Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan, by contrast, identified with his mother. Some of this was her doing: she kept him out of the Catholic baptismal font and cultivated those interests of his that matched hers. Dutch repaid her by being the good boy, the polite one who made people laugh, who worshipped with the Disciples, who took up with the minister’s daughter. He was the one Nelle would be proud of. He saw his mother trapped in Dixon, in a dismal marriage to a man who lacked competence and ambition. For her vicarious sake as well as his own future, he determined that he had to get out of Dixon. College was his escape.

  Nelle approved of Eureka College on religious grounds; Reagan was more taken by its football team. A Dixon football hero had gone to greater fame at Eureka; Reagan imagined himself doing likewise. “I had never seen Eureka College but it was my choice,” he explained later. Margaret Cleaver’s decision for Eureka sealed the deal.

  Money was a problem, but Reagan talked his way into a partial scholarship and a job that would cover the cost of his meals; the rest of his expenses would come from a savings account he had built with his pay from lifeguarding.

  REAGAN’S DREAMS OF football glory at Eureka weren’t unreasonable, for the college was tiny, with a mere 250 students, many of them girls. Surely he could stand out among such a small group. But he lacked talent. “Dutch? I put him at end on the fifth string,” his coach, Ralph McKinzie, recalled decades later. There was no lower string than fifth, and the team turned no one away. “The first year I never let him on the field to play a game. Guess he hated me for it. But I had a team to consider. He was nearsighted, you know. Couldn’t see worth a damn. Ended up at the bottom of the heap every time and missed the play because he couldn’t see the man or the ball moving on him.” McKinzie acknowledged Reagan’s resolve. “Gotta say he was a regular at practice. And took his knocks.” But he just wasn’t cut out for the gridiron. “Don’t know why he persisted at football. He had this dream I guess of becoming a big football star. He liked being close to the field even when he wasn’t playing a game. Used to take an old broom from the locker room and pretend it was a microphone and ‘announce’ the game play by play afterwards.” Reagan learned the formations and plays, but to no avail. “Just couldn’t execute what he knew,” McKinzie said.

  He fared better on the stage. He appeared in several campus dramatic productions, taking the lead in some. The drama coach entered her troupe in a one-act competition at Northwestern University, near Chicago. The Eureka team came in third of twelve, and Reagan was recognized individually. “The head of Northwestern’s Drama Department sent for me and asked if I’d ever considered the stage as a career,” Reagan recalled afterward.

  Margaret’s father and mother took Reagan and Margaret to see a touring production of the play Journey’s End, set in wartime France. Reagan later remembered the leading character’s effect on him. “War-weary, young but bitterly old Captain Stanhope carried me into a new world. For two and a half hours I was in that dugout on the Western front—but in some strange way, I was also on stage. More than anything in life I wanted to speak his lines to the young replacement officer who misunderstands and sees callousness in his effort to hide grief. That deep silence, the slow coming to his feet, then the almost whispered, ‘My God, so that’s it! You think I don’t care! You bloody little swine, you think I don’t care—the only one who knew—who really understood.’ ”

  Yet Reagan’s most memorable performance at Eureka came not onstage, and certainly not on the football field, but in student politics. The college was chronically strapped for money, and in his freshman year its president proposed to balance the books by eliminating various courses and laying off the faculty who taught them. The trustees supported the president. The faculty resisted the reductions, but it was the student response that had the larger effect. Seniors and juniors discovered that courses they required for graduation were suddenly unavailable; they complained that the college was reneging on its commitment to them. The students formed a committee to weigh their options; Reagan served as a representative of the freshman class.

  Members of the committee suggested a strike, a student boycott of classes. The idea caught on, but the committee leaders judged that it would carry the greatest weight if put forward by a freshman, a member of the class with the least immediate self-interest in the matter. Someone knew Reagan and suggested him. He accepted the assignment.

  “I’d been told that I should sell the idea so there’d be no doubt of the outcome,” he remembered. He took the advice and prepared an elaborate brief on behalf of the students and against the president and trustees. “I reviewed the history of our patient negotiations with due emphasis on the devious manner in which the trustees had sought to take advantage of us.” Reagan was thrilled by the response. “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine.” Thirty years later he could still taste the victory. “Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet,” he said, riffing on Longfellow’s rendering of Paul Revere’s ride.

  The strike prompted the trustees to reconsider and the president to resign. It made Reagan a presence on campus. He never became a football hero, though he eventually earned more playing time. He was a first-rate swimmer, from his years as a lifeguard, and he represented the college in meets. But swimming was a minor sport and didn’t have the cachet of football. He was active in student government, working his way to election as student body president.

  He joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he enjoyed a fraternal comeuppance. Manual labor had lost its charm for Neil, and he decided to give college a try. He came to Eureka and pledged Reagan’s fraternity, a year behind his younger brother, who was expected to haze him along with the rest of the pledges. Reagan later claimed to have faked the whacks, delivered to the buttocks with a wooden paddle drilled with holes to raise blisters. Neil remembered things differently. “I became the younger brother,” he said. And he was treated like a younger brother, only more harshly. “Anytime I heard the shout ‘Assume the position, Reagan’ and grabbed my ankles, I knew the whack I got from him was going to be worse than the others because he felt he had to; otherwise they’d accuse him of showing partisanship.”

  Reagan loved everything about Eureka except its reason for being: academics. He was a thoroughly indifferent student, unmotivated and insufficiently brilliant to make good grades without effort. He studied economics, the closest thing Eureka offered to a curriculum in business, in hopes it might prove practical after graduation. But he was an optimist at heart, and neither the theory nor the practice of the dismal science engaged him. History was too backward-looking for a young man with an eye on the future. French might be good for the French, but what did an American need with it? Reagan’s attitude toward his studies was purely instrumental: he worked no harder than his extracurriculars required. “My principal academic ambition at Eureka was to maintain the C average I needed to remain eligible,” he confessed afterward.

  English was the rare subject that sometimes inspired him, when he could exercise his storytelling skills. One of his short stories involved what the protagonist called “the A.E.F. suicide club,” for the doomed soldiers of World War I. A doughboy named Edwards reflects on the experience of a younger soldier, Bering. “Edwards was not old himself, but his thirty years had robbed him of some of Bering’s optimism, his idealism and youth. A lump came to his throat as he listened to the boy talk of sacrifice and glory and heroism and he cursed mentally at a world so ordered that once every generation it must be bathed in the blood of youth like this one.” A half century later Reagan would offer public paeans to the sac rifice of men like Bering, but in 1931 he could see little but folly in their efforts. Bering, in Reagan’s s
tory, survives the war yet sustains permanent physical and emotional injuries. He never regains his grounding in life. Reagan’s story ended with Edwards, years later, reading a short piece in the newspaper: “A tramp, David Bering, met his death today beneath the wheels of a Santa Fe freight. Bering, an ex–service man, had been gassed in the war and was bumming his way to the Speedway veterans hospital for treatment. He attempted to board the moving train and lost his footing. He was thrown under the wheels when he fell. Notices have been broadcasted but no relatives or friends have claimed the body. He will be buried in the potters field.”

  2

  AFTER WE MOVED to Dixon, I fell in love with the movies,” Reagan recalled. “I couldn’t count the number of hours I spent in the darkness of our only moviehouse with William S. Hart and Tom Mix galloping over the prairie or having my eyes turned misty by the cinematic perils that befell Mary Pickford and Pearl White.” His mother’s sister came for a visit, and the whole family went to the theater to watch the weekly silent film. “I don’t remember its name, but it featured the adventures of a freckle-faced young boy and I enjoyed it a lot. Afterward, I overheard my aunt talking to my mother about this young star and saying she thought I had the potential to become a child actor. ‘If he was mine,’ she said, ‘I’d take him to Hollywood if I had to walk all the way.’ ”

  Nelle Reagan wasn’t about to walk to Hollywood; she had her hands full holding the family together in Dixon. But her sister’s attitude was widely shared in the years after World War I. Hollywood’s grip on the American imagination was new but more seductive for its novelty. Photographers and inventors had tried to get pictures to move in the late nineteenth century; Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope accomplished the feat, for one viewer at a time, in 1894. By the turn of the century peep shows had become picture shows, and the 1903 Great Train Robbery, a twelve-minute drama set in the West but shot in New Jersey, promised a heady future for the new medium.

  That future unfolded in California. Early movie cameras required daylight to make their recordings, and Southern California’s glorious weather allowed more days of outdoor shooting than almost anywhere else in the country. By 1910, Hollywood, a community west of downtown Los Angeles that had begun life as the brainchild of real estate developers, was attracting some of the budding industry’s best talent. D. W. Griffith shot The Birth of a Nation there; the tendentious depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction that appalled Jack Reagan and other advocates of racial equality riveted large audiences who paid the exorbitant price of $2 to see the three-hour film. By 1920 several motion-picture studios, Hollywood’s answer to Henry Ford’s assembly line, were together churning out hundreds of movies per year.

  In the process they were making stars. The actors in the earliest films hadn’t been credited, but audiences nonetheless came to have favorites. Some studios resisted promoting these favorites, fearing they would demand higher wages. Yet the shrewder executives recognized the potential for establishing brand names, and they signed the crowd-pleasers to long-term contracts. The star system was born.

  It was the star system that drew the attention of Nelle Reagan’s sister and the millions of Americans who dreamed that they or their children would go to Hollywood and acquire fame and wealth. Both attributes were on gaudy display in the movie capital in the 1920s. Mary Pickford, the object of Dutch Reagan’s filmic affections, earned half a million dollars a year before becoming a movie mogul herself as a founding partner—with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks—of the United Artists studio. Pickford and Fairbanks were romantic partners as well as business associates; their romance was a sensation, partly because it began while each was married to someone else but mostly because it seemed a match made in Hollywood heaven. Their lavish wedding provided reams of copy for the rapidly growing movie press; their Beverly Hills estate, Pickfair, was soon the most popular stop on the homes-of-the-stars tours that became a staple of Southern California tourism.

  THE MAGIC OF Hollywood grew more essential to the American psyche when the 1920s crashed to a close with a stock market collapse in the final months of the decade. The bubble in share prices had grown unsustainable, and when it burst, it knocked the wind out of Wall Street. The woes of the financial industry became the agony of America when the country was rudely awakened to the fact that bankers had been playing the market with depositors’ money. Their losses triggered defaults by their banks, leaving depositors without cash or recourse. The federal government might have salvaged the situation by flooding the financial markets with money; in fact the dominant figure on the Federal Reserve Board, Benjamin Strong, had advocated readying just such a response as the stock bubble grew. But Strong died untimely and his successors lacked the nerve to open the spigots, and the money supply shrank by a strangling one-third. Prices plunged, merchants canceled orders, and manufacturers laid off workers in a vicious circle that continued until a quarter of the workforce lacked jobs.

  Reagan had the good luck to be in college during the first two years of the depression but the bad luck to graduate, in June 1932, when conditions were worse than ever. He recalled the Christmas Eve of his senior year; he and Neil were at home when Jack received a special-delivery letter. Jack read the letter and muttered, “Well, it’s a hell of a Christmas present.” He had lost his job. Reagan sent Nelle money during his last semester to help with the grocery bill, and he resolved anew not to wind up like Jack.

  He returned to lifeguarding for his postgraduation summer, but this bought him barely two months. Come autumn, he’d have to compete with the many other unemployed for a permanent job. He knew what he wanted to do; he just couldn’t figure out how to do it. His love for movies had only grown, as had his appetite for the applause that kept his anxieties at bay. He had followed the careers of Tom Mix and Mary Pickford, and he imagined himself on the screen beside them. “By my senior year at Eureka, my secret dream to be an actor was firmly planted,” he remembered. But he kept it secret lest his friends and acquaintances consider him egotistically odd. “To say I wanted to be a movie star would have been as eccentric as saying I wanted to go to the moon,” he explained. “If I had told anyone I was setting out to be a movie star, they’d have carted me off to an institution.”

  To disguise his dream, he charted a path he considered more conventional. Radio was a newer medium than movies, with the first regular broadcasts postdating the war. But it caught on quickly, and soon radio sets—typically large consoles, often in handsome wood cabinets—had become a standard feature in middle-class households. Sports broadcasts were an early staple of programming; for many Americans the age of radio began when the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, aired the 1921 heavyweight boxing championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. Soon the voices of sports announcers were almost as familiar as the faces of Hollywood movie stars.

  Reagan spent his teens listening to radio stations broadcasting from Chicago; their signals covered Dixon and much of the rest of northern Illinois. He supposed that sports radio could be a step on his road to the movies; at least it was in the field of public entertainment. And its announcers enjoyed the fame he sought. So he decided that after his last season as a lifeguard ended, he would try to find a job in radio. He bade farewell to Margaret Cleaver, who herself was departing to take a teaching job in a distant Illinois town, and headed to Chicago.

  He arrived with high hopes. Chicago had lots of stations and, presumably, room for at least one more announcer. Yet several fruitless visits to stations produced nothing. A kindly woman in one of the offices told him why. “This is the big time,” she said. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on inexperience.” He should go out to smaller cities and towns and interview with stations there. “They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance.”

  Reagan returned to Dixon and talked his father into lending him the family car, a worn Oldsmobile, for a small-town tour. Davenport, Iowa
, was just across the Mississippi River from Illinois, seventy-five miles west of Dixon. A series of futile visits to radio stations there made him think the Chicago woman had simply wanted to get rid of him. Eventually, he found himself at station WOC. The program director told him he had arrived too late; the station had had an opening but had filled it just the day before. Reagan’s frustration overcame his usual politeness. He stalked out of the office saying, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “How the hell can you get to be a sports announcer if you can’t even get a job at a radio station?”

  Something about Reagan appealed to the program director, who followed him out into the hall. Peter MacArthur was a blunt-spoken Scotsman with arthritic knees; his two canes clacked on the wooden floor while his brogue demanded, “Hold on, you big bastard!” Reagan stopped. “What was that you said about sports announcing?” MacArthur inquired. Reagan replied that he wanted to be a sports announcer someday. “Do you know anything about football?” MacArthur asked. Reagan said he had played in high school and college. MacArthur offered him an audition. He took Reagan to an empty sound studio and put him in front of a microphone. “I’ll be in another room listening. Describe an imaginary football game to me and make me see it.”

  Reagan hadn’t been expecting this, but he wasn’t going to miss the first opportunity his job search had yielded. He recalled a game Eureka had won in the last seconds. He knew the action and the players’ names, and he launched in. “Here we are in the fourth quarter with Western State University leading Eureka College six to nothing.” He added color: “Long blue shadows are settling over the field and a chill wind is blowing in through the end of the stadium.” Eureka didn’t have a stadium, only bleachers, but Reagan guessed MacArthur wouldn’t know the difference. He proceeded to the decisive final play. In real life Reagan had missed his assigned block in the secondary, but the ballcarrier got through anyway to score the tying touchdown. In Reagan’s retelling, he obliterated the linebacker, creating the crucial opening for the game-tying score. The extra point sealed the victory. Reagan described the delirious fans, recapped the outcome, and closed: “We return you now to our main studio.”