Lessons My Father Taught Me

by Michael Reagan

  Boz said, “I’ve never heard anybody put it that way.”

  I think we are often so eager to comfort the child who has been abused that we are too quick to say, “Everything is the molester’s fault. Nothing is your fault.” And that’s simply not true. The fact that I was molested doesn’t excuse the sins I committed against Mom and Dad and others.

  I think it is actually a healing and empowering experience for an abuse victim to say, “I am responsible for my own actions. Just because I’ve been hurt doesn’t mean I have to hurt others. Just because I was exploited doesn’t mean I have to hate others. The cycle of abuse ends with me. I am personally responsible for my own actions.”

  Forgiveness does not equal reconciliation. Forgiving doesn’t mean that we condone what other people do. It doesn’t mean that there are no consequences for the other person. And it doesn’t mean we have to reconcile with, or become friends with, the person who wronged us. It just means we give up the right to retaliate.

  Sometimes people are so troubled or mentally ill or obnoxious or just plain evil that it is impossible for us to be friends with them. But we can still forgive them. We can keep them at a distance so they won’t hurt us again, but we can give up our right to hate them and hold a grudge against them.

  My father wanted a chance to tell the man who shot him that he forgave him, face-to-face. But the young man’s doctors said it would not be in his best interests. So it’s not always best to say to a person, “I forgive you.” But it’s always possible to make the choice to forgive that person within your own heart.

  If you can express forgiveness to the other person, fine. If you can’t, that doesn’t take anything away from the forgiveness that you have experienced inside.

  Forgive yourself. And let others forgive you. If you’re holding a secret you think no one could ever forgive, go to someone—a pastor, a priest, a counselor—and let that secret go. Forgiving yourself may be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. I know it wasn’t easy for my father to forgive himself for something that happened during his first term as president.

  It took place at dawn on Sunday, October 23, 1983. A truck loaded with the equivalent of 21,000 pounds of TNT, driven by a suicide bomber, plowed into a U.S. Marine compound outside of Beirut, Lebanon. The bomb detonated, producing the largest nonnuclear blast since World War II. The explosion lifted the building off its foundation and collapsed it to a pile of smoking rubble. The attack killed 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. servicemen. It was the heaviest one-day death toll suffered by the Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima. My father called it the saddest day of his presidency, and perhaps of his life. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as he and Nancy passed by the rows of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base.

  My father had sent those Marines, sailors, and soldiers to Beirut, and they had died there. And I know that one of the hardest things my father ever had to do was to forgive himself for those 241 deaths. I think many of us find it much easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves. I know that Dad internalized the blame for that loss of life.

  That’s why, from that point on, my father was much more forceful in dealing with the Gaddafis and Gorbachevs of the world. He never wanted to see such wholesale slaughter on his watch. It wasn’t in my father’s makeup to avoid responsibility. If anything, he tended to accept more blame than he deserved. But I believe he ultimately did forgive himself for sending those servicemen to Beirut—and that’s why he was able to move forward.

  We all have regrets, but we can’t change the past. We have to learn the lessons of the past, seek God’s forgiveness, and move on. That’s the example my father set. That’s the lesson he left for me—and for all of us.

  Dad’s example played a big role in my life. I saw that he was able to forgive himself, and from his example, I learned to forgive myself for being molested, and for all my other sins and regrets.

  The next time you struggle to forgive someone who has hurt you, remember my father, lying on that gurney, with a bullet lodged next to his heart. His first impulse was forgiveness.

  So forgive and be forgiven. Set yourself free and live.

  10

  Never Underestimate the Power of One

  TODAY, THE SOVIET UNION is on the ash heap of history. But on Inauguration Day 1981, it looked as if the Soviets were on the rise, and America was headed for the ash heap.

  The United States was in a full retreat, while the Soviets were on the march. Soviet power was projected around the globe: Cuba, Nicaragua, Asia, the Middle East, Iraq, Ethiopia, Angola, North and South Yemen, and Afghanistan. For years, America had stood by, impotently wringing its hands.

  Then came Reagan.

  It took a man of rare vision to believe that we could “begin the world over again” (as Thomas Paine once put it). It took a man of rare conviction to decide that the time had come to end the stalemate between the superpowers and to liberate half of the globe from oppression.

  Upon his inauguration in 1981, Ronald Reagan made it his top priority to collapse the Soviet Empire. He gave his “evil empire” speech—and his critics went ballistic. He worked with his allies, including Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, to break the Soviet stranglehold on Eastern Europe. He used overt and covert means to bankrupt the Soviet economy. And in 1987, in defiance of all his advisers, he went to the Brandenburg Gate and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

  The pundits declared that Reagan was asking the impossible. Today, a slab of the Berlin wall, decorated with butterflies and flowers, is proudly displayed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

  I firmly believe—and history shows—that if my father, Ronald Reagan, had never been born, the Soviet Union would still be alive and well today. In fact, when you realize that America in the late 1970s was in steep decline, militarily and economically, it seems likely that, if not for Ronald Reagan, the Soviets might well have won the Cold War, and America would be on the ash heap.

  Can one person make such a profound difference in history?

  Absolutely. I know one person can. Because I know the person who did.

  One Man Alone against Communism

  For Dad, the Cold War was not an abstract concept. It was his own personal battle, and he was on the front lines. His enemy was Communism, and the enemy repeatedly tried to destroy him.

  Dad’s battle began almost soon as World War II ended in the summer of 1945. At that time, the Reagan family—Dad, my mother Jane Wyman, my sister Maureen, and I—lived in Beverly Hills, and Dad had just signed a long-term million dollar contract with Warner Bros. That contract enabled him to achieve his dream of owning a ranch. Life was good, and the future seemed rosy.

  But on Friday, October 5, 1945, something happened that upset the apple cart of Dad’s life. That was the day “the Battle of Hollywood” erupted on the street in front of the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. The “battle” was actually a riot between three hundred strikers from the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) and the hundreds of nonstriking studio employees who were trying to get to work. The CSU was headed by union organizer Herbert “Herb” Sorrell, an avowed Communist who had organized the cartoonists’ strike that nearly shut down the Walt Disney Studio in 1941. The strikers overturned cars and attacked the nonstriking employees with chains, hammers, and metal pipes, injuring more than forty people.

  In his autobiography, Dad recalled the scene: “The gates of the studios soon became a bloody battleground. . . . Homes and cars were bombed and many people were seriously injured on the picket lines; workers trying to drive into a studio would be surrounded by pickets who’d pull open their car door or roll down a window and yank the worker’s arm until they broke it, then say, ‘Go on, go to work, see how much you get done today.’”1

  The Battle of Hollywood raged for weeks. Herb Sorrell’s thugs blocked the Warner Brothers main entrance, so studio head Jack Warner sneaked actors and production crew into the studio via th
e storm drain which led to the Los Angeles River. While Dad’s colleagues sneaked in via the storm drain, he and some other hearty souls insisted on taking the studio bus straight through the main gate. Though the studio’s security chief told everyone to lie flat on the floor, Dad insisted on sitting upright next to the window—making himself a visible target as the bus ran the gantlet of bottle-throwing strikers.

  The Communist-inspired violence in front of the Warner Brothers studio continued throughout 1946. Dad, Katharine Hepburn, and Gene Kelly represented the Screen Actors Guild in a series of marathon meetings with Herb Sorrell and other CSU officials. They met on a near-daily basis, week after week, seeking an end to the strike—and every time they seemed close to an agreement, Sorrell would come in with new demands. When the CSU refused to accept anything but capitulation, Dad pulled the plug on the talks.

  Soon after Dad broke off negotiations with Sorrell, he began receiving anonymous threats. He was shooting a motion picture, Don Siegel’s production of Night unto Night with Viveca Lindfors, at a beach house near Malibu. During a break in shooting, a man from the service station on the highway said there was a phone call for Ronald Reagan. Dad went to the station and took the call. The anonymous caller warned him to meet the union demands or “your face will never be in pictures again.” Dad later learned that union thugs planned to throw acid in his face.

  Dad told Siegel about the threat, and Siegel shut down the set for the day. Hours later, the police gave my father a .32 Smith & Wesson and shoulder holster, and he wore it for protection for the next seven months. At night, he kept the gun on his nightstand. My mother would sometimes wake up to find Dad sitting up in bed, gun in hand, listening for noises outside the window. When Dad had to be away, he would hire private bodyguards to protect his family (I was eighteen months old at the time, and Maureen was five).

  In the end, Dad and the Screen Actors Guild defeated the union. The strike collapsed in February 1947. Because of Dad’s dedicated work on behalf of SAG, Gene Kelly nominated him as president of the union. Dad was elected to his first term in March 1947. That was Dad’s first experience fighting Communism—and it took real physical courage to stand firm against the threats. That experience prepared him well to take on the global Communist threat in the 1980s—and win again.

  It was a costly victory. Dad’s long hours spent working on negotiations and union issues, along with the threatening calls and the gun on the nightstand—all of this took its toll on my mother. When baby Christine died and Dad was in the hospital, that was the final straw. Mom filed for divorce soon after that.

  The Soviet Communists tried to take over Hollywood and threatened Dad’s life, along with his family and his livelihood—and their threats prompted him to action. The Communists made a big mistake when they took on Ronald Reagan. Decades later, he was still standing tall, and Soviet Communism lay in ruins.

  Dad’s anti-Communist activism continued into the 1950s and beyond. He lent his name and energies to such groups as the Crusade for Freedom, founded by General Lucius Clay, and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. In the fall of 1956, after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution, killing thousands of Hungarian patriots, Dad closed one of his General Electric Theater telecasts with a call for donations to help Hungarian refugees.

  My father’s primary motivation for becoming president was so that he could fight and defeat Soviet Communism. In January 1977, he met with Richard V. Allen. They had a long talk about foreign policy, especially the failure of détente during the Nixon–Ford era. At one point, Dad made a statement that epitomized his no-nonsense approach: “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple and some would say simplistic. It is this: we win and they lose. What do you think of that?”

  Allen was so impressed by my father’s confidence and commitment to winning the Cold War that he was one of the first to sign on as an aide to Dad’s 1980 presidential campaign. Allen later became Dad’s first National Security Advisor.

  Only one man on the political scene in the era of détente dared to say, “We win and they lose.” All the experts wanted to get along with the Soviets. Dad wasn’t interested in getting along with the evil empire. He wanted to become president so he could defeat the evil empire. He had the faith and confidence to believe that one person could make a big difference in the world.

  Fear of Flying

  If you visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, there is one exhibit that is guaranteed to knock your socks off—Air Force One, the customized Boeing 707 that served every president from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Dad logged more than 675,000 air miles aboard that plane—more than any other president before or since. He last flew on that plane on January 20, 1989—the day he and Nancy returned to California to resume private life.

  Now I’ll let you in on a little secret: Dad was afraid of flying.

  I’m absolutely serious. Fact is, he was so fearful of flying airplanes that he nearly passed up a career in politics. It may well be that one of the real unsung heroes of the Reagan era was the man who cured Dad of his aerophobia—his brother, Neil “Moon” Reagan.

  Dad’s fear of flying is all the more ironic because, in every other way, he was the most courageous man I’ve ever known. It took courage and confidence to save seventy-seven lives in the Rock River in Illinois. It took courage for him to stand strong against the threats against his life during the Battle of Hollywood. Why, then, was he afraid of flying?

  In 1937, while working as a radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs, Dad flew to Catalina Island to cover the Cubs spring training camp. It was an exceptionally choppy flight—a flight so harrowing he thought he wouldn’t survive. (During this visit to Southern California, Dad also made a screen test with Warner Bros., which launched his Hollywood career.)

  Dad was required to fly when he was with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps (his nearsightedness prevented him from being shipped overseas). As soon as the war ended, however, he vowed never to fly again. Dad told me the reason he made that vow: “God only gives you so many air miles. I believed I used all of mine during the Second World War.”

  In the late 1950s, while hosting General Electric Theater, he traveled ten weeks out of the year, giving a dozen or more speeches per day—but he never traveled by air. He went entirely by train or car.

  After my father delivered a highly acclaimed speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964, Republican power brokers urged him to run for governor of California. It was an appealing invitation, but there was one problem: his fear of flying. How could he campaign in such a large state by train and car? How would he carry out his duties without flying?

  This is where Dad’s brother Neil comes in. John Neil Reagan was a senior vice president of the advertising firm McCann Erickson. Neil was also a senior producer for the CBS television network. Many of the wealthy donors and kingmakers who supported Dad’s political career—his “kitchen cabinet”—were clients of McCann Erickson, introduced to Dad by Neil.

  “Moon” and “Dutch” were always very close as brothers. Dad had helped put Neil through college, so Neil felt he owed his younger brother a debt. From his office at McCann Erickson, Neil was able to help Dad in many important ways.

  One day in 1965, Dad spoke at an event in San Francisco. That evening, Neil phoned Dad in his hotel room and said, “Ron, you want to be governor of California, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes I do.”

  “If you really mean that, then be at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles tomorrow morning at nine. I’ll introduce you to the people who will fund your campaign.”

  “But Moon, in order to get there by nine, I’ll have to fly.”

  “Yes, you will. Good-bye.” Neil ended the call not knowing if his brother would show up.

  At nine the next morning, Dad arrived at Hillcrest Country Club, fresh from his first airplane ride in twenty years. Soon Dad was electioneering around California in an aging DC-
3. He bounced and white-knuckled his way right into the governor’s mansion.

  The Untapped Greatness within Each of Us

  My father never saw himself as a politician. He was an average citizen who saw that something was very wrong with his government, very wrong with the world—and he stepped forward to help set it right. He was just one man—but he believed in the power of one.

  The founding fathers envisioned a government consisting of citizen legislators and citizen leaders—not professional politicians. The political class that rules America today was never part of the original plan for America. Instead, the founders envisioned a nation in which grassroots Americans served a term or two in Congress or the White House, then returned home to their farms, shops, and offices to live under the laws they had created.

  My father once remarked as governor of California, “I’m just a citizen temporarily in public service.” And during his first presidential race in 1976, he said, “I’m not a politician by profession. I am a citizen who decided I had to be personally involved in order to stand up for my own values and beliefs.” He saw a job that needed doing, and he got it done—then he went back home and picked up the life he had temporarily set aside when he first ran for governor—the life of Ronald Reagan, citizen.

  He was just one person who believed in the power of one. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned by studying my father’s example:

  Do the thing that scares you. There is untapped greatness within each of us. The only thing holding us back is our fear. For my father, the obstacle was fear of flying. For you, it might be a very different fear. But my father would want you to know that one person can accomplish amazing things—if that person has the courage to try. You’ll never know what you can achieve until you stop listening to your fears and start following your courage.