Reagan: The Life 0385536399, 9780385536394

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* * * * * * * * * * * * * FROM MASTER STORYTELLER AND NEW YORK

TIMES BESTSELLING HISTORIAN H. W. BRANDS COMES THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF A VISIONARY AND TRANSFORMATIVE PRESIDENT

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n his magisterial new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the twentieth cen­ tury, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how the confident force of Reagan's personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a con­ servative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today. Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the voice of The General Electric Theater on television made him an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began Reagan's improbable political ascen­ sion, starting in the 1960s, when he was first elected governor of California; and culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the United States. Employing archival sources not available to previous biographers and drawing on dozens of in­ terviews with surviving members of Reagan's ad­ ministration, Brands has crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative, of the presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagan's remote man­ agement style and fractious West Wing staff, his deft handling of public sentiment to transform the (continued on hack flap)

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MAY 1 5

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Also by H. W. Brands The Reckless Decade T.R. The First American The Age of Gold Lone Star Nation Andrew Jackson Traitor to His Class American Colossus The Murder ofJim Fiskfar the Love ofJosie Mansfield The Man Who Saved the Union

The Life

H.W Brands DOUBLEDAY

New York London

Toronto

Sydney Auckland

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from Iowa City Public Library

IOWA CITY MAY - - 2015 PUBLIC LIBRARY

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 distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. www.doubleday.com DOUBLE DAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photograph ofthe ABC story on the Reaganfamily © Bettmann/CORBIS All other photographs courtesy ofthe Ronald Reagan Library Book design by Michael Collica · Jacket design byJohn Fontana Jacket photograph by George Rose/Getty Images Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brands, H. W. Reagan : the life I 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-Politic_s and governinent-1981-1989. I. T itle. E877.B73 2015 973.927092-dc23 [BJ 2014038054 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 First Edition

CONTENTS

Prologue 1 PART ONE

Prairie Idyll: 1911-1934 7 PART TWO

The Golden West: 1935-1962 33 PART THREE

A Time for Choosing: 1962-1980 129 PART FOUR

Heroic Dreams: 1980-1983 239 PART FIVE

A Worthy Adversary: 1984-1986 429 PART SIX

The Frosty Iceland Air: 1986 -1988 561

PART SEVEN

A Ranch in the Sky: 1989-2004 703 Acknowledgments 739 Sources 741 Notes 747 Index 781

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PROLOGUE

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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

for desperate measures. Barry Goldwater's campaign was nearly broke, and the candidate was floundering. His opponent, Lyndon Johnson, the crafti­ est 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 com­ munist insurgency in Southeast Asia. In the process Johnson had made Goldwater look like a closet racist and a trigger-happy warmonger. Gold­ water 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 elec­ tion he turned to a proxy speaker, a political unknown from California, Ronald Reagan. Reagan faced desperation of a different kind, less public but more ESPERATE TIMES CALLED

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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 al_lure 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 com­ pany 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 p_ackaging 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

Prologue

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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 aban­ doned 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 con­ fused as to what the American federal debt had to do with the Castro revo­ lution 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. "Any­ time 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 pro­ vided 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 revo­ lution 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 com­ ing 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

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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 �er 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 gov­ ernment 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 regula­ tion 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 govern­ ment 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 con­ sidered 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."

Prologue

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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 will­ ing 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, sur­ prisingly for a Republican, to Franklin Roosevelt. "You and I have a ren­ dezvous 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 thousancl years of darkness."

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

THE SPEECH CAME

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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 nam� 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. Per­ haps 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 hap­ pened 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 sud­ denly 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 what�ver decision I make will be based on what I think will provide the most good."

PART ONE

PRAIRIE IDYLL 1911-1934

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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 Rea­ gan 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 EAGAN REMEMBERED THREE

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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 Mon­ mouth, 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 hero­ ism. 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.

NELLE REAGAN EXPLAINED her husband's weakness in terms intended to elicit the boys' sympathy and understanding. "Nelle tried so hard �o 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 drink­ ing," 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

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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 exam­ ple. 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 mak­ ing 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 pic­ ture 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. Reagan told another story that Jack had told him. On the road for work, Jack checked into a hotel where the proprietor assured him, "You'll like it here, Mr. Reagan. We don't permit a Jew in the place." Jack grabbed his suitcase and turned to leave. "I'm a Catholic," he declared. "If it's come to the point where you won't take Jews, then some day you won't take me either." Jack Reagan spent that cold night in his car.

NEIL REAGAN WAS socially adept and a good athlete, with little trou­ ble finding a niche after each of the family's moves. Ronnie, two and a half years younger, wasn't so lucky. The frequent relocations left him disconcerted. "I was forever the new kid in school," he remembered with retrospective anxiety. "During one period of four years, I attended four different schools." Neil's grace at sports eluded him. "I was small and spent a lot of time at the bottom of pile-ons in sandlot football games. In

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baseball, I was forever striking out or suffering the indignity of missing an easy fly ball. I was so lousy at baseball that when our group was choos­ ing up sides for a game, I was �lways the last kid chosen. I remember one time when I was in the eighth grade. I was playing second base and a ball was hit straight toward me but I didn't realize it. Everybody was looking at me, expecting me to catch it. I just stood there. The ball landed behind me and everybody said, 'Oh, no!"' Decades later the memory still stung. ((You don't forget things like that." Some of his trouble was myopia, which glasses partially remedied, albeit at the cost of his being taunted as ((Four-Eyes." He preferred the nickname Dutch, originally for the way Nelle cut his hair. But the dam­ age to his psyche had been done. ((I had a lot of trouble convincing myself I was good enough to play with the other kids, a deficiency of confidence that's not a small matter when you're growing up in a youthful world dom­ inated by sports and games. I was always the first to think: I can't make the team. I'm not as good as Jack orJim or Bill." In one respect, though, he was as good as the others. Nelle Reagan contributed to the cultural life of Dixon by organizing amateur perfor­ mances at her church, where participants delivered passages from books, plays, poems, or speeches they had committed to memory. Nelle per­ formed and loved the experience. She encouraged her sons to join her. Neil accepted readily; Dutch required convincing. But she persisted and even­ tually won him over. ((Summoning my courage," he recalled, ((I walked up to the stage that night, cleared my throat, and made my theatrical debut. I don't remember what 'I said, but I'll never forget the response: People laughed and applauded. That was a new experience for me and I liked it. I liked that approval. For a kid suffering childhood pangs of insecurity, the applause was music."

his fondness for stories. Reagan was an early reader, with a sticky memory. The tales of the Rover Boys, of Tarzan and Frank Merriwell, provided escape from his father's drinking and smoothed the rough edges of life for the new kid struggling to fit in. Someday, he dreamed, his world would be like that of the popular, athletic Merriwell. Stories also provided a rare chance to bond with his father, who taught him how to spin a yarn. ((He had a wry, mordant humor," Reagan remem­ bered of J�ck. ((He was the best raconteur I ever heard, especially when it came to the smoking-car sort of stories." Nelle took exception to her hus-

THE MU.SIC FED

Prairie Idyll

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band's bawdy tales, but on this point her son sided with his father. "Jack always made clear to us that there was a time and place for this sort of anecdote; he drew a sharp line between lusty vulgar humor and filth. To this day I agree with his credo and join Jack and Mark Twain in asserting that one of the basic forms of American humor is the down-to-earth wit of the ordinary person, and the questionable language is justified if the point is based on real humor." An inspiring teacher encouraged young Reagan's storytelling. B. J. Frazer informed the students in his ninth-grade English class that good writing should be entertaining as well as informative. "That prodded me to be imaginative with my essays," Reagan recalled. "Before long he was asking me to read some of my essays to the class, and when I started get­ ting a few laughs, I began writing them with the intention of entertaining the class. I got more laughs and realized I enjoyed it as much as I had those readings at church." His stories displayed various motifs. '"Twas the night of Hallowe'en, but nothing was still," he wrote in one. "The good people went to sleep that memorial"-presumably "memorable"-"Saturday night with the sounds of laughter, running feet, and muffled shouts ringing in their ears. Then they were peaceful, and only then, at twelve o'clock, a gasping, panting roar awakened the town." The town's pranksters have been at work in the dark beyond the rail station. "The freight due from the north was vainly :fighting to get over a hundred foot stretch of greased track." Eventually, the engineer coaxes his engine and cars beyond the slippery spot. "But the next morning a greater shock came. The city was transformed, but less beautiful. The telephone poles were artistically draped with porch furni­ ture, signs, and various parts of buggys and wagons. The streets looked like rummage sales, while schools and stores found their doorways piled with representatives of the last nights"-here the sentence ends, short a word or two and an apostrophe. The story concludes with a flourish: "But alas! Except for an occasional chair on a telephone pole, the scene was soon shattered by the respective owners of the collected articles." In eleventh grade he crafted a longer tale. "Mark had, with an air of mystery and promise, insisted that I dine with him," it began. Mark and the narrator are students at Yale-the alma mater of Frank Merriwell­ and they are visiting New York City for the day. "Here we were, in one of those little cafes tucked in a cranny just off Broadway, a place without the elegance of famous places, and without the soiled squalor of the Bowery, a place that defied any attempt to classify it." They overhear two men

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seated nearby discussing a nefarious plot. "One was a tall dark man with glittering black eyes and a lean hard jaw. His companion, who seemed to do most of the talking, was a. swarthy, dark haired man, short and stout with a pointed Van Dyke beard and a pointed waxed mustache. Suddenly we heard the talkative man hiss, 'Fool! bombs are too bungling. Gas is smooth and silent.' My heart suddenly cross-blocked my liver and my adams apple drop-kicked a tonsil." The conspirators depart the restaurant but leave behind a piece of paper, which Mark snatches up. The paper has a diagram of the U.S. Treasury building in Washington. "The word gas seared through my brain like a hurtling meteorite. For outlined in red ink on the map was the complete ventilation system of the Treasury building." Mark and the narrator stare at each other. "We were speechless. It did not seem possible that two mere undergraduates of Yale should stand alone between this gang of maniacs and the horrible tragedy outlined on that soiled paper." But they have to try. They race to the local police station and convey their intelligence to the sergeant, who piles them into his squad car to chase down the plotters. They catch them, only to have the desperate pair laugh in their faces. They are not criminals at all, but fugitives from a mental asylum, as Mark discovers from a newspaper conveniently at hand. "He held before our startled eyes a screaming headline, 'Lunatics Escape. Reward.' Beneath these startling words were photographs of our new found friends. So the honor of 'old Eli' was upheld." B.]. Frazer headed Dixon High's drama program when he wasn't teaching English, and he encouraged Reagan to try out. Reagan did so gladly, seeking more of that welcome music. By this time he had out­ grown a bit of his shyness, not least by discovering a sport, football, that required neither keen eyesight nor particular coordination in those who played the line. Yet the sensitivities of earlier days remained, and perform­ ing onstage continued to ease them. "For a teenager still carrying around some old feelings of insecurity, the reaction of my classmates was more music to. my ears," he said. The experience grew more habit-forming with each curtain call. "By the time I was a senior, I was so addicted to student theatrical productions that you couldn't keep me out of them." In later years he would reflect on the phenomenon. "There's some­ thing about the entertainment world that attracts people who may have had youthful feelings of shyness or insecurity," he observed. "After I went to Holl�ood, some of the most successful people I met-a lot of actors and great comedians like Jack Benny, for example-would just sit quietly, even shyly, at a party while some of the funniest people were writers who

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took center stage and became the real show-offs. It made me wonder if some entertainers hadn't gravitated to their calling because they' d been a little insecure and the job gave them a chance to be someone they're not, at least for a while."

AMERICANS LIKED STORIES as much as Reagan did, and for simi­ lar reasons. America's national youth had been difficult. Where the inhabitants of other countries drew their common identities from shared histories and long attachment to particular pieces of ground, Americans­ overwhelmingly immigrants and their offspring-shared little except a rejection of the lands whence they came. New kids all, they sought a com­ mon story, a cultural glue that gave their disparate experiences a collective meanmg. They found their most satisfying story in what they came to call American exceptionalism. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachu­ setts Bay Colony, declared the Puritan settlement a "city upon a hill": a model to people everywhere. Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence placed their dispute with Britain squarely in "the course of human events," not simply events of North America or the British Empire. The exponents of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s spoke of America's divinely ordained mission to spread the blessings of liberty and democracy from sea to sea. Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg declared the Civil War a struggle to determine whether government of, by, and for the people would perish not merely from America but from the earth. Advocates of overseas expansion during the 1890s updated the Manifest Destiny argument, alternately asserting a Christian duty to baptize hea­ thens and citing Darwin to explain American superiority as the result of the competitive struggle among peoples and cultures. By the early twentieth century the concept of American exceptional­ ism was rooted firmly in the national psyche. Woodrow Wilson led Amer­ ica into World War I contending that only the example and guidance of the United States, the most selfless of nations and the most developed democracy, could enable Western civilization to survive the horrendous destruction it was inflicting on itself. Western civilization did survive, but barely, and American exceptionalism turned inward as it became clear that the world wasn't ready for America's regenerative leadership. Young Reagan adopted the widely held belief that Wilson had made a terrible misjudgment in leading America to war. Recalling the fate of the troops

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he'd cheered off to battle, he reflected, "I think the realization that some of those boys to whom I'd waved on the troop train later died on Euro­ pean soil made me an isolationist for a long time." The reaction against the Wilsonian project included a rejection of the liberalism that had carried Wilson into office. The 1920s were the most conservative decade in memory. A ban on alcohol was written into the Constitution; state legislatures outlawed the teaching of evolution; a "red scare" swept the land in the wake of the foreign revolutions the, world war spawned; xenophobia inspired a drastic curtailment of immigration and contributed to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. After nearly two decades during which the powers of government had consistently grown, Ameri­ cans turned away from government toward the private sector. "The chief business of America is business," Calvin Coolidge said, and most of his compatriots agreed. It helped Coolidge's case that American business thrived during the 1920s. The automobile industry became a mainstay of the industrial sec­ tor after General Motors introduced annual model changes that caused motorists to view their vehicles as assertions of identity rather than mere instruments of locomotion. Electrical appliances entered millions of households, transforming daily life and creating the perception of needs where none had existed before. Real estate and housing boomed, espe­ cially in Florida and other sunny climes. The stock market soared, qua­ drupling in value and creating millionaires too many to count. Yet the wealth wasn't spread evenly. The cities flourished, but the farm sector languished. Commodity prices never regained their wartime levels, though farmers continued to hope they would. And when the farmers planted according to their hopes, overproduction and low prices became chronic.

YouNG REAGAN DIDN'T analyze the nation's economy, but he felt the effects of the farm squeeze. While his father's line of work was selling shoes, not corn or hogs, when the farmers who lived near Dixon and might have been Jack Reagan's customers couldn't sell their corn and hogs, they didn't buy his shoes. Neil and Dutch never went hungry, but they knew the family was living month to month. They worked when they could, Dutch most regularly as a lifeguard in Dixon's riverside Lowell Park. He liked the' job, not least because it conferred a certain stature. He wore a shirt with "Life Guard" emblazoned on the chest and exercised authority

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over his waterfront domain. He afterward boasted of saving seventy-seven people in several summers on the job, although more than a few of these denied needing rescue. "'I would have been fine if you' d let me alone,' was their theme," Reagan remarked later. "'You made a fool out of me trying to make a hero out of yourself.'" But whatever the rescue count, which he meticulously notched in a tree branch by the river, he carried an impor­ tant responsibility on his broadening shoulders. And his paycheck helped cover the family bills. Yet lifeguarding wasn't a career, or even a year-round job. As high school graduation approached, he had to consider alternatives. College in the 1920s was the preserve of the few; neither of his parents had attended college, nor had Neil made a start. But a girl in his class had her sights on college, and he had his sights on her. Margaret Cleaver was the daughter of the minister of the church Reagan attended with Nelle. She was pert and pretty and less enamored of him than he was of her. "She was (strange as it sounds) grown up enough to know we weren't any of us grown up enough to call this anything but friendship," he recalled. "Me? I was in love." Margaret's older sisters had gone to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ school between Peoria and Bloomington, a hundred miles south of Dixon. Margaret intended to follow their lead. Reagan would likely have gone to college even without Margaret's positive example. His mother continued to insist that her sons make some­ thing of themselves, something more than their father. Neil resisted the urging, identifying more and more openly with Jack. He had Jack's dark charm and discovered a liking for alcohol. He announced that he was for­ saking his mother's church, the Disciples, for his father's Catholicism­ prompting Nelle to explain tearfully that he had been baptized a Catholic as an infant. And he defied Nelle's wish that he go to college, opting instead for wage labor at the local cement plant. Reagan, by contrast, identified with his mother. Some of this was her doing: she kept him out of the Catholic baptismal font and cultivated those interests of his that matched hers. Dutch repaid her by being the good boy, the polite one who made people laugh, who worshipped with the Disciples, who took up with the minister's daughter. He was the one Nelle would be proud of. He saw his mother trapped in Dixon, in a dismal marriage to a man who lacked competence and ambition. For her vicari­ ous sake as well as his own future, he determined that he had to get out of Dixon. College was his escape. Nelle approved of Eureka College on religious grounds; Reagan was

18

REAGAN

more taken by its football team. A Dixon football hero had gone to greater fame at Eureka; Reagan imagined himself doing likewise. "I had never seen Eureka College but it was my choice," he explained later. Margaret Cleaver's decision for Eureka s'ealed the deal. Money was a problem, but Reagan talked his way into a partial schol­ arship and a job that would cover the cost of his meals; the rest of his expenses would come from a savings account he had built with his pay from lifeguarding.

football glory at Eureka weren't unreason­ able, for the college was tiny, with a mere 250 students, many of them girls. Surely he could stand out among such a small group. But he lacked talent. "Dutch? I put him at end on the fifth string," his coach, Ralph McKinzie, recalled decades later. There was no lower string than fifth, and the team turned no one away. "The first year I never let him on the field to play a game. Guess he hated me for it. But I had a team to consider. He was nearsighted, you know. Couldn't see worth a damn. Ended up at the bottom of the heap every time and missed the play because he couldn't see the man or the ball moving on him." McKinzie acknowledged Rea­ gan's resolve. "Gotta say he was a regular at practice. And took his knocks." But he just wasn't cut out for the gridiron. "Don't know why he persisted at football. He had this dream I guess of becoming a big football star. He liked being close to the field even when he wasn't playing a game. Used to take an old broom from the locker room and pretend it was a microphone and 'announce' the game play by play afterwards." Reagan learned the formations and plays, but to no avail. "Just couldn't execute what he knew," McKinzie said. He fared better on the stage. He appeared in several campus dramatic productions, taking the lead in some. The drama coach entered her troupe in a one-_act competition at Northwestern University, near Chicago. The Eureka team came in third of twelve, and Reagan was recognized indi­ vidually. "The head of Northwestern's Drama Department sent for me and asked if I'd ever considered the stage as a career," Reagan recalled afterward. Margaret's father and mother took Reagan and Margaret to see a touring production of the play journey's End, set in wartime France. Rea­ gan later'remembered the leading character's effect on him. "War-weary, young but bitterly old Captain Stanhope carried me into a new world. REAGAN'S DREAMS OF

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For two and a half hours I was in that dugout on the Western front-but in some strange way, I was also on stage. More than anything in life I wanted to speak his lines to the young replacement officer who misunder­ stands and sees callousness in his effort to hide grief. That deep silence, the slow coming to his feet, then the almost whispered, 'My God, so that's it! You think I don't care! You bloody little swine, you think I don't care­ the only one who knew-who really understood.'" Yet Reagan's most memorable performance at Eureka came not onstage, and certainly not on the football field, but in student politics. The college was chronically strapped for money, and in his freshman year its president proposed to balance the books by eliminating various courses and laying off the faculty who taught them. The trustees sup­ ported the president. The faculty resisted the reductions, but it was the student response that had the larger effect. Seniors and juniors discovered that courses they required for graduation were suddenly unavailable; they complained that the college was reneging on its commitment to them. The students formed a committee to weigh their options; Reagan served as a representative of the freshman class. Members of the committee suggested a strike, a student boycott of classes. The idea caught on, but the committee leaders judged that it would carry the greatest weight if put forward by a freshman, a member of the class with the least immediate self-interest in the matter. Someone knew Reagan and suggested him. He accepted the assignment. "I' d been told that I should sell the idea so there' d be no doubt of the outcome," he remembered. He took the advice and prepared an elaborate brief on behalf of the students and against the president and trustees. "I reviewed the history of our patient negotiations with due emphasis on the devious manner in which the trustees had sought to take advantage of us." Reagan was thrilled by the response. "I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar-even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine." Thirty years later he could still taste the victory. "Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through 'every Middlesex village and farm'-without horses yet," he said, riffing on Longfellow's rendering of Paul Revere's ride. The strike prompted the trustees to reconsider and the president to resign. It made Reagan a presence on campus. He never became a football

20

REAGAN

hero, though he eventually earned more playing time. He was a first-rate swimmer, from his years as a lifeguard, and he represented the college in meets. But swimming was a minor sport and didn't have the cachet of football. He was active in student government, working his way to elec­ tion as student body president. He joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he enjoyed a fra­ ternal comeuppance. Manual labor had lost its charm for Neil, and he decided to give college a try. He came to Eureka and pledged Reagan's fraternity, a year behind his younger brother, who was expected to haze him along with the rest of the pledges. Reagan later claimed to have faked the whacks, delivered to the buttocks with a wooden paddle drilled with holes to raise blisters. Neil remembered things differently. "I became the younger brother," he said. And he was treated like a younger brother, only more harshly. "Anytime I heard the shout 'Assume the position, Reagan' and grabbed my ankles, I knew the whack I got from him was going to be worse than the others because he felt he had to; otherwise they' d accuse him of showing partisanship." Reagan loved everything about Eureka except its reason for being: academics. He was a thoroughly indifferent student, unmotivated and insufficiently brilliant to make good grades without effort. He studied economics, the closest thing Eureka offered to a curriculum in business, in hopes it might prove practical after graduation. But he was an optimist at heart, and neither the theory nor the practice of the dismal science engaged him. History was too backward-looking for a young man with an eye on the future. French might be good for the French, but what did an American need with it? Reagan's attitude toward his studies was purely instrumental: he worked no harder than his extracurriculars required. "My principal academic ambition at Eureka was to maintain the C average I needed to remain eligible," he confessed afterward. English was the rare subject that sometimes inspired him, when he could exercise his storytelling skills. One of his short stories involved what the protagonist called "the A.E.F. suicide club," for the doomed soldiers of World War I. A doughboy named Edwards reflects on the experience of a younger soldier, Bering. "Edwards was not old himself, but his thirty years had robbed him of some of Bering's optimism, his idealism and youth. A lump came to his throat as he listened to the boy talk of sacrifice and glory and heroism and he cursed mentally at a world so ordered that once every generation it must be bathed in the blood of youth like this one." A half century later Reagan would offer public paeans to the sac-

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rifice of men like Bering, but in 1931 he could see little but folly in their efforts. Bering, in Reagan's story, survives the war yet sustains permanent physical and emotional injuries. He never regains his grounding in life. Reagan's story ended with Edwards, years later, reading a short piece in the newspaper: "A tramp, David Bering, met his death today beneath the wheels of a Santa Fe freight. Bering, an ex-service man, had been gassed in the war and was bumming his way to the Speedway veterans hospital for treatment. He attempted to board the moving train and lost his foot­ ing. He was thrown under the wheels when he fell. Notices have been broadcasted but no relatives or friends have claimed the body. He will be buried in the potters field."

2

A

to Dixon, I fell in love with the movies," Rea­ gan recalled. "I couldn't count the number of hours I spent in the darkness of our only moviehouse with William S. Hart and Tom Mix galloping over the prairie or having my eyes turned misty by the cinematic perils that befell Mary Pickford and Pearl White." His mother's sister came for a visit, and the whole family went to the theater to watch the weekly silent film. "I don't remember its name, but it featured the adventures of a freckle-faced young boy and I enjoyed it a lot. Afterward, I overheard my aunt talking to my mother about this young star and saying she thought I had the potential to become a child actor. 'If he was mine,' she said, 'I'd take him to Hollywood if I had to walk all the way.'" Nelle Reagan wasn't about to walk to Hollywood; she had her hands full holding the family together in Dixon. But her sister's attitude was widely shared in the years after World War I. Hollywood's grip on the American imagination was new but more seductive for its novelty. Pho­ tographers and inventors had tried to get pictures to move in the late nine­ teenth century; Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope accomplished the feat, for one viewer at a time, in 1894. By the turn of the century peep shows had become picture shows, and the 1903 Great Train Robbery, a twelve-minute drama set in the West but shot in New Jersey, promised a heady future for the new medium. That future unfolded in California. Early movie cameras required daylight to make their recordings, and Southern California's glorious weather allowed more days of outdoor shooting than almost anywhere else in the country. By 1910, Hollywood, a community west of downtown Los Angeles that had begun life as the brainchild of real estate developers, FTER WE MOVED

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was attracting some of the budding industry's best talent. D. W. Griffith shot The Birth of a Nation there; the tendentious depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction that appalled Jack Reagan and other advocates of racial equality riveted large audiences who paid the exorbitant price of $2 to see the three-hour film. By 1920 several motion-picture studios, Hol­ lywood's answer to Henry Ford's assembly line, were together churning out hundreds of movies per year. In the process they were making stars. The actors in the earliest films hadn't been credited, but audiences nonetheless came to have favorites. Some studios resisted promoting these favorites, fearing they would demand higher wages. Yet the shrewder executives recognized the poten­ tial for establishing brand names, and they signed the crowd-pleasers to long-term contracts. The star system was born. It was the star system that drew the attention of Nelle Reagan's sister and the millions of Americans who dreamed that they or their children would go to Hollywood and acquire fame and wealth. Both attributes were on gaudy display in the movie capital in the 1920s. Mary Pickford, the object of Dutch Reagan's filmic affections, earned half a million dol­ lars a year before becoming a movie mogul herself as a founding partner­ with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks-of the United Artists studio. Pickford and Fairbanks were romantic partners as well as business associates; their romance was a sensation, partly because it began while each was married to someone else but mostly because it seemed a match made in Hollywood heaven. Their lavish wedding provided reams of copy for the rapidly growing movie press; their Beverly Hills estate, Pickfair, was soon the most popular stop on the homes-of-the-stars tours that became a staple of Southern California tourism.

Hollywood grew more essential to the American psyche when the 1920s crashed to a close with a stock market collapse in the final months of the decade. The bubble in share prices- had grown unsus­ tainable, and when it burst, it knocked the wind out of Wall Street. The woes of the financial industry became the agony of America when the country was rudely awakened to the fact that bankers had been playing the market with depositors' money. Their losses triggered defaults by their banks, leaving depositors without cash or recourse. The federal govern­ ment might have salvaged the situation by flooding the financial markets with money; in fact the dominant figure on the Federal Reserve Board,

THE MAGIC OF

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Benjamin Strong, had advocated readying just such a response as the stock bubble grew. But Strong died untimely and his successors lacked the nerve to open the spigots, and the.money supply shrank by a strangling one­ third. Prices plunged, merchants canceled orders, and manufacturers laid off workers in a vicious circle that continlled until a quarter of the work­ force lacked jobs. Reagan had the good luck to be in college during the first two years of the depression but the bad luck to graduate, in June 1932, when conditions were worse than ever. He recalled the Christmas Eve of his senior year; he and Neil were at home when Jack received a special-delivery letter. Jack read the letter and muttered, "Well, it's a hell of a Christmas present." He had lost his job. Reagan sent Nelle money during his last semester to help with the grocery bill, and he resolved anew not to wind up like Jack. He returned to lifeguarding for his postgraduation summer, but this bought him barely two months. Come autumn, he'd have to compete with the many other unemployed for a permanent job. He knew what he wanted to do; he just couldn't figure out how to do it. His love for movies had only grown, as had his appetite for the applause that kept his anxiet­ ies at bay. He had followed the careers of Tom Mix and Mary Pickford, and he imagined himself on the screen beside them. "By my senior year at Eureka, my secret dream to be an actor was firmly planted," he remem­ bered. But he kept it secret lest his friends and acquaintances consider him egotistically odd. "To say I wanted to be a movie star would have been as eccentric as saying I wanted to go to the moon," he explained. "If I had told anyone I was setting out to be a movie star, they'd have carted me off to an institution." " To disguise his dream, he charted a path he considered more con­ ventional. Radio was a newer medium than movies, with the first regular broadcasts postdating the war. But it caught on quickly, and soon radio sets-typically large consoles, often in handsome wood cabinets-had become -a standard feature in middle-class households. Sports broadcasts were an early staple of programming; for many Americans the age of radio began when the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, aired the 1921 heavyweight boxing championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. Soon the voices of sports announcers were almost as familiar as the faces of Hollywood movie stars. Reagan spent his teens listening to radio stations broadcasting from Chicago; their signals covered Dixon and much of the rest of northern Illinois. He supposed that sports radio could be a step on his road to

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the movies; at least it was in the field of public entertainment. And its announcers enjoyed the fame he sought. So he decided that after his last season as a lifeguard ended, he would try to find a job in radio. He bade farewell to Margaret Cleaver, who herself was departing to take a teach­ ing job in a distant Illinois town, and headed to Chicago. He arrived with high hopes. Chicago had lots of stations and, presum­ ably, room for at least one more announcer. Yet several fruitless visits to stations produced nothing. A kindly woman in one of the offices told him why. "This is the big time," she said. "No one in the city wants to take a chance on inexperience." He should go out to smaller cities and towns and interview with stations there. "They can't afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance." Reagan returned to Dixon and talked his father into lending him the family car, a worn Oldsmobile, for a small-town tour. Davenport, Iowa, was just across the Mississippi River from Illinois, seventy-five miles west of Dixon. A series of futile visits to radio stations there made him think the Chicago woman had simply wanted to get rid of him. Eventually, he found himself at station WOC. The program director told him he had arrived too late; the station had had an opening but had filled it just the day before. Reagan's frustration overcame his usual politeness. He stalked out of the office saying, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, "How the hell can you get to be a sports announcer if you can't even get a job at a radio station?" Something about Reagan appealed to the program director, who fol­ lowed him out into the hall. Peter MacArthur was a blunt-spoken Scots­ man with arthritic knees; his two canes clacked on the wooden floor while his brogue demanded, "Hold on, you big bastard!" Reagan stopped. "vVhat was that you said about sports announcing?" MacArthur inquired. Reagan replied that he wanted to be a sports announcer someday. "Do you know anything about football?" MacArthur asked. Reagan said he had played in high school and college. MacArthur of(ered him an audi­ tion. He took Reagan to an empty sound studio and put him in front of a microphone. "I'll be in another room listening. Describe an imaginary football game to me and make me see it." Reagan hadn't been expecting this, but he wasn't going to miss the first opportunity his job search had yielded. He recalled a game Eureka had won in the last seconds. He knew the action and the players' names, and he launched in. "Here we are in the fourth quarter with Western State University leading Eureka College six to nothing." He added color:

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"Long blue shadows are settling over the field and a chill wind is blowing in through the end of the stadium." Eureka didn't have a stadium, only bleachers, but Reagan guessed MacArthur wouldn't know the difference. He proceeded to the decisive final play. In real life Reagan had missed his assigned block in the secondary, but the ballcarrier got through anyway to score the tying touchdown. In Reagan's retelling, he obliterated the line­ backer, creating the crucial opening for the game-tying score. The extra point sealed the victory. Reagan described the delirious fans, recapped the outcome, and closed: "We return you now to our main studio." MacArthur clattered in from the control booth. "Ye did great, ye big SOB," he said. "Be here Saturday, you're broadcasting the Iowa-Minnesota Homecoming game. You'll get $5 and bus fare." The game day came. Reagan discovered that he wouldn't be alone in the press box; a veteran announcer would share the duties. Reagan called the first quarter, the other man the second, Reagan the third. He expected to hand off the microphone again for the fourth quarter, but MacArthur phoned Reagan's partner and told him to let the new fellow finish. Reagan concluded that he had passed his live test. MacArthur offered him $10 a game for Iowa's three remaining home games. Reagan was thrilled to accept and delighted to be a high-profile sports announcer. The Big Ten was the best football conference in the country, and to call its games was a remarkable feat for someone so new to the business. Unfortunately, hi$ job terminated with the season's end. Basketball and other winter sports had nothing like football's following, and the sta­ tion had no work for him. MacArthur said he' d keep him in mind for the following season, but he couldn't make any promises.

REAGAN COULD NOT have lost his job at a bleaker time. The depression had prompted thousands of jobless, often homeless veterans of the war to march to Washington to petition for early payment of the pension they had been promised, lest they expire before they reached the statutory age. Herbert Hoover, the self-made millionaire whose precrash election had seemed confirmation of the business-oriented policies of that Republican era, grew alarmed at their presence. He envisioned a Bolshevik revolu­ tion toppling America's capitalist democracy, and he ordered the army to drive the petitioners away. The operation, headed by Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, who shared Hoover's red fears, proved a tragic fiasco

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as the soldiers scattered the pitiful vets, burned their makeshift shelters and many of their meager belongings, and, in the process, killed the baby daughter of one of the protesters. The country recoiled at Hoover's over­ reaction; Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for president, turned to his friend Felix Frankfurter and declared, "Well, Felix, this will elect me." It, and the deepening depression, did just that. Reagan was one of the twenty-three million Americans who in November 1932 voted for Roosevelt, and with them and more than a few of the sixteen million who voted for Hoover, he looked to the new president to stanch the econo­ my's bleeding. But Roosevelt wouldn't be inaugurated until four months after the election, as inaugurations occurred in March in those days, and it wasn't clear the country could survive until then. The banking sys­ tem staggered under the weight of stock losses and bad loans; its distress caused depositors to fear for the security of their deposits. Few deposits were insured, and the depositors raced to withdraw their funds before the banks collapsed. These "runs" precipitated the very result the depositors feared; dozens, then scores, then hundreds and thousands of banks closed their doors. The entire financial structure of the United States teetered at the edge of an abyss. As if the moment weren't fraught enough, Roosevelt was nearly assas­ sinated just weeks before he was to take his inaugural oath. The deranged gunman missed Roosevelt but killed a member of his traveling party, the mayor of Chicago. The incident intimated that Hoover had been right in declaring democracy in danger, if perhaps wrong about the direction from which the danger came. Reagan didn't record his reaction to Roosevelt's instantly famous inaugural address, with its reassurance that America had nothing to fear but fear itself. Nor did he comment directly on the initial measures Roo­ sevelt adopted to stem the bank panic. But after Congress, convened in special session at Roosevelt's summons, rubber-stamp