it’s acceptable to lie about your opponent’s character and portray a decent, honest, fair-minded Christian man as a bigot. Of course, my father was bigger than all the false accusations leveled against him. He survived character assassination just as he survived an assassin’s bullet. He lived and he forgave, but he was wounded nonetheless.

  My Father’s Compassion

  My father had one of the most compassionate hearts of anyone I’ve ever met. His compassion extended not only to people in need, but to suffering animals. Ray Jackin, the foreman of Dad’s Malibu ranch, once told me a story about Dad’s love for animals. One of the thoroughbreds, a mare named Bracing, was dying of cancer and had to be put down. She had birthed Ronnie’s Baby—the only one of Dad’s horses to actually win at Santa Anita. The thought of her death absolutely devastated my father.

  Ray offered to handle the chore of putting the horse out of her misery, but Dad felt he owed it to her to do it himself. So Dad loaded a .30-30 rifle, and he and Ray went out to the corral. Ray took a piece of chalk and drew an X on Bracing’s forehead, just above the eyes.

  “Just put a bullet right at the center of the X, Mr. Reagan. She’ll never feel a thing.”

  Holding the rifle at his side, Dad looked into the trusting eyes of that horse. Finally, he raised the gun and took aim at the X. The mare didn’t flinch. Dad tried to squeeze the trigger, but couldn’t.

  Finally, Ray walked over, took the rifle from Dad’s hands, aimed and fired. The horse dropped to the ground, dead.

  “That’s how you do it,” Ray said.

  Ray Jackin told me he would never forget the sight of my father’s shoulders shaking, tears in his eyes, as he looked down at that horse.

  Barney Barnett, Dad’s driver when he was governor of California, told me another story of my father’s compassion. Dad got a letter from a young soldier in Vietnam. “My wife and I will soon celebrate our first anniversary,” the soldier wrote. “I can’t be there, so could you call her and wish her a happy anniversary for me?”

  Dad had a better idea. He had Barney buy a dozen roses, then they drove to the lady’s home. Dad knocked on the door. When the lady opened the door, the Governor of California presented her with a dozen roses and an anniversary message from her husband. The story never appeared in the newspapers because Ronald Reagan did acts of kindness for people, not for publicity.

  As president, Dad once hosted members of the U.S. Senate Youth Program in the White House Rose Garden. He encouraged the students to tour Washington, D.C. “Have you been to the Lincoln Memorial yet?” he said. “If you stand on one side of the statue and look at Lincoln’s profile, you see his compassion. Stand on the other side and you see the strength of the man. You get a different view of Lincoln’s character, depending on which side you view.”

  Those two qualities—strength and compassion—characterized the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The official biographer of President Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, describes Lincoln this way: “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as a rock and soft as a drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.”5

  Those words also describe my father, Ronald Reagan. Dad was a great student and admirer of Lincoln, and the insight he shared with those young people was the guiding principle of his personal and public life: strength and compassion working together. Under my father’s leadership, America became both stronger and more compassionate. As he restored and rebuilt our long-neglected American military—America’s strength—he also lifted millions out of the pit of dependency and set them on the road to self-reliance.

  Strength and compassion go together. My father exemplified both qualities, and our society needs to rediscover these qualities in order to thrive.

  As president, my father believed that part of his job was to maintain direct contact with the people. Though he could not personally answer the mountain of mail he received, his director of correspondence, Anne Higgins, would bring him a representative selection of letters. He answered many of them with handwritten notes. On more than one occasion, he actually took out his checkbook and sent money to people in need.

  On one occasion, a mother wrote to Dad, telling him how hard it was for her young son to keep up his grades in school. She worried that she would not be able to afford to send him to college. Dad was so touched by her letter that he sent her a check for a hundred dollars so that she could start a college fund for the boy. When the woman received the check, she was thrilled and took it to the bank. The bank manager, however, told her not to cash the check, advising her that it would one day be worth far more as a collector’s item. The woman wrote to Dad and told him she was keeping the check and would not be cashing it. Dad replied, “Deposit the check. I’ll have my accountant send the canceled check for you to keep.”

  My father always told aides and staffers not to publicize his good deeds. He followed the biblical advice, “Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven.”6 Mos
t of his kind acts will never be known, but here’s an example I saw with my own eyes:

  During Dad’s presidency, the Reagan family always had Thanksgiving at the ranch. Thanksgiving was our big family holiday; for Christmas, Dad and Nancy remained at the White House. Why? Because Dad believed his Secret Service agents should be with their families on Christmas Day.

  You may recall the controversy surrounding a trip that Dad and Nancy made to Japan in October 1989, after he left office. A Japanese media company paid Dad $2 million for an eight-day visit that included several speeches, a TV interview, and lunch with Emperor Akihito. Media pundits were aghast that an American president would reap such a rewards after leaving office. (Those same pundits said nothing when the Clintons reaped hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves and their foundation after Bill left office.)

  One aspect of Ronald Reagan’s journey to Japan went largely unreported. In Dad’s chartered 747, he brought 229 spouses and children of American military personnel stationed in Japan. These military dependents traveled round-trip as his guests. Even when Dad was criticized in the media, he never said a word about his good deed for those military families.

  Dad’s kindness defined him even during his long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. I remember one visit with Dad at his home in Bel Air, when the disease was in its late stages. I saw a Secret Service agent standing beside Dad, spoon-feeding him. That wasn’t part of the agent’s job description, but the man didn’t mind. He loved and respected my father.

  As I moved closer, the agent took a step back so that I could greet my father. But as the man stepped back, Dad reached out, took the agent’s arm, and kissed his hand.

  I’ll never forget the look of gratitude in my father’s eyes—even though there were tears in mine.