Lessons My Father Taught Me

by Michael Reagan

  A Role Model of Selflessness

  Dad loved lifeguarding. He thought working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, rescuing people was the best job he ever had. Why? Because he was helping others. Dad was never happier than when he was putting others first.

  My father’s selfless devotion to serving others seemed as natural to him as his smile and the Irish gleam in his eye. And a spirit of selflessness was part of his spiritual heritage from his mother, Nelle. I knew and loved Nelle when I was young because she took my sister Maureen and me to Sunday school. That same quality of selflessness and compassion that I observed in my Dad, I also saw in Nelle.

  The ability to put others first is a wonderful quality—and I hope I’ve learned it from Dad and Nelle. I want other people to see in me that same quality they saw in my father. Here are some of the lessons my father taught me in how to put others first:

  Treat all people as equals. There’s no room in this world for bigotry or racism. We need to learn how to truly love one another and understand one another in our society—or our nation will rattle apart. Go out of your way to meet and befriend people of other races, other cultures, other religions, and other political beliefs.

  If you are liberal, stop stereotyping conservatives and start talking to them, listening to them and understanding them. And if you are conservative, stop stereotyping liberals. Everybody is an individual, and there is something we can learn even from people we disagree with. In fact, we almost never learn anything from people who think the same way we do. We learn by listening to people who are different.

  My father didn’t believe that race, color, and culture should be barriers to friendship between people. Neither should we.

  Live compassionately. Take an interest in the people around you. Go out of your way to meet people, listen to people, and help people. Find tangible ways to encourage and thank the people who help you—the servers at the restaurant, the clerk at the store, the people who tend your yard, the teachers who educate your children. Don’t take them for granted—put others first.

  Live generously. Dad sometimes sent generous checks to strangers who wrote to him about a problem or need. You may not be able to afford that kind of generosity—but you can still live generously.

  You can be generous with your time. Volunteer to read stories to kindergartners or tutor students in math or language skills. Mow a neighbor’s lawn or wash a neighbor’s windows. Visit shut-ins in the nursing home. Volunteer to serve food at a rescue mission or soup kitchen. Even if you don’t have much money, you can be generous with your time.

  Be generous with compliments and encouragement. When Dad flew on Air Force One, he always exchanged greetings with the flight crew before takeoff. After the flight, he’d lean into the cockpit and say, “Great flight. Thanks, fellas!” It meant a lot to the crew.

  We tend to treat those who serve us—waiters, baristas, delivery people, barbers—as nonpersons. We don’t think of them as people with hopes, dreams, sorrows, and needs. What if we started treating each one as a real human being? What if we looked them in the eye and thanked them, encouraged them, empathized with them, prayed for them, and got to know them as people? What if we began treating the people around us the way my father treated people? What kind of impact would that make on the world?

  Every day, we have opportunities to live generously and compassionately. Let’s make the most of those opportunities, and let’s put others first.

  9

  Forgive and Be Forgiven

  THE MARCH 30, 1981, ASSASSINATION attempt nearly ended my father’s life. It also left three other people severely wounded. A few days after that attempt, Dad recorded his thoughts of that day in his diary. It wasn’t until his diaries were published in 2007 that I read this entry:

  Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.1

  When those thoughts were going through his mind, Dad had a bullet lodged about a quarter of an inch from his heart. For all he knew, that gurney could have been his deathbed. Yet his chief concern was forgiveness for the young gunman who had shot him.

  I visited my father in the hospital after the surgery, and he told me he believed God had spared him for a purpose. “Michael,” he said, “I’m committing the rest of my presidency to God.”

  In June 1982, Dad visited the Vatican and met with Pope John Paul II. What did these two men have to talk about? What did they have in common? They shared a special bond—both had recently survived assassination attempts. The pope had been shot by a Turkish gunman six weeks after the attack on my father. Both the pope and the president had had come within inches of death—and both freely forgave their attackers. Because they both exemplified forgiveness, their leadership was blessed. Freedom ultimately came to Poland, the land of the pope’s birth. And the Berlin Wall that Ronald Reagan had hated for years ultimately came down. Neither man demanded credit. Both acted in humility and forgiveness—and the world became freer as a result.

  Many of us can recite The Lord’s Prayer—“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”2 Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II lived The Lord’s Prayer. Both men expressed forgiveness for their attackers even before they left the hospital. I believe that’s why God used them to change the world.

  In 1983, my father reached out to Dr. Roger Peele, head of psychiatry at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Dad’s attacker was confined after being found “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Dad wanted to meet privately with the young man and express his forgiveness in person, but he didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the young man’s treatment. Dr. Peele recommended against a meeting, fearing it might diminish his patient’s sense of responsibility. So the meeting never took place. But I was impressed that my father wanted to take that extra step and express his forgiveness man-to-man. Dad’s ability to forgive the troubled young gunman made a huge impression on me.

  Forgiveness wasn’t just a one-time event in my father’s life. Like his traits of compassion, humility, and generosity, the trait of forgiveness was an ongoing theme of his life.

  It’s no secret that the Reagan family experienced its share of dysfunctional behavior. For example, my sister Patti was involved in the nuclear freeze movement and she organized protests against Dad’s strategic policies. She also wrote a scathing tell-all book in 1992 that she later disavowed (she has since written two loving tributes to my father, The Long Goodbye and Angels Don’t Die). Dad was frustrated by her political activities and hurt by her first book, but he never held a grudge. At Thanksgiving dinner, we all sat at the same table, we ate from the same turkey, and we were a family. A few years after Dad passed away, Patti wrote:

  My father, for his part, was not a man to begrudge anyone a divergent opinion; he’d have been fine if I had written some articles disagreeing with his policies, or even given interviews, as long as I was respectful and civil. But I chose stridency instead. . . . I was a child railing against a parent, nothing more. . . .

  Decades later I would look into my father’s eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer’s with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.3

  And let’s face it, there were some things in my first book, On the Outside Looking In, that must have been difficult for Dad to read—yet he wrote a very gracious and loving foreword for the paperback edition of that book.

  Conservative journalist Patrick B. McGuigan once wrote a book about the Reagan administration’s failed attempt to confirm Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court—and that book included a number of harsh criticisms of my father. Dad
read the book, then wrote a public letter urging conservatives to study McGuigan’s book and learn the lessons so that the next conservative nominee would be confirmed.

  McGuigan was amazed that my father forgave him for what he wrote in the book, and observed, “That was classic Reagan. He never held a grudge. It served him well in a profession where grudge-holding has defined too many. . . . He was the gentlest of souls after political conflicts.”4

  It’s true. Dad regularly forgave his many political opponents. He forgave George H. W. Bush, who attacked Dad’s economic policies as “voodoo economics,” and he brought Bush aboard as his running mate. He even forgave the vicious attacks from Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill and managed to win their support for many of his most important policy initiatives.

  I studied the way my father responded to his would-be assassin; his political rivals and enemies; and yes, his often ungrateful and ungracious children, and I learned lessons in forgiveness that have impacted my life in a powerful way. Why was my father always so positive and optimistic despite all the obstacles and opposition he faced? Without any doubt, it’s because he had learned the secret of forgiveness.

  A Huge Temptation

  For most of my life, I had hated myself for being molested. I carried around an enormous load of rage, guilt, and fear. My wife Colleen knew I was struggling with a terrible inner conflict, but she didn’t know what it was. I had never told her about the molestation. I was scared to death that she would hate me and leave me if she ever found out. So Colleen could only pray for me and ask God to heal me. Thank God, he honored and answered my wife’s prayers.

  One day, with Colleen at my side, I went down on my knees beside my bed and prayed, “God, forgive me, make me clean, take over my life.” And in the days that followed, a change took place in my life. I felt forgiven and accepted at last—and my anger began to melt away. On Father’s Day 1985, Colleen and I were baptized together at Faith Church in the San Fernando Valley. Colleen had been baptized years earlier, and I had been baptized as a child into the Catholic Church, but we wanted to be baptized together.

  That was the turning point of my life. God has been reshaping and rebuilding my life ever since. But even though I had turned a spiritual corner, I still had a lot of residue from the old life inside me. I saw my past through the eyes of a child—and I blamed God and Mom and Dad for the problems in my life.

  I hadn’t told anyone, not even Colleen, about the molestation. And I intended to take that secret to my grave.

  But God had other plans.

  In early 1987, a publisher offered a huge sum of money for me to write a book about my life in the Reagan family. There was one huge condition: it had to be a revealing tell-all book—one of those scandal books in which Hollywood children tell the world what miserable parents they had. In 1978, Christina Crawford, daughter of actress Joan Crawford, had shredded her late mother’s reputation in Mommie Dearest, a runaway bestseller that was made into a movie. In 1983, Gary Crosby had published a similar tell-all, Going My Own Way, about his late father, Bing Crosby.

  Here I was, with the offer of a huge advance on the table—and all I had to do to claim that money was to blow up the reputation of Dad, Nancy, and my mother, Jane Wyman. It was a tremendous temptation. I was working hard, struggling to make ends meet—but I could cure all my financial woes with one book.

  But what about the truth?

  Dad had taught me to speak the truth and live the truth. Could I write a book about my life and leave out the truth about the molestation? If I didn’t mention what the pedophile had done to me, the book would be a big lie.

  Yet I didn’t dare mention the molestation. I had kept that secret from a psychiatrist, a priest, and even my own wife. I sure wasn’t about to tell the whole world in a book!

  I decided to take the easy way out. I would tell my story, but leave out the molestation. I would blame all my problems on my parents, on the divorce, on boarding school. And after selling out my parents for cold hard cash, I would put that money in the bank and never have to work again.

  After all, I had been blaming God and Mom and Dad for my problems throughout my life. Why not blame them in a book and get paid for it?

  Looking back, I’m amazed that I was ready to betray my parents. I’d had a life-changing encounter with God—yet, like Judas, I was willing to sell out Mom and Dad for cash.

  How could I do that?

  I remember my mind-set at the time. I wanted to follow God, but I also wanted that money, and above all else, I had to keep my darkest secret hidden.

  The publisher put me together with writer Joe Hyams, a syndicated Hollywood columnist who had interviewed such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn. Before the publisher would pay out such a large advance, the editors wanted to see a thirty-page treatment so they’d know what they were getting for their money. So Joe and I met together to hammer out the treatment.

  We met at Joe’s house, and he spent a lot of hours asking questions and recording my conversation. I knew I would have to give him material that would make Dad and other family members look bad. That’s the essence of a tell-all book. I wasn’t planning to tell an outright lie or make anything up. But I was prepared to make the facts seem as scandalous as possible.

  As Joe interviewed me, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was an attack of conscience. Maybe it was God trying to get through to me. It was as if a voice inside me said, “Michael, what are you doing? The story you’re telling isn’t true—and you know it. By leaving out the key truth—the molestation—you’re turning this book into a pack of lies. Stop lying. Tell the truth.”

  I couldn’t go on. I broke down and began to cry uncontrollably. Poor Joe! He had no idea what I was going through, so my emotional breakdown seemed to come right out of the blue. He leaned away from me and said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I can’t do it, Joe. I just can’t do it.”

  As my writing partner, Joe Hyams was to receive half the advance and royalties from the book—so when I said, “I can’t do it,” he was thinking, There goes a ton of money, right out the window. He said, “What do you mean, you can’t do it?”

  “I can’t do this to my parents,” I said. “I can’t write a book that blames them for all my problems. It’s not their fault. They never knew what happened to me.”

  “What happened to you?”

  I took a deep breath—then I told him the story of how a day camp counselor repeatedly molested me when I was in the third grade. I didn’t go into all the details, but I told him how the memories, the fear, and the guilt had affected my relationships with everybody in my life.

  “Joe,” I said, “if I write a book blaming Mom and Dad for all my problems, it’ll be a lie. I can’t do that.”

  “Who else have you told about this?”

  “No one. You’re the first person I’ve told. Even my wife doesn’t know.”

  “You need to tell her. Let’s sleep on this and talk tomorrow.”

  I left Joe’s house and drove home, determined to finally tell Colleen about my past. We had been married for twelve years, and I owed her the truth. If I didn’t tell her that night, I might never work up the nerve again. I arrived home and found Colleen in the kitchen. “Honey,” I said, “we’ve got to talk.”

  We went into the living room and sat together on the couch. I took her hand and said, “I’ve got to tell you something about my life—something I’ve never told you before. And I’m going to write a book about it.”

  Then I told her the story of how the man molested me, took pictures of me, controlled me, and blackmailed me. I had told Joe Hyams a sketchy version of the story, but Colleen was the first to hear the details. I was scared to death. She held my life in her hands, and everything depended on what she would say after hearing me out.

  For all I knew, she’d be disgusted—and she’d want to end the marriage. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit. I blamed myself for what
happened to me—and hated myself for it.

  I finished and I waited for her reaction. She put her arms around me, cradled my head, and told me over and over in a soothing voice, “I love you, Michael. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  For the first time in my life, someone knew my secret—and still loved me. For the first time, I truly felt loved.

  I knew that Mom, Dad, Colleen, and the kids all loved me. But they didn’t know my secret. I always felt that, if they knew, they could never love me. At last, it wasn’t a secret anymore—and Colleen still loved me.

  Now the healing could begin.

  The Secret Comes Out

  On Sunday, April 12, 1987, Colleen and I took the kids to Dad’s Santa Barbara ranch to celebrate our daughter Ashley’s fourth birthday. And I had another reason for visiting Dad and Nancy. While Colleen took Cameron and Ashley to the corral to see the horses, I walked with Dad and Nancy to the edge of Lake Lucky—the pond where Dad took Nancy for canoe rides.

  When the three of us reached the water’s edge, Nancy broke the silence. “Michael,” she said, “we know you’re writing a book. What’s in the book that we should know about?”

  I tried to look them in the eye, but I couldn’t. All I could do was look at Dad’s belt buckle and his boots. I took a deep breath—then I began telling them the story. They needed to know exactly what that child molester did to me, so I explained it in blunt terms.

  As the story came out of me, everything came out of me. I was crying and I was throwing up, and it was all landing on my dad’s boots. I thought, Dad, don’t look down at your boots or you’ll be really mad at me. Because I’m really ruining your boots. It’s funny the things you think about such times.

  I kept talking, and I didn’t dare stop or I might never get it all out. I didn’t know how Dad and Nancy would take it. I fully expected my father to hate me and turn away from me. Finally, I got it all said, and I fell silent.