Reagan: The Life (112 page)

Of particular note is the memoir of Nancy Reagan, who exerted a powerful influence on her husband yet one that has often been misunderstood. Nancy Reagan cared little for politics per se; her interest lay almost completely in the fact that the love of her life was the most powerful politician in America. She had no policy agenda as such, aside from her war on drugs; her sole interest was in protecting and promoting her husband. She pursued this interest fiercely and, for the most part, effectively. And afterward she wrote one of the most candid and at times self-critical memoirs in recent American political history. Biographers of her husband are deeply in her debt.

Reagan’s children wrote memoirs too. Those by Michael Reagan, Maureen Reagan, and Ron Reagan are the most revealing of family dynamics in the Reagan household. Patti Davis has written with sensitivity about her father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease during his final decade.

The memoirs of some of Reagan’s foreign counterparts illuminate the
effect the American president had on world affairs. The most important of these are by Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan’s associates left collections of papers at the Reagan Library and elsewhere. The persons closest to Reagan and whose papers were available at the time of the research for this book include James Baker, with papers at the Reagan Library and Princeton University; William Casey, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Michael Deaver, at the Reagan Library; Edwin Meese, at the Reagan Library and the Hoover Institution; Donald Regan, at the Reagan Library and the Library of Congress; George Shultz, at the Reagan Library; and Caspar Weinberger, at the Library of Congress.

Reagan’s associates and contemporaries have in many cases conveyed their impressions of Reagan and his actions in interviews. The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley has recorded and transcribed many such interviews. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has compiled a separate collection of interviews. Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober have gathered and edited scores of interviews to produce
Reagan: The Man and His Presidency
(1998). The present author has made use of all three collections and has conducted numerous interviews of his own.

The secondary literature on Reagan and the Reagan years is large and growing fast. Nearly every author writing on American public life in the last third of the twentieth century deals with Reagan, as do many authors discussing the major events of international relations during this period. Of works dealing with Reagan specifically, several merit particular mention. Lou Cannon covered Reagan as a reporter from the beginning of Reagan’s political career to its close; his
Governor Reagan
and
President Reagan
remain the starting point for any understanding of Reagan’s role in public life. Steven F. Hayward has written at comparable length on Reagan, with a broader focus. Hayward’s two-volume
The Age of Reagan
is as fully history as biography; the first volume, which covers the years 1964 to 1980, sets the stage for the Reagan presidency, the subject of the second volume. Richard Reeves recounts the White House years with a journalist’s eye for detail in
President Reagan
; the book is especially good on the interplay of personalities in the administration. Edmund Morris enjoyed unprecedented access to Reagan as president, attending meetings in the White House and conducting lengthy interviews with the president and his associates. Morris’s
Dutch
disappointed and at times infuriated readers who expected a standard presidential biography rather than the
impressionistic rendering Morris provided. Yet readers willing to invest the energy to sift the fact from the fiction can find illuminating material here. Sean Wilentz places Reagan at the center of
The Age of Reagan
, which assesses the conservative turn in American politics embodied and energized by the fortieth president.

1.
   “TONIGHT”:
New York Times
, Oct. 27, 1964. Similar ads in
Los Angeles Times
and other papers.

2.
   “Anytime you and I question”: Reagan campaign speech, Oct. 27, 1964, Reagan Library.

3.
   “I have never aspired”:
Washington Post
, Nov. 26, 1964;
Los Angeles Times
, Nov. 29, 1964.

1.
   “When I was eleven”: Reagan,
An American Life
(1990), 33.

2.
   “The parades, the torches”: Reagan,
Where’s the Rest of Me?
(1965), 13.

3.
   “Nelle tried so hard”:
American Life
, 34–35.

4.
   “While my father was a cynic”: Ibid., 22–23, 30.

5.
   “The Klan’s the Klan”: Anne Edwards,
Early Reagan
(1987), 53.

6.
   “You’ll like it here”:
American Life
, 30.

7.
   “I was forever the new kid”: Ibid., 23, 34.

8.
   “Summoning my courage”: Ibid., 35.

9.
   “He had a wry, mordant humor”:
Rest of Me
, 9.

10.
   “That prodded me”:
American Life
, 41.

11.
   “ ’Twas the night”: “Hallowe’en,” Nov. 6, 1925, in
Reagan, in His Own Hand
, edited by Kiron F. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (2001), 423–24.

12.
   “Mark had”: “Yale Comes Through,” Nov. 17, 1927, in
Reagan, in His Own Hand
, 424–26.

13.
   “For a teenager”:
American Life
, 41.

14.
   “There’s something”: Ibid., 42–43.

15.
   “I think the realization”: Ibid., 26.

16.
   “The chief business of America”: David Greenberg,
Calvin Coolidge
(2006), 4.

17.
   “ ‘I would have been fine’ ”:
Rest of Me
, 21-22.

18.
   “I had never seen Eureka College”: Ibid., 23.

19.
   “Dutch?”: Edwards,
Early Reagan
, 87–88.

20.
   “The head of Northwestern’s Drama Department”:
Rest of Me
, 44.

21.
   “War-weary, young”: Ibid., 29.

22.
   “I’d been told”: Ibid., 28–29.

23.
   “I became the younger brother”:
Neil Reagan interview, Bancroft Library.

24.
   “Anytime I heard”: Edwards,
Early Reagan
, 101.

25.
   “My principal academic ambition”:
American Life
, 53.

26.
   “the A.E.F. suicide club”: “Killed in Action,” May 7, 1931, in
Reagan, in His Own Hand
, 430–32.

1.
   “After we moved to Dixon”:
American Life
, 58–59.

2.
   “Well, it’s a hell”:
Rest of Me
, 41.

3.
   “By my senior year”:
American Life
, 59.

4.
   “This is the big time”:
Rest of Me
, 46.

5.
   “How the hell”:
American Life
, 64–66.

6.
   “Well, Felix”: H. W. Brands,
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(2008), 259.

7.
   “His strong, gentle, confident voice”:
American Life
, 66.

8.
   “I soon idolized FDR”: Ibid.

9.
   “I was shocked”: Ibid., 68.

10.
   “One summer’s day”: Ibid., 72–73.

1.
   “Max”:
American Life
, 79–81; Reagan to Ron Cochran, May 12, 1980, in
Reagan: A
Life in Letters
, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (2003), 29–31.

2.
   “mortgage lifter”: Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Milner,
Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story
, with Jack Warner Jr. (1998), 81.

3.
   “Who the hell”: Scott Eyman,
The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930
(1997), 70.

4.
   “The making of any animal pictures”: Susan Orlean,
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
(2011), 83.

5.
   “The motion picture presents”: Harry Warner quoted in Neal Gabler,
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
(1988), 196.

6.
   “Where in hell”: Reagan, “The Making of a Movie Star,”
Des Moines Register
, June 13, 1937, in
Reagan, in His Own Hand
, 435–36.

7.
   “Kid, don’t worry”:
American Life
, 86.

8.
   “Some day when the team’s up against it”: Reagan as George Gipp in
Knute Rockne: All American
(1940).

9.
   “Look”:
American Life
, 93–94.

10.
   “He was such a sunny person”: Edmund Morris,
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
(1999), 153–54.

11.
   “When Clark Gable”: Ibid., 154.

12.
   Hollywood gossip and bits of circumstantial evidence: Ibid., 162–63.

1.
   “When do I fight?”: Stephen Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics
(1994), 71–72.

2.
   “There was Harry Warner”: Ibid., 62.

3.
   “If any more stuff”: Ibid., 43.

4.
   accepted Hitler’s assurances: Gabler,
Empire of Their Own
, 338.

5.
   “A lot of Jews”: Ibid.

6.
   “Are we making it”:
Ibid., 340, 343.

7.
   “I started preparing”:
American Life
, 95–96.

1.
   “live in infamy”: Roosevelt address to Congress, Dec. 8, 1941. Unless otherwise noted, public statements by presidents are taken from the Public Papers of the Presidents, hosted by the American Presidency Project,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu
.

2.
   “I didn’t have a burning desire”:
American Life
, 75.

3.
   “any time after that date”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 107.

4.
   “Jack, we’ve got enough pilots”: Jack L. Warner,
My First Hundred Years in Hollywood
, with Dean Jennings (1964), 281–82.

5.
   “If we sent you overseas”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 107.

1.
   “At the end of World War II”:
American Life
, 105.

2.
   “I was well fixed”:
Rest of Me
, 139–41.

3.
   “Set Your Clock at U-235”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 122; Paul Lettow,
Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(2005), 5.

4.
   “I expected great things”:
Rest of Me
, 165.

5.
   “I think your speech”:
American Life
, 106–7.

6.
   “It sounded good to me”:
Rest of Me
, 166–68.

1.
   “I couldn’t do that”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 140.

2.
   “The CSU strike was a phony”:
American Life
, 108.

3.
   “Now!”:
Rest of Me
, 171–74.

4.
   “We wangled a meeting”: Ibid., 148–52.

1.
   “shocking piece of legislation”: Truman radio address, June 20, 1947.

2.
   “We went into that meeting”: House of Representatives, 80th Cong., 1st sess.,
Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor: Jurisdictional Disputes in the Motion-Picture Industry
(1948), 349.

3.
   “I am no longer neutral”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 142.

4.
   “We were scared to death”:
Rest of Me
, 173.

5.
   “Reagan spoke very fast”: Reynold Humphries,
Hollywood Blacklists
(2008), 70.

6.
   “Ronnie Reagan has turned out”: Marc Eliot,
Reagan: The Hollywood Years
(2008), 192.

7.
   “Eddie Arnold and I”:
Rest of Me
, 175.

1.
   “It is estimated”:
Washington Post
, Oct. 19, 1947.

2.
   “Some of the most flagrant”:
Los Angeles Times
, Oct. 19, 1947.

3.
   “Our committee’s job”:
New York Times
, Nov. 8, 1947.

4.
   “The committee is well aware”: House of Representatives, 80th Cong., 1st sess.,
Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities
(1947), 1.

5.
   “Ideological termites”: Ibid., 10–16.

6.
   “I think you should tell”: Ibid., 55, 60, 66.

7.
   “Communism is so completely opposed”: Ibid., 70–72.

8.
   “You really lay it on the line”:
Ibid., 68.

9.
   “At meetings”: Ibid., 165, 168, 170.

10.
   “They are well organized”: Ibid., 205.

11.
   “I think there is communism”: Ibid., 211–12.

12.
   “with a brief interlude”: Ibid., 213–18.

1.
   “I don’t care to read”:
Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities
, 290–95.

2.
   “With no vested right”:
New York Times
, Oct. 26, 1947.

3.
   “Members of the Association”: Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund,
The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960
(1983 ed.), 455.

1.
   “to protect the industry”: Vaughn,
Ronald Reagan in Hollywood
, 153–54.

2.
   He reported having encountered:
San Jose Mercury News
, Aug. 25, 1986. The basis of the
Mercury News
article was a newly released FBI file on Reagan.