At the end of a busy and productive first day in office, Dad remarked, “It’s been a very wonderful day. I guess I can go back to California—can’t I?”
Joking aside, Dad enjoyed the presidency as few presidents have, before or since. The job suited him, and he dignified and elevated the office of president more than anyone since Lincoln. From the historic Resolute desk in the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan changed the world. He faithfully executed the office of president of the United States. He preserved, protected, and defended the Constitution. And when my father handed the presidency over to his successor, the office was in much better condition than when he’d received it.
He used his defeat and failure in 1976 as a launching pad for his dreams of a better world—a world of economic opportunity for all, a world without the glowering presence of the Soviet “evil empire,” a world in which America shone brightly like a city on a hill. My father didn’t believe in small dreams.
During the eight years of his leadership, America recovered from the national trauma of Vietnam and Watergate, the disastrous Ford–Carter recession, and the humiliating Iranian hostage crisis. As America recovered, the American people learned that they could dream heroic dreams once more. We learned that, both as individuals and as a nation, we could turn past defeats into future successes.
It’s time we relearned that lesson all over again. It’s time to dream heroic dreams once more.
Willing to Do Whatever It Took
Dad almost never talked about failure. It was not a subject he liked to dwell on, He often talked about success—not his own successes, but what it takes to be successful in life. He taught me the importance of hard work, of doing my work well, of applying myself to my studies and to sports and to work, of setting goals and staying focused on those goals, and of persevering through obstacles and opposition.
So to learn how Dad responded to failure, I couldn’t draw much from his words—but I learned a lot from studying his example.
I know it was hard for my father to talk about emotions, especially his feelings about failure. His father, Jack Reagan, was an alcoholic who would occasionally lose his job because of his drinking. Jack was not a mean drunk, but he often caused embarrassment to his devoutly Christian wife, Nelle, and his boys, Ronald and Neil. Sometimes Jack would simply leave the family for days, and Nelle would explain to the boys that their dad had a “sickness,” and they should remember what a good man he was when he was sober.
The children of alcoholics tend to respond to their parents’ example in one of two ways: they either adopt their parents’ failings and habits, becoming alcoholics themselves, or they go to the opposite extreme. Though Dad admired many of his father’s qualities, he chose to become the opposite of his father when it came to drinking. Throughout his life, Dad avoided alcohol except for the occasional glass of wine—or sometimes, after working hard at the ranch, a cold Budweiser with his ranch foreman.
My father had an experience when he was just eleven years old that had a deep and lasting impact on him. One winter night, he was returning home from the YMCA. Nelle, who worked part time as a seamstress, was away from home. As Dad approached the house, he found his father, Jack, lying among the snow drifts on the porch, reeking of whiskey. The young Ronald Reagan knew that the whole neighborhood could see his father passed out on the porch. So he opened the front door and dragged his father inside.
Dad learned at an early age to hide the shame of his father’s failures. And if Dad suffered any failures of his own, he didn’t talk about them. Failure just wasn’t in his vocabulary. When I was a boy, he never let me see him in a moment of weakness. He never seemed to lack confidence and optimism, even during times in which (as I later learned) he was dealing with major crises in his career.
In the early 1950s, Dad’s film career foundered. So Dad took a job emceeing a comedy show at The Last Frontier in Las Vegas. A Vegas night club was often the last stop in an entertainer’s fading career—but Dad was willing to do anything to provide for his family.
Audiences loved him and the gig paid well. But when the night club offered him a four-week extension, Dad declined. Better screen roles were trickling in, including scripts for Cattle Queen of Montana and Hellcats of the Navy. Dad was eager to get back in front of the camera.
I remember some advice Dad gave me during one of our rides to the ranch. He said, “If you’re an out-of-work actor in Oshkosh, maybe you should move.” In other words, do whatever it takes and go wherever the jobs are in order to make a living.
Dad’s advice kept me focused and motivated when I got into talk radio. The only station that offered me my own show was in San Diego, more than 120 miles from my home. So I made that long commute every weekday to provide for my wife and two children. One of the most important lessons my father taught me was to go anywhere, do anything—just be the breadwinner.
A few months after turning down the extension in Vegas, Dad won a part that was sought by such top-drawer actors as Walter Pidgeon and Kirk Douglas—hosting television’s General Electric Theater on CBS. In show business and in politics, timing is everything. GE Theater would ultimately steer him into the realm of politics.
After a time of struggle and failure, Dad’s time was coming.
Signposts to Success
My father always made the best of bad situations. That was the narrative of his life. When his motion picture career began to fade, he found television. When his television career began to fade, he found politics. Again and again, he used failure as a launching pad for his next big success. What seemed like a fading career in one field always opened up new worlds to conquer.
Dad began hosting General Electric Theater in 1954. Under his contract with GE, he toured the country by train, visiting GE plants and meeting workers while giving hundreds of speeches to business and civic groups. GE never told him what to say—or what not to say. General Electric Theater aired Sunday nights at nine, and always ranked in the top ten. So it came as a shock when, one day in 1962, Dad called the family together and told us the show was canceled and he had been fired by GE.
Why would CBS cancel a successful show? Answer: CBS didn’t. General Electric pulled the plug. While GE was negotiating government contracts, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, informed GE that, in order to do business with the government, the company needed to cancel General Electric Theater and fire the host, Ronald Reagan. The Kennedy administration had been monitoring Dad’s speeches and didn’t like what he was saying. So the show was canceled and my father was out of a job.
All too often in America today, people say, “I won’t take that job—it’s beneath me.” My father never saw any job as beneath him. What some people would call a “dead-end job,” he saw as a stepping stone. A job other people would consider embarrassing, he saw as a doorway to a new opportunity. Being the opening act at The Last Frontier was not his dream job—but it provided a paycheck until General Electric came along. Losing his job with GE was a huge disappointment—but it opened up new possibilities, including his run for governor of California four years later. My father always used the setbacks in his life as bridges to the next plateau.
One memory from my father’s boyhood had a huge impact on his view of work. I remember Dad telling the story—and the somber look in his eyes as he told it. One Christmas Eve during the Great Depression, when Dad’s mother Nelle worked as a seamstress and his father Jack was a traveling shoe salesman, a letter arrived at their apartment. Jack was happy when he saw that the letter came from his employer, the shoe company. “I’ll bet this is my Christmas bonus,” he said.
Jack opened the letter, began reading and then swore. “They laid me off.”
It took weeks for Jack to find another job—and his new job was in a town 200 miles away. But Jack did what he had to for the sake of his family. The lesson of that bleak Christmas stayed with my father for life. It was a lesson he shared with me, and I often thought of the Christmas letter story during
my own tough times. A good provider does whatever it takes to care for his family, even if he has to reinvent himself, take a “lesser” job, or move 200 miles away.
I don’t remember Dad ever saying to me, “Michael, notice how I keep reinventing myself. Notice how I keep turning old defeats into new successes.” But I listened to his stories and I watched his life. I absorbed the lessons of his failures and triumphs. The way he lived his life spoke volumes to me, and I watched him reinvent himself again and again.
From Dad, I learned that I didn’t have to be locked into a single career for life. I could go from the trucking dock to a job at Matrix Science Corporation, a company that produced components for the space shuttle. I could be a boat racer one week and a boat salesman the next. I could be an after-dinner speaker one week and a radio talk show host the next. I recreated and reinvented myself many times to take care of my family and keep my career moving forward.
Here are some of the lessons I have learned from my father’s example:
Failure is a great teacher. Failure teaches us unforgettable lessons that lead to success—if we are willing to be taught. Dad was always willing to learn the lessons of failure.
The 1976 primary battle between President Ford and Governor Reagan was brutal. Dad lost the first six contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, and Illinois. Next stop: North Carolina. Contributions were drying up and the campaign was $2 million in debt. The campaign plane sat on the tarmac—there was no money for fuel. If Dad lost in North Carolina, he’d have to quit the race.
At that point, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms stepped in and saved Dad’s political career. Helms’ endorsement and grassroots organization handed Dad an upset victory in North Carolina—Dad’s first win of the 1976 primaries. From there, he went on to big wins in Texas, Georgia, California, and other major states.
As the Republican convention neared, Dad saw that President Ford was having success with his “Rose Garden strategy”—swaying uncommitted delegates by inviting them to the White House. Following the advice of consultants, Dad tried to counter Ford’s strategy with a surprise move. Hoping to win over moderate Republicans by “balancing the ticket,” Dad named moderate Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate.
Dad’s decision didn’t sit well with the Senator from North Carolina. Helms launched a “draft Buckley” campaign to nominate James L. Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley), to derail Dad’s campaign. Though Helms would become one of Dad’s closest political allies in 1980, he road-blocked Dad’s quest for the nomination in 1976.
My father learned from his mistake and returned to California, where he continued to speak and write and hone his message about the issues he believed in. He vowed never to water down his conservative credentials with a “ticket-balancing” move before the convention. From then on, he preached a political philosophy of “bold colors,” not “pale pastels.”
He knew his time would come again. When it came, he was ready.
Learn to look at failure from a different perspective. If you have a tendency to be down on yourself when things go wrong, find a more positive perspective on the experience. Instead of saying, “I screwed up again,” say, “I learned a valuable lesson.” Both statements may be perfectly accurate appraisals of the situation, but one reinforces defeat, while the other looks forward to success.
Dad was a born optimist. He didn’t waste time lamenting his loss in 1976. As soon as he knew that his quest for the nomination was over, he began looking forward to new challenges.
When Dad lost the nomination in 1976, Maureen and I hoped Gerald Ford would ask Dad to be his running mate. Because of Dad’s age, we didn’t think he’d get another chance to run for national office. So it was a crushing blow to our hopes when Mr. Ford didn’t even ask Dad to consider joining the ticket—crushing to Maureen and me, but not to our father.
Dad’s first thought after losing the nomination was not a comeback in 1980, but, “How do I pay my bills today?” As it turned out, the answer was to go right back where he started, behind a radio microphone. He began recording weekly syndicated radio commentaries immediately after losing the nomination. Those commentaries not only helped pay his bills, but they also built his reputation as an opinion leader. He also formed a political action committee, headed by Lynn Nofziger, which enabled him to support conservative candidates at every level. Those candidates later supported Dad when he ran again in 1980.
Dad didn’t fail at much—but when he did, he failed forward. He didn’t stay down, he bounced back—and the bounce came from his optimism. For some, like my father, optimism seems to come naturally. But even if you’re not a natural-born optimist, you can acquire optimism as a learned skill. You can nurture close friendships with optimistic people and absorb their positive attitude. Shake off the gloom of failure, and start making plans for your next big success.
Accept mistakes and failures as normal. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody fails at one time or another. Successful people usually make more mistakes than the rest of us because making mistakes means you’re trying. If you never fail at anything, you are probably not risking and not putting out enough effort. Successful people embrace mistakes and failures as necessary stepping-stones to success.
It’s said that Thomas Edison tried thousands of substances to use as the filament for his electric lightbulb before he discovered that tungsten provided the perfect combination of electrical resistance, brilliance, and durability. Asked if he considered his earlier experiments to be failures, he replied, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
Be prepared to make mistakes and encounter setbacks along the way. Don’t be dismayed. They’re just signposts on the road to success.
Accept the responsibility for your mistakes and failures. When people try to shift the blame for their failures onto “bad luck” or other people, they short-circuit the learning process. Instead of saying, “What can I learn from this failure?,” they say, “Why am I always the victim of other people’s incompetence?”
We can’t learn from our mistakes if we don’t own them. When we admit our failures to ourselves and others, we actually take control of the situation. When we say, “I made this mistake, and I will learn from it and succeed next time,” we are actually saying, “I have the power to affect my own destiny.” Until we accept responsibility, we reject our ability to control our lives. Accepting blame can be an enormously empowering experience.
Recent scandals, such as the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-walking operation, the IRS persecution of Tea Party groups, and the 2012 Benghazi attack cover-up, have conditioned us to expect deception, blame-shifting, stonewalling, and obstruction from our leaders. But when a serious foreign-policy scandal threatened my father’s administration in 1986, he acted swiftly and decisively—and he took personal responsibility. Many Americans forget that such principled leadership once existed in the Oval Office.
The Iran–Contra scandal grew out of a plan hatched by the CIA and the National Security Council to circumvent the Boland amendment, which forbade U.S. aid to the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Iran–Contra affair was first exposed by a Lebanese magazine on November 3, 1986, a month after a CIA cargo plane was shot down over Nicaragua. On November 13, ten days after Iran–Contra became public, my father addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising an independent investigation of the matter.
On November 25, he announced the creation of an independent review commission consisting of Republican senator John Tower, former Democratic secretary of state Edmund Muskie, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. The Tower Commission began its work on December 1, and the first witness, Ronald Reagan, appeared before them on December 2. The Tower Commission completed its work in less than three months and delivered its report on February 26, 1987. Six days later, on March 4, my father again addressed the nation from the Oval Office, taking responsibility and apologizi
ng to the nation:
First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. . . .
As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. . . . But as President, I cannot escape responsibility.3
It took my father just four months—from November 3, 1986, to March 4, 1987—to lay the Iran–Contra scandal to rest. That is the benchmark for how to deal with a scandal. You own your mistakes, you tell the truth, you get the facts on the table, and you apologize. Once my father apologized for Iran–Contra, the issue became a nonissue—and the final two years of his administration were hugely successful.
Among the achievements of those final two years were the “Tear Down This Wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the Washington and Moscow summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War. Another, less well-known achievement of the final two years of my father’s administration was his veto of a June 1987 attempt by Congress to preempt the Federal Communications Commission and reinstate the unconstitutional Fairness Doctrine. My father’s veto defended the First Amendment and made the world safe for conservative radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Reagan.
If my father had not acted swiftly and apologized to the American people, those final two years would have been consumed by scandal and marked by failure. The American people are good-hearted and forgiving, and they will accept you if you apologize and own your mistakes. But people don’t like being lied to and stonewalled. When my father apologized for Iran–Contra, he made it possible for his administration to finish strong and achieve his goal of winning the Cold War.
Lessons My Father Taught Me Page 12
