Reagan: The Life (2 page)

At the outset he had said that the Goldwater campaign had not provided him with a script; the words he spoke were his own. He didn’t say they were words he had tested on hundreds of audiences. But the polish showed. “This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man,” he said. “This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

He made his points with images and examples. “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one,” he said in a swipe at government redistribution schemes. Government welfare programs were a racket. “A judge called me here in
Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning $250 a month. She wanted a divorce to get an $80 raise. She’s eligible for $330 a month in the
Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.” A job-training program was typically profligate. “We’re going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help $4,700 a year. We can send them to Harvard for $2,700!” He cracked a smile. “Of course, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.”

The audience laughed and applauded. Some remembered to wave their Goldwater signs, but most were focused on the man in front of them. “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size,” Reagan said. “So government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” The audience laughed again and clapped more loudly.

His pace hit a rhythm that swept them along. Government
regulation was the creeping edge of
socialism. “It doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

The danger to freedom was double-edged, from communism abroad and from socialism at home. Both threats drew from the same liberal source. “Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ‘accommodation.’ And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.”

Reagan had the audience in his hand. He let them cheer, then gave them more of the same. “We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, ‘Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’
Alexander Hamilton said, ‘A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.’ Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace, and you can have it in the next second: surrender.”

He borrowed from
Patrick Henry: “You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” He delved further into history: “If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain.”

He drew toward the close. “Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies: There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” He quoted
Winston Churchill: “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits, not animals.” Churchill again: “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.” He pivoted, surprisingly for a Republican, to Franklin Roosevelt. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan said. He finished with a nod to Lincoln: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

T
HE SPEECH CAME
too late to rescue Goldwater, who lost in a landslide to Johnson. But it earned Reagan a future. His listeners in the hall leaped to their feet and stamped their approval as he finished; the reaction of the national television audience was almost as positive. Editorials and letters praised the energy and conviction this newcomer brought to the defense
of American freedom at home and abroad. Many Republicans concluded that their party had nominated the wrong man. Reagan had never run for political office, but his name at once surfaced in discussions about the governorship of California. Conservatives in other states formed Reagan-for-president committees.

Reagan professed surprise at the sudden reversal in his fortunes. Perhaps he
was
surprised. But he wasn’t unprepared. He had been honing his broadcast skills since his days in radio, and all those talks for GE had served like a long off-Broadway run before a main-stage premiere. Seven years as head of the Screen Actors Guild had exposed him to a species of politics as conniving as politics could be. The decade when he thought he would never again reach a big audience had sharpened his hunger for the satisfaction only applause could bring.

Those who afterward read the transcript of his speech realized it could not have been better composed to draw attention to Reagan, rather than Goldwater. The most quotable lines had nothing of Goldwater in them, beyond the fact that Goldwater shared Reagan’s conservative values. Reagan positioned himself as a spokesman for conservatism who happened to be campaigning for Goldwater. The Goldwater defeat, far from damaging Reagan, made him more appealing as the one around whom conservatives might rally.

Reagan couldn’t know that his speech had launched one of the most remarkable careers in American politics. He couldn’t know that he would be twice elected governor of the most populous state in the Union and twice elected president of the United States. He couldn’t know that he would leave a deeper impression on the country and the world than any but a handful of other presidents. All he could know in the autumn of 1964 was that at a time of life when career doors begin to close, at a time in his own life when the obvious doors had already closed, he had suddenly kicked a new door wide open.

He got ready to step through. “
I have never aspired to public office, nor looked upon a political career with any particular favor,” he told reporters soberly. He said he still viewed government skeptically. But a patriotic American had to listen to his fellow citizens. “I’m honored and flattered that so many people would think of me in connection with public office.” Their opinions deserved careful consideration. “I will review my thinking, and whatever decision I make will be based on what I think will provide the most good.”

R
EAGAN REMEMBERED THREE
things from childhood: that his father was a drunk, that his mother was a saint, and that his ability to make an audience laugh afforded an antidote to life’s insecurities and embarrassments.

“
When I was eleven, I came home from the YMCA one cold, blustery, winter’s night,” Reagan recalled decades later. “My mother was gone on one of her sewing jobs, and I expected the house to be empty.” Nelle Reagan worked to supplement her husband’s earnings. “As I walked up the stairs, I nearly stumbled over a lump near the front door; it was Jack lying in the snow, his arms outstretched, flat on his back.” Reagan and his older brother, Neil, called his mother and father by their first names. “I leaned over to see what was wrong and smelled whiskey. He had found his way home from a speakeasy and had just passed out right there. For a moment or two, I looked down at him and thought about continuing on into the house and going to bed, as if he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. When I tried to wake him he just snored—loud enough, I suspected, for the
whole neighborhood to hear him. So I grabbed a piece of his overcoat, pulled it, and dragged him into the house.”

The boy watched his father during several years and drew inferences. “Jack wasn’t one of those alcoholics who went on a bender after he’d had a run of bad luck or who drowned his sorrows in drink,” Reagan said. “No, it was prosperity that Jack couldn’t stand. When everything was going perfectly, that’s when he let go, especially if during a holiday or family get-together that gave him a reason to do it. At Christmas, there was always a threat hanging over our family. We knew holidays were the most likely
time for Jack to jump off the wagon. So I was always torn between looking forward to Christmas and being afraid of its arrival.”

Jack Reagan’s drinking made him an unreliable breadwinner, and the family bounced around Illinois during his younger son’s first decade. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico on February 6, 1911. The family moved to Chicago when he was two, then to Galesburg, to Monmouth, and back to Tampico. The places passed like scenes outside a car window. Reagan remembered a noisy fire engine from Chicago that made him want to be a fireman. America entered
World War I in April 1917, when the family was in Galesburg; the soldiers on the troop trains passing through seemed to a six-year-old to embody adventure and heroism. The war ended in November 1918, with the family in Monmouth, where the celebrations almost overwhelmed the lad. “
The parades, the torches, the bands, the shoutings and drunks, and the burning of Kaiser Bill in effigy created in me an uneasy feeling of a world outside my own,” he remembered.

The family landed in Dixon when Reagan was nine. The town of ten thousand became his home until he left for college. Jack Reagan pulled himself together a bit, or perhaps Nelle simply put a stop to the serial moves. But as his sons grew into teenagers, they encountered challenges of a different sort. Dixon had few Catholics and disliked most of those. The boys didn’t practice their father’s faith, but the malignant papism the town bullies saw in Jack Reagan was imputed to them, and they were forced to defend themselves, sometimes with fists. More insidious and less amenable to riposte was the scorn they endured on account of Jack’s boozing.

N
ELLE
R
EAGAN
explained her husband’s weakness in terms intended to elicit the boys’ sympathy and understanding. “
Nelle tried so hard to make it clear he had a
sickness
that he couldn’t help, and she constantly reminded us of how good he was to us when he wasn’t drinking,” Reagan recalled. Nelle was Scots-English by ancestry, to Jack’s Irish, and she displayed the proverbial thriftiness of the Scot. Not that she had much choice, given her husband’s uncertain earnings. She mended and re-mended Neil’s clothes for passing down to Ronnie. She sent Neil to the butcher to cadge liver for a mythical family cat. She filled the stew pot with oatmeal and passed it off as a delicacy. “I remember the first time she brought a plate of oatmeal meat to the table,” Reagan recounted. “There
was a thick, round patty buried in gravy that I’d never seen before. I bit into it. It was moist and meaty, the most wonderful thing I’d ever eaten.”

Nelle schooled her boys in religion, by precept and especially by example. She spent every Sunday at the
Disciples of Christ Church and took the boys with her, to Sunday school at first and then to the regular services. She never thought ill of anyone, so far as her sons could tell. “
While my father was a cynic and tended to suspect the worst of people, my mother was the opposite,” Reagan remembered. “She always expected to find the best in people and often did, even among the prisoners at our local jail to whom she frequently brought hot meals.” She preached and practiced the Golden Rule. “My mother always taught us: ‘Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you.’ ” She put others ahead of herself, and her sons foremost. “While my father was filled with dreams of making something of himself, she had a drive to help my brother and me make something of ourselves.”

In one respect Jack Reagan seemed entirely admirable to his sons. Their youth witnessed the revival of the
Ku Klux Klan, which added Catholics,
Jews, and
immigrants to
African Americans as targets of its venom. Jack forbade the boys to see
The Birth of a Nation
, the
D. W. Griffith film that made heroes out of the white-robed vigilantes. In vain did Neil and Ronnie point out that all the other kids were seeing the picture and that, anyway, the Klan in the movie was of a different time and place. “
The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum,” Reagan recalled Jack saying.