One Simple Idea (27 page)

Yet Peale had once been seriously damaged by political embarrassment. More than two decades before he stood with Reagan, Peale was
the subject of controversy and scorn for his political alliances within some of the darkest precincts of right-wing activism.

Contrary to his persona, Peale never stood aloof from partisan politics. Indeed, he had a history of sharp-edged political statements. In 1934, he warned congregants that “a sinister shadow is being thrown upon our liberties,” a thinly veiled reference to the New Deal. In 1952, he supported an archconservative movement to draft General Douglas MacArthur to run for president. In 1956, Peale used his pulpit to criticize Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson for being divorced.

But it was in the fall of 1960 that Peale ignited a storm of controversy. During the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, Peale publicly aligned himself with a group of conservative Protestant ministers who opposed the presidential candidacy of John F. Kennedy on the grounds that Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic, would ultimately prove loyal to the pope. The benignly named Citizens for Religious Freedom said in a statement: “It is inconceivable that a Roman Catholic president would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies …” Conspiracists feared that the young senator was, in effect, a Vatican “Manchurian Candidate.”

In early September, Peale cochaired a Washington meeting of Citizens for Religious Freedom and addressed reporters afterward as its spokesman. While journalists were being handed copies of the Committee’s anti-Catholic position paper, Peale absurdly (and unconvincingly) characterized the meeting as a mere “philosophical” discussion of “the nature and character of the Roman Catholic Church.” (It was a discussion to which no Catholics had been invited.)

An immediate flood of negative coverage led to calls for Peale’s resignation from his pulpit, and several newspapers dropped his syndicated column. In statements that followed, Peale tried to play down his advocacy. He attempted to further dampen his characterization of the
group’s Washington meeting as a gathering to merely discuss “the general subject of religious freedom.” Eventually he claimed to have no idea there was
any
further agenda to the conference that he cochaired—and certainly none pertaining to politics. These positions were clearly contradicted by the group’s earlier statements about the unfitness of a Catholic to serve as president.

In the weeks immediately following the Washington meeting, Peale succeeded in convincing his parishioners that he had simply wandered, Forrest Gump–style, into a situation of which he had no foreknowledge. Speaking in
“who me?”
tones from his Marble Collegiate pulpit, Peale said of his decision to attend the meeting: “I never been too bright, anyhow.” The line elicited sympathetic laughter from the pews. Within Marble Collegiate, the rift had been healed.

But a darker Peale emerged in private. In a 1960 letter to a female supporter, Peale wrote: “I don’t care a bit who of the candidates is chosen except that he be an American who takes orders from no one but the American people.” He went on to ask her how a “dedicated Protestant as yourself could so enthusiastically favor an Irish Catholic for President of our country which was founded by Calvinistic Christians?” Upon Kennedy’s electoral victory, a despondent Peale wrote to friends: “Protestant America got its death blow on November 8th.”

To Peale’s critics, the minister’s attack-and-deny tactics on Kennedy came as no surprise. Detractors saw him as a smiley-faced cipher—a propagator of happiness with no ethical core. Indeed, it must be acknowledged that Peale’s philosophy of positivity and self-worth was incapable of meeting life in all of its difficulties and tragedies. His outlook did not include a theology of suffering. Peale seemed incapable of persuading readers, as his hero Emerson once did, that the individual facing illness, tragedy, and death could find dignity and purpose only by seeing himself as part of the cycles of creation, in which loss plays an inevitable part.

It must also be said, however, that if those intellectuals who rolled their eyes at Peale’s gospel of affirmation had taken the care to read his
books they would have discovered a wealth of serviceable ideas. Peale’s outlook could ford a river—his advice could prevent a marriage from crumbling when an unspeakable criticism, of the kind that can never be rescinded, was uttered in the heat of an argument. Peale’s integration of psychology into church life dramatically lessened the 1950s stigma of seeing a psychiatrist. Indeed, Peale was the best-known clergyman to embrace psychotherapy—the literature from his Religio-Psychiatric Clinic told of the “sacredness of human personality.” And Peale encouraged the faith traditions to stretch and grow in order to stay relevant. Four years after taking the pulpit at Marble Collegiate, he privately wrote a congregant: “As time passes men’s ideas change; their knowledge is enlarged; and before long a creed leaves much to be said and says some things that are no longer tenable.”

Peale possessed spiritual depth—though “the world did not see that depth,” Caliandro recalled. Still, supporters and critics alike harbored questions both about Peale’s theology and, in the wake of the Kennedy debacle, his innermost judgment.

The chief criticism of Peale’s work arose from his principle that self-assurance brings accomplishment. Critiquing this modern urge to self-belief, philosopher George Santayana noted: “Assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.” The philosopher’s observation highlights a contradiction in Peale’s approach—which is that blindly self-confident people, rather than accurately assessing their strengths and achieving their ends, are often dangerously delusive.

Yet the part of the equation that Santayana and other critics missed is that the pursuit of self-belief
can itself become a form of self-inquiry
. Peale didn’t promulgate a conceited idealism that deterred self-questioning. What Peale understood—and this is a key facet of the positive-thinking approach that detractors overlooked—is that only by a coordinated effort
of thought could an individual begin to grasp or question what he actually wants from life and who he really is.

Consider how rare it is for us to make a meaningful, sustained observation of our likes and dislikes. Of course, we routinely complain, grasp, go along, fight—but we rarely ask ourselves, in a protracted and serious way:
What would create purpose or contentment for me? What would I really like to be doing right now—and in whose company?
We seldom ask, with deadly seriousness, who we want as intimates; where we physically and morally wish to dwell; and what we want to
do
with ourselves.

Once we persistently ask these things, we may be forced to acknowledge unclaimed desires, including those that we may not like discovering. Someone who has outwardly shrugged at money may find that such attainments really matter to him. Or the realization of a cherished desire may fail to satisfy, forcing someone who yearned for a certain status or recognition to take a second look at things. Whatever happens, the scrutinizing of our assumptions always places us before a deepened question.

The individual who possesses authentic and healthful self-belief is, in actuality, easily distinguishable from the person who harbors the fatal self-delusion noted by Santayana. Self-delusiveness always exposes itself in one telltale character trait: that of the person
who places chronic demands on others
. The seemingly self-assured man who persistently makes claims on the energies and attention of other people is not expressing self-sufficiency but, rather, fear and defensiveness. His false sense of security constantly requires propping up.
The deluded self-striver is characterized by his inability to leave other people alone
.

Seen in proper perspective, Peale’s outlook demanded a personal inventory: a reckoning of one’s abilities and wishes, a responsibility for choosing one’s associates, and a clear self-sense of how one relates to others—none of which is guaranteed to increase one’s portion but
will
increase awareness. And the individual, armed with that awareness, must possess a willingness to leap a chasm when life demands. That, finally, is what Peale’s work pushes a mature reader toward.

As a seeker, Peale was engaged in all facets of mental life. He exchanged admiring letters with Duke University psychical researcher J.B. Rhine. He cultivated dialogue with other religious leaders. He regularly referred Jewish advice-seekers to Tehilla Lichtenstein, the pioneering female leader of the Jewish Science movement. Peale considered her a friend. The board of his Religio-Psychiatric Clinic was religiously diverse. All of this, finally, turns us back on the question: Where did Peale’s anti-Catholic bigotry come from? Friends and colleagues were mystified. Reverend Caliandro, a minister of depth and sensitivity who knew Peale for decades, could only shake his head in wonder.

One possibility is that Peale suffered from a form of prejudice that remains common today: When a member of a minority group is a friend or coworker, all is well; but when that same figure is a president or authority figure, fears of a changing social order begin to rise; code words get used. For Peale, it was fine, even desirable, to break bread with Catholics and Jews; but he simply couldn’t picture an America, in the form of a Kennedy presidency, that looked different from the one he grew up in.

Seen from this perspective, Peale, as a man, was less than his work. Yet there is probably not an ethical philosopher, political reformer, or religious figure of whom this cannot be said.

In the decades following the Kennedy debacle, Peale was more circumspect about his public affiliations. “You couldn’t get me near a politician now,” he said in 1982. Peale’s caution extended not only to politics but also to his connections with the New Thought world. He wanted no controversial associations, and he cultivated his latter-day image for the broadest possible appeal. Referring to the New Thought community in an interview in 1989, four years before his death, Peale said: “They think I am one of them, but I am not.” He added as an afterthought: “Actually I am not opposed to it.”

The nation’s most fateful evangelizer of the positive in the latter half of the twentieth century was neither a mystic nor a minister. Like many of the shapers of positive thinking, he had a modest formal education, possessed a self-devised philosophy of life, and showed a willingness to experiment with a wide range of religious ideas. Friends and adversaries alike experienced a sense of wonder that he became the twentieth century’s most influential president next to Franklin Roosevelt. This was Ronald Reagan.

Every historical writer who has approached the life of Reagan experiences the same sense of perplexity over who the man really was. Pulitzer-winning biographer Edmund Morris was so confounded by his subject that in his epic biography,
Dutch
, the writer made himself a character, finding it more useful to chart Reagan’s influence on those around him than to part the curtain on the man himself. (Morris wondered if there even was a man behind the curtain.) Many biographers were left to plumb Reagan’s movies, his penchant for homegrown wisdom, and his bevy of moralistic stories for keys to the man’s outer actions—such as his stare-down of the Soviet Union (followed by his role-reversal as a peacemaker); his chimerical (though to the Soviets alarming) pursuit of “Star Wars”; and his bread-and-butter conservatism (clung to even though his family was rescued by the New Deal). In every respect, Reagan was a pairing of opposites.

The skeleton key to Reagan’s career is not found in his films, his flights of idealism, or the pivoting of his internal moral compass, though each of these things is important. To be finally understood, Reagan must be seen as a product of the positive-thinking movement. Indeed, it was Reagan’s song of the positive—as articulated in thousands of speeches as a conservative activist, California governor, and U.S. president—that, more than any other factor, made the principle of brighter tomorrows and limitless possibilities into the idealized creed of America.

The code in which Reagan spoke is the key to the inner man—a fact sensed by President Gerald Ford, who called Reagan “one of the few
political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations.” (Reagan, it should be noted, had produced his own political speeches starting in the 1950s, and, as president, crafted the basic boilerplate and stories for many of his talks.)

In a 2010 reassessment of Reagan,
Newsweek
erroneously called him a born-again Christian. For all the admiration that born-again Christians felt for Reagan, and he for them, he cannot be described in that way. Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s proclivity for astrology is already well known, but it is just one branch from a larger tree. One of the most overlooked facets of Reagan’s career, and an aspect of his life with which few admirers have come to terms, is the strain of avant-garde thought and mysticism that touched him as a young man, and Reagan’s enduring taste for the New Age spirituality of his Hollywood years.

Reagan didn’t experience Hollywood as an interlude in his life. He spent nearly three decades of his adulthood there; it was, in all its facets, an integral part of him. He complained to biographer Lou Cannon about “this
New York Times
kind of business of referring to me as a B-picture actor.” In a late-night discussion, after speaking with Cannon about his string of substantial film roles, Reagan concluded somewhat sheepishly, “I’m proud of having been an actor.” He was similarly proud of being part of that community’s spiritual and social customs.

One of his closest friends in California was astrologer Carroll Righter, who in 1969 became the first and only astrologer to appear on the cover of
Time
magazine. In Reagan’s best-known movie,
Kings Row
from 1942, he costarred and became friendly with actress Eden Gray, who went on to write some of the twentieth century’s most popular guides to Tarot cards. (Gray recalled Reagan gamely reading aloud from his horoscope and those of other actors before shoots.) And when Reagan began his political rise in the 1950s, his early speeches, and those he later delivered as president, featured themes and phrases that can be traced to the writings of a Hollywood-based occult philosopher, Manly P. Hall.