Ronald Reagan as Dad, a Sunny Stranger: 'My Father at 100' by Ron Reagan

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

MY FATHER AT 100
By Ron Reagan
Illustrated. 228 pages. Viking. $25.95.



Related
Excerpt: ‘My Father at 100’
January 28, 2011



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/books/28book.html?pagewanted=all





Books of The Times
Ronald Reagan as Dad,
a Sunny Stranger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 27, 2011


Ron Reagan


Ronald Reagan, the politician, has been enshrined as a heroic visionary by the right, celebrated for ending the cold war and reducing the size of government, and invoked as a touchstone for all things conservative. At the same time, he’s been caricatured by the left as the dunderheaded godfather of a red-state America, promoting lower taxes for the rich, higher deficits and a more fragile social safety net.

Ronald Reagan, the man, has meanwhile eluded capture, described over the years in an assortment of metaphors and images that make him out to be more symbol than human being: “the perfect Scout,” a “Doctor Feelgood” and an “amiable dunce.” His official biographer, Edmund Morris, was so perplexed by his subject’s opacity and contradictions that he abandoned his efforts to write a serious work of history and instead produced “Dutch” (Random House, 1999), a cringe-making hodgepodge of fact and fiction, narrated by an imaginary alter ego.

Now, on the occasion of what would have been the former president’s 100th birthday, his youngest son, Ron Reagan, has written a deeply felt memoir — a memoir that underscores the bafflement his own children often felt about their father, a man the younger Mr. Reagan describes as an inscrutable, “paradoxical character,” “warm yet remote,” “affable as they come” but with “virtually no close friends besides his wife,” a man who “thrived on public display yet remained intensely private.”

“His children, if they were being honest,” Mr. Reagan writes in “My Father at 100,” “would agree that he was as strange a fellow as any of us had ever met. Not darkly strange, mind you. In fact, he was so naturally sunny, so utterly without guile, so devoid of cynicism or pettiness as to create for himself a whole new category of strangeness. He was, in some respects, too good — like a visitor from an enchanted realm where they’d never even consider inventing a Double Down sandwich or credit default swaps. I often felt I had to check my natural sarcasm and sense of absurdity at the door for fear of inducing in him a fit of psychological disequilibrium.”

Though the younger Mr. Reagan — an avowed atheist with decidedly liberal leanings — would have philosophical arguments with his father over the years, their difficulties had nothing to do with politics but with emotional connection. The author says that he never felt that his father didn’t love or care for him but that he often seemed to be “wandering somewhere in his own head.”

“Occasionally,” Mr. Reagan writes, “he seemed to need reminding about basic aspects of my life — like birthdays, who my friends were or how I was doing in school. I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I’d walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I’d disappeared into the wings of his mind’s stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line.”

This suspicion that he was not central to his father’s daily existence, that his father’s inner life was both elusive and impregnable lends a wistful tone to the memoir. Ron Reagan, who writes in charming, lucid prose, clearly wants to try to know his father, and his travels to the small Midwestern towns where his dad grew up become a Telemachus-like search for understanding as he deconstructs the former president’s earliest dreams and ambitions and his relationships with his parents, his brother and his classmates. These chapters of the book have the emotional detail and heartfelt power of recent classics of filial devotion like Martin Amis’s “Experience” and Philip Roth ’s “Patrimony.” They are testaments both to the author’s deep, protective love for his father and to his puzzlement over his father’s deeply solitary nature and frequent obliviousness to people around him.

Unfortunately for the reader, the later chapters in the book are considerably more cursory, hopping and skipping oddly through Ronald Reagan’s adult life, as if running out of time or space. Mr. Reagan discusses how his father’s dreams of glory and valor were shaped by the movies — especially by westerns featuring “a lone hero saving the day” — but he spends very little time examining his father’s time in Hollywood and how his experiences there informed his gifts as a politician. He is similarly casual about his father’s tenure as governor of California and as president, giving us a handful of personal anecdotes but appreciably little insight into how Ronald Reagan’s political thinking evolved or how his time in office shaped or reshaped his apprehension of the world.

The most revealing passages on the Reagan presidency — which have already made headlines — concern the author’s suggestion that his father had possibly begun to experience the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease while in office. Ron Reagan writes that his father “might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”

The younger Mr. Reagan also writes that he became so distressed about his father’s state of mind during the Iran-contra scandal — he describes him as “lost in a fog of depression and denial” — that he urged him over dinner to take more forceful action, while his mother, Nancy, sat by “in silent assent.”

Though his father had received the Tower report on the scandal a couple of days earlier, his son thought he “seemed woefully behind the curve, if not out of the loop altogether. He needed to own up to what he’d obviously approved (arms for hostages) and to make it clear that those who took part in the other part of the scheme (funds to the contras) would be prosecuted. I had come to the conclusion that a little tough love from his youngest might encourage him in the right direction.”

Given his father’s legendary “powers of denial” and his own guileless nature, Ron Reagan adds, the Iran-contra affair — with “its shady characters with murky motives, its architecture of internal betrayal” — would, in any case, have been “a perfect example of the sort of mess Dad was ill suited, at any age, in any condition, to anticipate, head off, or reckon with once it blew up in his face.”

From where did Ronald Reagan’s “preternatural talent for excising unpleasantness from his picture of reality” stem? What accounted for the firm boundaries of his “internal construct of the world”? Ron Reagan traces it all back to the former president’s childhood, when he coped with his own father’s episodes of drunkenness, his parents’ tension-filled marriage and his mother’s near death from the influenza epidemic of 1918 by developing a deep-seated rage for order and routine, and a penchant for retreating to a private realm of the imagination — “burrowing under the covers and into the fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs.” Later his job as a lifeguard would heighten his sense of solitary watchfulness, as well as shape his notions of heroism and ambition.

In these pages Ron Reagan reminds us that his father grew up in a small-town America vastly different from our own — “the shootout at the O.K. Corral was barely as distant” from his birth as “Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural is from us today.” He also argues that that America and his father’s temperament would indelibly mold the narrative Ronald Reagan would write (and edit and polish) for himself in which he always played the same role: “the loner, compassionate yet detached, who rides to the rescue in Reel 3” — a version of the role of heroic lifeguard he really played as a teenager, when he rescued an astonishing 77 people over the course of seven summers.

“My father didn’t create his personal narrative to put one over on anyone,” Ron Reagan writes. “On the contrary, with its creation, he was forming a template for his life. He wanted to be seen — he wanted to truly be — an estimable individual who made his way through life as a positive force in the world, a man people would admire for all the right reasons.” Keeping the “primary themes” of that story “intact and inviolate” was not a future president’s political act of willpower or spin but “an endeavor of existential import” for a boy grappling with “the depredations of an intrusive, ambiguous and contradictory world.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/id/2283940/

Would America Have Been Better
Off Without a Reagan Presidency?
His simple-mindedness had a touch of genius to it.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Saturday, Feb. 5, 2011, at 7:13 AM ET




The centennial memoir of his famous parent by Ron Reagan (My Father at 100 ), which at first sight looks as slight as its author, is better than many press reports might suggest. For example, the younger son by no means "cashes in" on the idea that our 40th president was suffering from Alzheimer's well before he left office; he simply adds his own private observations to what has since become perfectly obvious. A number of things apart from cognitive decay could have curtailed Reagan's two-term reign. He might easily have died after being shot in March 1981, and indeed he was much closer to death than anybody realized at the time. He should certainly have been impeached and removed from office over the Iran-Contra racket, in which he was exposed as the president of a secret and illegal government, financed with an anti-constitutional hostage-trading and arms-dealing budget, as well as of the ostensibly legitimate one. The question that keeps recurring to me is this: Would the country and the world have been better off without his tenure of the Oval Office?

I lived in Washington for most of those eight years, and for most of them would have replied with an unhesitating "yes." (To this day I refuse to call my local airport "Reagan," since before the name change it was Washington National, which means, thanks very much, that it was already named for a perfectly good ex-president.) Even now I can easily remember the things that outraged me: his easy manner when lying and his sometimes breathtakingly reactionary views. These extended from the whitewashing of the SS graves at Bitburg to his opinion that Americans fighting for the Spanish Republic had been on the "wrong" side, to his discovery that apartheid South Africa had always been an ally of the United States. Then there was the abject scuttle from Lebanon and the underhanded way in which Reagan tried to blame it on the Democrats. Perhaps worst of all was an apparent fusion of two things: his indulgence of fundamentalist and millennial priestly crooks like Jerry Falwell and his seeming flippancy about nuclear war. He once maintained that intercontinental missiles could be recalled after being launched, made on-air jokes about blasting the Soviet Union, and fatuously intoned "May the Force be with you" after announcing his plan for a Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." The coincidence between his superstitious interest in "End Times" theology and his insouciance about nuclear matters seemed dire in the extreme. And then there was Alexander Haig as secretary of state, and Oliver North as confidant, and the wife with the astrologer …

In a bizarre way, though, his simple-mindedness turns out to have had a touch of genius to it. His grasp of physics was on a level with Hollywood beam-weapon B-movies, and how we all laughed when he told Mikhail Gorbachev that, in the event of a Martian invasion of Earth, the United States and the Soviet Union would combine to sink their differences. But he had an insight that was denied to the adherents of Mutual Assured Destruction, whose theory was rapidly coming up against diminishing returns.

Young Reagan rightly draws attention to a forgotten moment at the forgotten Republican Convention of 1976. Having only narrowly defeated him, Gerald Ford felt obliged to call on Reagan to join him on stage after accepting the nomination. Reagan took his sweet time to come to the podium, where he was already the darling of many delegates. And having done so, he said not a word in praise of Ford or his running mate, Bob Dole. Instead, he spoke about being invited to contribute something to a "time capsule" that was being readied in Los Angeles and was scheduled to be opened 100 years later. Those who opened that capsule, said Reagan, would know whether or not Armageddon had been avoided. "We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons, that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in."

Of course there's an anachronistic contradiction there, in that had the weapons been used, the time capsule would never have been opened, but why quibble? It was an unusual way for the losing candidate of the right to address the faithful. A bit more than 10 years later, I was having a drink with Timothy Garton Ash in the Glasnost Café, as the coffee shop of the Marriott Hotel in Washington had been renamed while it hosted the joint press conferences of the Reagan and Gorbachev summit.* Outside, right-wing Republican nuts wearing Reagan masks were angrily flourishing umbrellas, in order to compare him to Neville Chamberlain in Munich. I said: "Well, we've lived to see it. The end of the goddam Cold War." Within a much shorter time, the Berlin Wall had gone, and I could verify from the people who had written Reagan's celebrated "tear down this wall" speech that he had insisted on the insertion of these words over the objections of many "realists."

It was extraordinary that, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan was dealing with a man who knew that the Soviet Union could not sustain the arms race and a man who was out of patience with the satraps of East Germany. To Gorbachev goes an enormous share of the credit. But if I run the thought experiment and ask myself whether Walter Mondale would have made a better interlocutor in 1987, I cannot make myself believe it. This does not involve un-saying any of the things about Reagan that his admirers would prefer us to forget. But it does acknowledge the distinction between a historic presidency and an average one. Reagan's friend Margaret Thatcher once said that the real test of her success was the way that she had changed the politics of the Labour Party. By that standard, the legacy of Reagan in permanently altering the political landscape is with us still.