Blogging Reagan Pt. II
I forgot to mention earlier that one of the inspirations for my interest in Ronald Reagan was Stephen Ambrose's discussion of writing a biography of Richard Nixon. In To America, Ambrose relays (via the acknowledgements to volume three of the biography) the effect that trying to understand Nixon had upon he and his wife:
The funny thing is, the more she got to know Richard Nixon, the less she liked him, while as for me, well, in volume one I developed a grudging admiration for the man. . . . In volume two I came to have a quite genuine and deep admiration for many of his policies. . . . And in volume three I found, to my astonishment, that I had developed almost a liking for him.
While I'm clearly not planning to become a presidential biographer, I do want to emulate the most important aspect of Ambrose's Nixon project: giving the subject a fair shake. I'm open to the possibility that I may end up hating Reagan, and the possibility that I may end up liking him. That said, I'd like to relay a couple of things from Noonan's book that I did really like.
The first thing that Noonan has accomplished is to treat Reagan like a human being, giving him some of the three-dimensionality that political partisans hate to see in their opponents. The childhood stories, particularly the effect of Reagan's alcoholic father, give a fair sense of where Reagan came from. That's a tremendously hard thing to do in such a short, popular biography, and Noonan is not entirely successful. But she does get at some very interesting material. For example, Noonan spends nearly three pages on the adamant opposition to racial discrimination that Reagan's parents felt, and how that manifested itself in the young Ronald Reagan. It's also interesting that he was raised (and for many years remained) as what came to be known as a New Deal liberal.
The stories about Ronald Reagan's football playing and radio days are appreciated as gap fillers if nothing else. As a young man looking into an unknown future, I always like to read about the (often humble) first jobs of the now rich or famous. The details about his acting career itself are pleasant but not particularly probative of anything about him. In contrast are two interludes that are so far the most interesting pieces of Ronald Reagan previously unknown to me.
The first is the role that Reagan played in the "Red Scare" that plagued Hollywood after World War II. Now I'm not going to take Noonan's account as authority on what exactly happened in those years, or how serious the threat actually was. But Noonan suggests, and I find this entirely convincing, that this was likely the most formative early political experience of Reagan's life:
These days were the crucible, the central experience of his adulthood, the great educator, the time that formed him and that he referred back to all of his life. "Back when we were fighting over the Communists and the unions and so forth..." When you worked with him it wasn't really his youth he talked about, or his young stardom that he referred to. More than broadcasting, more than acting, more than succeeding, this is what shaped the Reagan we came to know years later.
I remember when the Berlin Wall fell, but I had no idea what it meant except that it was good. For those of who never lived with Communism as a real force in the world, it is almost impossible to gain any sense of how people felt in those years. As such, it is easy to both over and under-estimate the role that fear of Communism played in the daily life. It is also difficult to know how much of that fear was justified. Nonetheless, it clearly played a big role in shaping Reagan's views, and his anti-communism seems to endure as one of his most revered qualities. From Noonan's account, Reagan does seem to have acted quite honorably during the crisis, both before and during his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild. The whole account is so interesting, I have the urge to pause and go find a book on the Hollywood Red Scare. Reading history can be problematic that way; too many interesting tangients.
The second fascinating account is that of Ronald Reagan as "goodwill ambassador" for General Electric. When his movie career began to decline, he began hosting a weekly television show owned by General Electric. More importantly for the story, his contract also required him to travel to and speak at all 139 GE plants nationwide:
Reagan thought he had probably met, in all, a quarter million GE employees. In the first few years he gave speeches about the joys of giving and the blessings of democracy. But in time, as he grew more conservative, so did his speeches.
Noonan might be stretching it a bit thin when she claims that the "freedom to speak his mind" offered by GE "gave him new insights into the nature of big business." Still, it is an interesting ideal and one I've struggled over:
He concluded from all this that opposition to big business should not be knee-jerk, should not reflect cultural conditioning. Some big businesses were pretty good, some not. It all depended on the integrity of the people who led them and staffed them.
Perhaps most striking about this time in Reagan's life is how preparatory it would be for a life in politics:
He'd walk miles and miles of assembly lines in the huge plants, shaking hands, asking questions, making a speech and then moving on. He didn't know it at the time but was spending his days as modern politicians do, as presidents often do.
In that sense, the line between celebrity and politician is rather small, and never moreso than in the "goodwill ambassador" position that Reagan held. As I was reading these passages, and the subsequent discussion of his run for governor of California, I couldn't help but think of another movie star-turned-California governor. I began the project thinking of similarities between George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but it is becoming clear that GWB might not be the only politician modelling themselves after Ronald Reagan.
