Reagan: The Life

974 Pages·2015·10.21 MB·English

by  H.W. Brands

Copyright © 2015 by H. W. Brands
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random
House Ltd., Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin
Random House LLC.
Photograph of the ABC story on the Reagan family © Bettmann/CORBIS
All other photographs courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library
Book design by Michael Collica
Cover design by John Fontana
Cover photograph by George Rose/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brands, H. W.
Reagan : the life / H. W. Brands.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53639-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53640-0 (eBook)
1. Reagan, Ronald. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government
—1981–1989. I. Title.
E877.B73 2015
973.927092—dc23
[B]
2014038054
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
PART ONE
Prairie Idyll: 1911–1934
PART TWO
The Golden West: 1935–1962
PART THREE
A Time for Choosing: 1962–1980
PART FOUR
Heroic Dreams: 1980–1983
PART FIVE
A Worthy Adversary: 1984–1986
PART SIX
The Frosty Iceland Air: 1986–1988
PART SEVEN
A Ranch in the Sky: 1989–2004
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
Index
About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
TONIGHT
Don’t miss
“A Time for Choosing”
with
Ronald Reagan
9:30 to 10:00
WNBC-TV
Channel 4
Sponsored by T.V. for
Goldwater Committee
DESPERATE TIMES CALLED for desperate measures. Barry Goldwater’s
campaign was nearly broke, and the candidate was floundering. His
opponent, Lyndon Johnson, the craftiest politician in the country, had
wrapped himself in the mantle of the martyred John Kennedy to launch a
revolution in civil rights and had portrayed himself as the coolheaded
commander in chief to parry a communist insurgency in Southeast Asia. In
the process Johnson had made Goldwater look like a closet racist and a
trigger-happy warmonger. Goldwater hadn’t helped his cause by calling
himself an extremist, albeit in the defense of liberty, and by suggesting that
nuclear weapons be used in Vietnam. The more he spoke, the deeper his
hole grew and the more remote his chances of victory. In his desperation, a
week before the election he turned to a proxy speaker, a political unknown
from California, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan faced desperation of a different kind, less public but more
protracted. A washed-up actor last seen hawking the wares and bromides of
corporate America, Reagan was at a turning point in his life. As a child he
had discovered the allure of an audience, the soothing effect of applause on
one’s anxieties. He stepped from the stage of church skits and school plays
to broadcast radio, which multiplied his audience into the hundreds of
thousands, and then to movies, which put his face and voice before millions.
But in Hollywood he hit the limits of his talent. He never captured the
movie-house marquees, never cracked the A-list of leading men. By his mid-
thirties he couldn’t get good roles. He moonlighted in the politics of the film
industry, representing actors in negotiations with the studios. But that gig
ran out, and he was hard up for work. He took a job with General Electric
that got him back on-screen, but the much-reduced screen of television, in
the much-reduced role of series host. His contract required him to schlep the
country for GE, speaking to company employees and to local business
boosters about the blessings of big industry and its essential role in the
American dream. His own dreams meanwhile faded, and when the GE job
ended, they all but disappeared. The invitation to speak for Barry Goldwater
came as a godsend, but one fraught with risk. It put him before an audience
again and gave him a chance to be heard, but he knew if he flubbed this
opportunity, he might never get another.
The Goldwater campaign didn’t expect much. It bought a single-column
notice on page 79 of the October 27 issue of the New York Times;
comparable ads ran equally deep in papers around the country. In 1964
political campaigns were still figuring out how to employ television. They
hesitated to use spot advertising, from fear that they would be seen as
packaging their candidates like cereal or cigarettes. In this case the
Goldwater campaign created a faux political event. It hired a hall in Los
Angeles and enlisted a few hundred supporters who received Goldwater
placards and signs. It placed Reagan on a podium draped in bunting the
television audience took for red, white, and blue, though the broadcast was
in black and white. He spoke as though at a campaign rally of the sort that
had characterized American politics for more than a century.
But this staged event lacked the spontaneity of a genuine rally, and the
speech started awkwardly. The audience awaited its cue, the name
Goldwater, but Reagan spoke for many minutes before mentioning the
candidate, and the audience sat mute. Reagan nervously talked too fast. His
standard speech for the GE circuit was longer than this evening’s television
time allowed, yet rather than edit it down, he tried to pack it all in. The
silence of his listeners caused him to talk through his laugh lines, making
the awkwardness worse. During his years with GE he had abandoned the
pro-government liberalism of his young adulthood in favor of a pro-business
conservatism; in doing so, he accumulated note-card decks of statistics
documenting government waste and excess. On this occasion he rattled the
statistics off in numbing order. Then, without warning, he swerved from
domestic politics to foreign policy, leaving his audience confused as to what
the American federal debt had to do with the Castro revolution in Cuba. His
gestures didn’t suit his words, and his principal gesture, a wagging of the
right index finger, looked decidedly schoolmarmish.
Yet something happened midway into the half-hour speech. A belated
mention of Goldwater got the crowd to respond, and their encouragement
calmed Reagan down. He gave his jokes their moments to sink in. “Anytime
you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being
against their humanitarian goals,” he said. “They say we’re always ‘against’
things—we’re never ‘for’ anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends
is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
The audience perked up the more. American conservatives were a
combative tribe who didn’t speak of liberals as their “friends,” but here
Reagan did. His tone was serious, but it wasn’t angry, the way Goldwater’s
often was. Reagan criticized Democratic leaders, but he didn’t criticize
Democrats. He condemned the direction the American government was
going, but he professed confidence in the American people.
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.”