Lessons My Father Taught Me

by Michael Reagan

  Dad even talked to Mr. Gorbachev about the “unalienable rights” that are set forth in our Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which encompasses the right to the ownership of property. You see? Dad was always the same man as an actor, governor, president, father, and genial host to his former Cold War adversary. He was always influencing, always teaching, always talking about his great love for America. And even though America sometimes took my father away from his family, Dad never hesitated to make the sacrifice for the country he loved.

  How to Become a Person of Influence

  My father was the most influential man I’ve ever known. It’s humbling to realize that he first influenced the course of my life, then he influenced the course of human history. When I was growing up in his home, I didn’t realize how much he devoted himself to being a man of influence. I was too close to him to see all the ways he was influencing me, influencing my sisters and my brother, and influencing the world around him.

  Influence is something that you understand and appreciate better after you gain life experience, wisdom, and perspective. Over the years that I have been studying my father’s life, I have discovered some of the key principles of his influence. Here are some of the lessons in influence my father taught me:

  Influence is an investment of time. My father invested time in teaching me to shoot and ride a horse. He wasn’t just teaching me how to hit a target or sit in a saddle. He was teaching character. Dad taught me that shooting wasn’t a matter of killing animals for fun, and he taught me to respect the deadly power of a gun. Dad knew that shooting and riding are character-building, confidence-building activities and that an afternoon spent hunting or horseback riding can do more for a young person’s heart than a thousand parental lectures.

  If you want to influence the next generation, you must invest your time. The activity you choose doesn’t have to be shooting or horseback riding. Pick an activity that you love to do and share it with a young person. Invest your time, invest your life. Talk is cheap, but time well spent with young people is an investment that will pay dividends for decades to come.

  To influence others, be direct—and indirect. There are two forms of influence. One form is when you talk, lecture, teach, give speeches, and otherwise communicate a message to others. That’s direct influence, and it’s an important way of influencing our children and the people around us. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, was a master of the art of direct influence.

  But over the years, I have learned to appreciate my father’s gift for indirect influence. He had a great (and underappreciated) gift for teaching and influencing people without letting them know they were being influenced. When Dad and I were out shooting or riding, I thought we were just having fun. And we were having fun—lots of it.

  But looking back, I realize now how much thought Dad put into using those fun times as teaching opportunities. I didn’t realize back then that I was learning responsibility and self-discipline while I was feeding and grooming Rebel. In many ways, his indirect lessons had a much more profound impact on my life than the words he spoke.

  Know your audience. If you want to impact and influence others, you’ve got to know your audience. And sometimes your most important audience isn’t sitting in front of you. Sometimes your real audience is on the other side of the world.

  On March 8, 1983, my father addressed the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. That speech has become famous among conservatives and infamous among liberals because of a little two-word phrase that occurs only once in the entire speech: “evil empire.” In fact, that speech has become known as the “Evil Empire Speech” even though less than one percent of the speech deals with what my father called “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” the Soviet Union.

  Why did a speech that is 99.9 percent about something other than the “evil empire” come to be known as the “Evil Empire Speech”? The original speech, written by speechwriter Tony Dolan, made no reference to the Soviet “evil empire.” My father added those paragraphs to the speech shortly before he delivered it. With those additional sentences, he changed a fairly routine speech into a historic and controversial foreign policy manifesto—and he completely changed the audience of the speech.

  Reaction to the speech was blistering. Presidential historian Henry Steele Commager, in The Washington Post, called it “the worst presidential speech in American history.” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis asked, “What must Soviet leaders think?” The Soviet news agency TASS said the speech proved that President Reagan could only think “in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”6

  What had my father done in that speech? He had simply spoken the obvious, undeniable truth that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. He didn’t care if the truth made the Soviets upset. He was going to say it anyway, boldly and without compromise. The Soviet state had violated every right our founding documents held sacred: freedom of the press, free speech, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom to own property, and the freedom to travel and emigrate. The Soviet state had slaughtered tens of millions of its own citizens, many by starvation. If such a government was not an evil empire, what was it?

  At the time Dad delivered the Evil Empire Speech, Jewish–Russian dissident Natan Sharansky was serving time in a Soviet gulag. One day, a prison guard read a Soviet news account of Dad’s speech to Sharansky. The guard thought that Ronald Reagan’s words would discourage Sharansky. Instead, the news report filled Sharansky with joy. “It was the brightest, most glorious day,” he later recalled, adding, “The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.”7

  Sharansky spread the news to his fellow prisoners, using a secret code that he tapped on the pipes of his cell. He and his fellow prisoners knew that the evil empire could not withstand the white-hot glare of truth. Three years later, in February 1986, Sharansky and many other prisoners were freed as a result of a deal between my father and Mikhail Gorbachev. In May of that year, Sharansky came to the United States and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Sharansky also met with my father at the White House.

  “The first time I met President Reagan,” Sharansky recalled in a 2004 interview, “I told him of the brilliant day when we learned about his Evil Empire speech. . . . When I said that our whole block burst out into a kind of loud celebration, . . . the president, this great tall man, just lit up like a schoolboy. His face lit up and beamed. He jumped out of his seat like a shot and started waving his arms wildly and calling for everyone to come in” and hear Sharansky’s story. Only then did Natan Sharansky realize how my father had been bitterly attacked in the American press because of the Evil Empire Speech. Sharansky concluded, “Our moment of joy was the moment of his own vindication.”8

  When Dad gave that speech, his real audience was on the other side of the world—men without conscience in the Soviet Kremlin and men without hope in the Soviet gulags. My father was always conscious of the wider audience for his speeches.

  He knew that the audience for his “Tear Down This Wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was not the audience in front of him, but the people behind him—the oppressed people of East Berlin; the ruthless Communist oppressors of East Germany; and yes, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. My father let the people of East Germany know that the American president seriously intended to tear down that wall. My father’s example reminds us that the impact of our words may be felt far beyond the walls of our auditorium, our classroom, our church, or our home.

  Dad’s example also reminds us that we should not be too quick to defend ourselves against the accusations of our opponents. All too often, when someone attacks us, we want to find a microphone or get on social media and defend ourselves. Dad didn’t do that. Instead of responding to criti
cism, he shrugged it off.

  For example, when Dad ran for president in 1980, his critics in the media and the Democratic Party called him a “cowboy,” a reckless gunslinger, a man so dangerous and unpredictable that you never knew when he might start a war. CBS television journalist Leslie Stahl recalls how President Jimmy Carter’s attacks actually helped my father’s campaign:

  By the fall of 1980 . . . the only thing holding the Carter candidacy together was whatever fear of Reagan he could drum up. Carter warned that it was too risky to leave the serious business of leadership in the hands of a cowboy actor. Confrontation in the nuclear age, he said, “is not just another shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.” . . .

  His portrayal of Reagan as a “mad bomber” and a racist produced the “meanness issue.” . . . Within a few months Carter’s image had flipped from that of an ineffectual but decent religious man to a vindictive villain.9

  One of the best things my father said in the campaign was what he never said. He never refuted the charge of being a “cowboy”—he embraced it. He had his campaign print up posters in which he wore a cowboy hat and smiled at the camera. The posters read, “America—Reagan Country.” That poster became enormously popular, and helped turn the smears of the Left into a political asset—and a foreign policy triumph.

  Dad knew the leaders of Iran were closely watching the American election. He wanted the Iranian radicals, who were holding more the sixty Americans hostage, to see him as a dangerous and unpredictable “cowboy.” Let the Iranians worry that Reagan was just crazy enough to turn their country into a sea of molten glass. No matter how extreme and ridiculous the accusations of the Democrats, Dad never denied them. He understood his audience. He knew the Iranians were listening—and quaking in their sandals.

  As Dad took the oath of office as president of the United States, what did the Iranians do? They set the hostages free. If Dad had tried to refute the “cowboy” charge, those Americans might have spent the rest of their lives as hostages.

  Dad knew his American audience, his audience in the Kremlin, his audience in the gulags, and his audience in Tehran. He was aware of the impact of his influence, and he wielded his influence with the precision of a surgeon wielding a scalpel.

  Know what you believe and why you believe it. Most political consultants today believe only in the greenback dollar. They play an endless game of musical chairs, working for candidate after candidate, campaign after campaign. It amazes me that so many consultants keep getting hired even though they’ve never won an election.

  When my father ran for president, he had two close aides who believed in him. Their names were Michael Deaver and Lynn Nofziger. They knew my father well and they believed in his message and his values. If my father had dropped out of the campaign, they would not have surfaced with the campaign of George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole. They believed in my father because they knew that Dad’s message didn’t come from a focus group—it came from the core of his being. They trusted my father because he knew what he believed and why he believed it.

  If you want to be a person of influence, you have to know who you are, what you believe, and why you believe it. When my father ran for governor in 1966, his opponents were eager to brand him as an extremist—a tactic that had destroyed Barry Goldwater’s presidential hopes in 1964. The Democrats and their allies in the press repeatedly suggested a sinister link between Ronald Reagan and the far-right John Birch Society.

  My father refused to step into the trap of either aligning himself with the Birchers or renouncing them and their support. His standard reply whenever he was asked about the John Birch society was, “Anyone who chooses to support me has bought my philosophy. I’m not buying theirs.”10 If you know yourself and you know what you believe, your critics and opponents won’t be able to throw you off message. You’ll be able to turn bad news into good news, weaknesses into strengths, and problems into opportunities.

  Use the events of the day as object lessons. I’m not sure why Dad told us about the photographs of Senator Kennedy, but I do know two things: First, he trusted us to keep the matter confidential, and we did. Second, he used that situation as an object lesson to teach us important ethical principles. He used the current event of the election, along with some insider knowledge he had gained, and he taught Maureen and me the importance of separating issues that were public from issues that were personal and private.

  Become a storyteller. Practice the art of storytelling, and become a collector of stories that you can use in your personal interactions and even in public speaking. Dad loved to collect stories. He would write them down on index cards and try them out in his speeches. He kept the best stories, the ones that always got a reaction from the audience—and if a story fell flat, he’d toss the index card into the trash.

  Stories are among the most powerful and persuasive tools you have as a communicator and influencer. Stories rivet the attention. Stories are memorable and make your ideas and lessons unforgettable. Stories are the ideal vehicle for smuggling truth into the minds of your children or your audiences. Most of Dad’s stories had a kernel of truth in them. Sometimes the “moral of the story” was so obvious you couldn’t miss it. Sometimes it was almost subliminal in its subtlety. But most of the stories Dad told had a point to make. He used them as instruments of influence.

  During the 1976 campaign, I did a lot of speaking on Dad’s behalf—and I was terrible. So I asked him, “What’s the best lesson you can teach me about speaking?”

  “Michael,” he said, “it’s pretty simple. Remember that while you may be giving that speech for the fifteenth time that day, it’s the first time your audience has heard it. So deliver it like it’s the first time you’ve said it.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Always start with a story with a great punchline. Here’s a story that always works at political gatherings. There was a cattle rustler in Texas who stole a bunch of cattle. The sheriff assembled a posse to track him. After a few days, they caught up to him. There being no need for a fair trial, they threw a rope over a hanging tree, set the cattle rustler on a horse, and put the noose around his neck. The sheriff said, ‘Before you die, you have five minutes to make your peace with the Lord.’

  “The thief said, ‘I don’t need five minutes.’

  “A politician in the posse raised his hand and said, ‘May I have those five minutes?’”

  I’ve used that story many times, and Dad was right—it never fails, especially in a roomful of politicians.

  “The next story,” Dad said, “works well at religious gatherings. There was a man who wanted to be a preacher. He practiced and practiced his sermon, and on Sunday, he stepped up into the pulpit, looked out over the pews—but there was only one parishioner in the church.

  “The pastor stepped out of the pulpit and said to the man, ‘I’ve been working on this sermon for a long time. Do you want to hear it?’

  “The man said, ‘Pastor, I’m a rancher. When I get up to feed my cows in the morning, if only one cow shows up, I feed it.’

  “So the preacher went back to the pulpit and preached his sermon for the next hour and a half. When he was finished, he said, ‘What did you think of my first sermon?’

  “The rancher said, ‘Pastor, I told you that if only one cow shows up, I feed it. But Pastor, I don’t feed it the whole load.’”

  I’ve used that story many times as well. Take it from the Great Communicator—if you start with a story, you’ll never go wrong. Stories get attention, stories put your audience at ease, and stories can become parables that teach important lessons. To be a person of influence, become a storyteller.

  Look for opportunities to influence the next generation. Dad wrote countless letters to young fans when he was a Hollywood star, and he continued that practice when he was governor of California and president of the United States. He wasn’t thinking about what the public could do for him, but what he could do for his public. The story of the blind children who t
ouched my father’s face is just one example among many of how he was always influencing the next generation—and he preferred to do so without any reporters or photographers around.

  Good people have great influence. If you want to have great influence, be a person who blesses the next generation with good words and a good example. Invest your life in influencing others.

  5

  Make Your Marriage Work

  IN JUNE 1971, when I was twenty-six, I married a young woman of eighteen. I had known her and her family for years. She came from an intact family, and I wanted to be part of that, so I really went into the marriage for the wrong reasons. The wedding took place on Maui. Maureen and Mom helped with the arrangements. Though Dad and Nancy couldn’t come, he sent a letter to me a few days before the wedding, and I got misty-eyed as I read it:

  Dear Mike,

  You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the “unhappy marrieds” and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

  Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three a.m., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears.