RONALD WILSON REAGAN
February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004


Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts.  My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way.

    


Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

- - - Ronald Reagan


Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have made a difference in the world.  Marines don't have that problem.

- - - Ronald Reagan








Reagan's farewell note to his fellow citizens (1994) was his final masterpiece. ". . . I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience," he wrote in the same small, neat hand he used for thousands of personal letters.  "When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage. . . ."


Ten years after Reagan announced his Alzheimer's disease, in an open letter to the American people, he reached the end of his long twilight at his home in Bel Air, California, in the company of his wife and their children.


Born in tiny Tampico, Illinois, educated at Eureka College in nearby Dixon, Reagan was a radio sportscaster, a Hollywood B-movie star, host of a TV variety show, a soap salesman, a motivational speaker, governor of California and -- starting at age 54 -- arguably the most important American political figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
THE REAGANS--Jack, Neil, Ronald, Nelle

Ronald Wilson Reagan
February 6, 1911
Tampico, Illinois






One thing the children of alcoholics often have in common is an uncommon sense of control--control of themselves and control of their world, which they know from harsh experience can turn perilous at the click of a door latch. Not that Jack Reagan was known to be a mean drunk; but brutal or not, all alcoholics create states of alarm in their children.

There was an abiding compassion in Reagan for his father, for his father's drinking--the "sickness," as his mother explained it.

The story is now famous of his finding his father passed out on the front porch and bearing him inside. There is no sign that Reagan's father was anything but a man of high natural instincts, like the son who inherited his looks, capable of fierce rage at racial or religious bigotry. But neither are there signs of real father-to-son love. And the fact that Reagan's father was an alcoholic, albeit "periodic," as Reagan is quick to explain, must have alloyed young Ronald's feelings for his father as much with dread as with sympathy.


Ronald Reagan wrote a poem in high school and called it "Life," as all high school poems must be called. It went as follows:

I wonder what it's all about, and why
We suffer so, when little things go wrong?
We make our life a struggle,
When life should be a song.

Our troubles break and drench us.
Like spray on the cleaving prow
Of some trim Gloucester schooner.
As it dips in a graceful bow...

But why does sorrow drench us
When our fellow passes on?
He's just exchanged life's dreary dirge
For an eternal life of song...

Millions have gone before us,
And millions will come behind,
So why do we curse and fight
At a fate both wise and kind?

We hang onto a jaded life
A life full of sorrow and pain.
A life that warps and breaks us,
And we try to run through it again.

The poem is odd, baleful--not an unusual tone for a teenager generally, but neither is it what we would expect of the peppy, clean-cut teenager that was young Dutch Reagan.

Examined under a sad light, "Life" is the poem of a boy who either wants to drown or is at least considering the possibility.  The first stanza is cheery enough, but it really belongs to another poem.  The sense of advocated surrender in the final stanza is unmistakable.  Not that Reagan would be unusual in having contemplated death as a way out of adolescence, but one does not think of his early life as having been touched with "sorrow and pain."

Of course, the poem might simply have been the product of a bad moment.  But even a momentary touch of desperation is interesting in such a man.






Reagan, second from left with his school football team, had a deep affection for the game.  "It's a kind of clean hatred," he once said.






"Where's the rest of me?"  A horrifying scene in Kings Row (with Ann Sheridan) yielded the title of his autobiography.






A Gipper Is Born

Rockne, with Pat O'Brien, showed the actor's star quality and earned him a nickname.






In 1951, he was in Bedtime for Bonzo with Diana Lynn; a dramatic turn.






So it was no wonder that he believed all things were possible, from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he predicted even when the clash of superpowers seemed near its most menacing point, to the complete disarmament of all nuclear arsenals, which Reagan proposed in a stunning arms-control summit near the end of his administration. What seemed to some as naivete struck others as good old gumption.   
1953


1980

Ronald Reagan
40th U.S. President

Excerpts from Time (January 1981)
It began in October 1964 when, as co-chairman of California Citizens for Goldwater, he gave his "A Time for Choosing" television speech, a speech so tough that Goldwater himself was skittish about letting it air. Reagan ended the talk with "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," and was at least half right. So mesmerizing was his performance, so quick in its effect, that California businessmen swamped him like groupies, formed a "Friends of Ronald Reagan" committee, begged him to run for Governor. He had to be pushed. Yet in 1966 the former star of Juke Girl snatched the governorship of California by a million votes from incumbent Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, who must have thought he was the victim of an accident.



In fact, there has been a remarkably accidental air about Reagan's career; it has always borne the quality of something he could take or leave. The image of the non-politician running for office, antilogical as it is, has had its practical advantages, but it is also authentic. Because Reagan knows who he is, he knows what he wants. After a halfhearted run at Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, he returned to California for a second term as Governor. But in 1976, after an all-out and failed attempt to capture his party's nomination, he genuinely did not wish to be Gerald Ford's Vice-President. When Ford's invitation went to Bob Dole, Reagan loyalists were crestfallen, reading in that rebuff the end of their man's life in politics. Only Reagan took it well, content to settle forever on his ranch, if it came to that, but also believing (as few others did) that even at age 65 you can run into luck.


1985--Leaving the Naval Medical Center

Four years later, his party, now confirmed in its conservatism, turned to him like a heliotrope. He was lucky to run against (Eastern brittle) George Bush for the nomination; he was lucky to be beaten early in Iowa, before the so-called momentum against him was real; he was lucky to have Jimmy Carter as his opponent. On the night of Nov. 4, 1980, just 16 years after he had spoken his mind in behalf of a man too far right to be elected President, the amateur politician who will become 70 in February watched state after state turn in his direction. 		Reagan is a natural; he knows it. His intuitions are always in tune, and he trusts his own feelings. All his political opinions have been born of feelings--the passionate antagonism toward Big Government resulting from his boyhood observations of Dixon and his own experiences with the progressive income tax once he returned from the military; his staunch anti-Communism from his days with the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s, when he packed a pistol for self-protection. He will read up on a subject once it has initially been proved on his pulses, but he does not take his main ideas from printed words. In that process of intellection he is classically American--the natural man whose intelligence lies not in book learning but in right instincts. Reagan regularly reads conservative journals of opinion and his share of newspapers and magazines and contemporary books about politics, but no author seems to have been especially influential in his life. Yet he is able, by employing a kind of trick of memory, to dredge up whole passages of things he read as far back as 40 years ago. Like many politicians, he probably uses reading the way one might use friends. Instead of his going to books, they come to him.

This sense of his integrity, of his thoroughgoing self-knowledge is a major asset. When he was making Dark Victory (yes, he was there, well behind Bette Davis, George Brent and Humphrey Bogart), the director (Edmund Goulding) bawled him out for playing a scene too simply and sincerely. "He didn't get what he wanted, whatever the hell that was," Reagan recalls, "and I ended up not delivering the line the way my instinct told me it should be delivered. It was bad."

        

In the broadest terms Reagan does know what he wants out of the next four years. But as those terms address specifics, that broad vision may prove inept. Intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past. That is where the broad vision comes from; the past is his future. But is it also the country's? Helen Lawton, a current resident of Dixon, Illinois, and a loyal Reaganite, observed of her man:  "Right now, in some ways, I think he'd love to go back to the good old days. In those days he didn't even realize he was poor because so many others were poor too. He wants the good life, not in terms of material things, but so that kids can have good times and strong family relationships. Yes, I think he would like to go back to how it used to be, but it's going to be difficult." That puts it mildly.

         With Margaret Thatcher




November 1990

I was born February 6, 1911, in a flat above the local bank in Tampico, Illinois.  According to family legend, when my father ran up the stairs and looked at his newborn son, he quipped:  "He looks like a fat little Dutchman.  But who knows, he might grow up to be president some day." During my mother's pregnancy, my parents had decided to call me Donald. But after one of her sisters beat her to it and named her son Donald, I became Ronald. I never thought "Ronald" was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy and as soon as I could, I asked people to call me "Dutch." That was a nickname that grew out of my father's calling me "the Dutchman" whenever he referred to me.

My delivery, I was told, was a difficult one and my mother was informed that she shouldn't have any more children. So that left four of us - Jack, Nelle, and my brother, Neil, who had been born two years earlier. In high school, my brother had a teammate on the football team, Winston McReynolds, who was his closest buddy and they were so inseparable the other players began referring to Neil as "Moon" and Winston as "Mushmouth" - the names of the two lead characters in the "Moon Mullins" comic strip. Neil's nickname stuck and, from then on, about the only person who ever called him Neil was my mother.

My dad - his name was John Edward Reagan but everyone called him Jack - was destined by God, I think, to be a salesman. His forebears had come to America from County Tipperary by way of England during Ireland's potato famine and he was endowed with the gift of blarney and the charm of a leprechaun. No one I ever met could tell a story better than he could. Nelle Wilson Reagan, my mother, was of Scots-English ancestry. She met and fell in love with my father shortly after the turn of the century in one of the tiny farm towns that were planted on the Illinois prairie by pioneers as they moved westward across the continent during the nineteenth century. They were married in Fulton, Illinois, about forty miles from Dixon, in 1904.

While my father was a cynic and tended to suspect the worst of people, my mother was the opposite. 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. I learned from my father the value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a little something about telling a story. From my mother, I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true. My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He'd grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. My mother always taught us: "Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you," and "Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are."

When I was a child, we moved a lot. My father was constantly searching for a better life and I was forever the new kid in school. During one period of four years, I attended four different schools. We moved to wherever my father's ambition took him. Tampico, the place where I was born, had a population of only 820. There was a short paved main street, a railroad station, two or three churches, and a couple of stores, including the one where my father worked. When I was a baby, we moved from the flat above the bank into a house facing a park in the center of Tampico that had a Civil War cannon flanked by a pyramid of cannonballs. One of my first memories was of crossing the park with my brother on our way to an ice wagon that had pulled up to the depot.

A pair of toddlers intent on plucking some refreshing shards of ice from the back of the wagon, we crawled over the tracks beneath a huge freight train that had just pulled in. We'd hardly made it when the train pulled out with a hissing burst of steam. Our mother, who had come out on the porch in time to see the escapade, met us in the middle of the park and inflicted the appropriate punishment.

When I was two, we moved to Chicago, where my father had gotten a promising job selling shoes at the Marshall Field's department store. We moved into a small flat near the University of Chicago that was lighted by a single gas jet brought to life with the deposit of a quarter in a slot down the hall. After we'd been in Chicago for less than two years, Jack was offered a job at O.T. Johnson's, a big department store in Galesburg 140 miles to the west of Chicago, and we moved again, this time to a completely different world. Instead of noisy streets and crowds of people, it consisted of meadows and caves, trees and streams, and the joys of small-town life. From that time onward, I guess I've always been partial to small towns and the outdoors.

World War I started when we were in Galesburg. Like almost every other American during those years, I was filled with pride every time I heard a band play "Over There" or I thought of our doughboys crossing the Atlantic on a noble mission to save our friends in Europe. There were some days when everybody in Galesburg dropped whatever they were doing and rushed down to the depot to cheer on a troop train passing through town. The train windows were usually open to the air and the doughboys would be in their khaki uniforms and would wave to us; we waved back and cheered. Once my mother picked me up and gave me a penny, which I gave to a soldier, saying in my small voice, "Good luck."

Not long after the war ended, we moved again, this time back to Tampico, where my dad had been offered the job of managing the same H.C. Pitney General Store he was working at when I was born, and we moved into an apartment above the store. The owner, Mr. Pitney, who wasn't so much a merchant as an investor, liked my father and promised that, as soon as he could, he would try to help him become part owner of a shoe store. After a year or so, we packed up all our belongings and headed for Dixon, where, keeping his promise, Mr. Pitney had decided to open a swank shoe store called the Fashion Boot Shop with Jack as his partner.

It was in Dixon that I really found myself.


CAMPAIGNING FOR GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA


Did you know that when Ronald Reagan got his hearing aids, the resulting publicity dramatically increased the demand on the hearing healthcare industry? Almost overnight the processing time for hearing aid fittings went from days to weeks.


In the Garden




















It is not my intention to do away with government.  It is rather to make it work -- work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back.  Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

- - - Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981












With Lucy and good friend Margaret Thatcher on the White House lawn






The President--sporting a kiss from an admirer.






Ronald and Nancy Reagan at Rancho del Cielo, the Western White House, in 1983.  They starred in only one movie together, but their partnership made history.






The Eternal Optimist
by Nancy Reagan
Posted Sunday, June 6, 2004, in Time Magazine

I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie.  He was a man of strong principles and integrity.  He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn't feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone.  He said what he thought and believed.  He could move from being a sportscaster to moving pictures and TV, to being Governor of the largest state in the country for eight years and then to being President for eight years, and somehow remain the same wonderful man.  Perhaps this was helped by his strong, unshakable religious beliefs.

Ronnie always believed that God has a plan for each of us and that we might not know what it is now, but eventually we will.

He never took off or landed in a plane without looking out the window and saying a silent prayer.  I don't think many people knew this.  He was the eternal optimist--the glass was always half full, not half empty.

I think his faith and his comfort with himself accounts for that optimism.  Since he felt that everything happens for a reason, he never saw things darkly.  After he was shot and we almost lost him, he lay on his hospital bed staring at the ceiling and praying.  He told me that he realized he couldn't pray just for himself, that it wouldn't be right, and that he also had to pray for John Hinckley.  Hinckley's parents sent him a note and he wrote a nice one back to them.

Later, Cardinal Cooke visited Ronnie in the White House and said, "God was certainly sitting on your shoulder that day."  Ronnie replied, "Yes, I know, and I made up my mind that all the days I have left belong to Him."

Ronnie was a very private man but also gregarious, and he loved seeing and meeting people.  After being married to him for 52 years, I have so many memories.  He was very sentimental and romantic and tender.  On my birthday, he always sent my mother flowers to thank her for having me, and he wrote me beautiful, touching letters when we had to be apart.

Some time ago, he went for a walk and passed a house with roses in front.  He bent over to pick one, and the Secret Service agent reminded him it wasn't his house.  He looked stricken and said, "But I want to give it to my lady."  He picked it and brought it home to me. 		You cannot talk about Ronnie without mentioning his wonderful sense of humor.  I think he could tell stories all day without repeating himself--a joy for people with him, but he also made use of it politically.  If things got a little heated and tense, he would break the tension with a story.  By the time he ended, the mood would have changed, and they got on with the business with no rancor.

Ronnie always told his children, "If you go into a store and feel that the clerk is being rude, stop and think that she may have had a tough day, and put yourself in her shoes."  I remember that he told his son, "A gentleman always does the kind thing."  Yes, Ronnie could be stubborn--but always with a smile.

He was deeply guided by the principle that the Soviet system was wrong.  It made a tremendous impression when we went to Berlin and stood on a balcony to see the other side.  There was not a soul on the street, and we thought how eerie and disturbing that was.  When we went to Checkpoint Charlie, and Ronnie was shown the line that people couldn't cross, he took his foot and put it over the line.  He felt it was important to assert what was right.  He got very stubborn and even mad when his advisers would take out a line he really believed from a speech.  It was on that trip that he stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Ronnie felt this was his greatest accomplishment--finding a safe ending to the cold war.  And his other great legacy, he felt, was giving our country back its optimism.

At our last Kennedy Center Honors show, Walter Cronkite went back onstage at the end and brought out all the cast, performers and crew to salute us.  By this time, the aisles were filled with ushers, and he gave a very touching tribute.  The audience then turned, faced us and sang Auld Lang Syne.  I had dissolved into tears by that time.  But Ronnie called down, "Beats getting an Oscar."  Only Ronnie could do that.

When we were leaving the White House for the last time and walking toward the helicopter, he turned to me with his heartwarming grin.  "Well, it's been a wonderful eight years," he said.  "All in all, not bad. Not bad at all."


"I loved three things: drama, politics and sports, and I'm not sure they always come in that order."


Shortly after Bush's victory in 1988, Reagan tours New York City with his successor and Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the soon-to-be-extinct Soviet Union.






In August 1989, almost a year after leaving the White House, Reagan goes through documents at his ranch in Santa Barbara, California.






Mr. Reagan's 89th birthday - February 2000






Final Resting Place

I KNOW IN MY HEART THAT MAN IS GOOD
THAT WHAT IS RIGHT WILL ALWAYS EVENTUALLY TRIUMPH
AND THERE IS PURPOSE AND WORTH TO EACH AND EVERY LIFE






Sunset in Simi Valley