The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
An 874-page biography of Ronald Reagan is something I normally would not purchase, especially when its list price is $35.00. But when I saw a copy of Dutch at our local library used book sales counter for two dollars (half price that day), which looked as though it had never been opened, let alone read, I couldn’t pass it up. “Deals which are steals” are in my blood; what can I say?
Ronald Reagan grew up in Dixon, Illinois, although he was born in Tampico, Illinois, a two-hour drive south of Dixon at the time he was born. I was born in Dixon. When I was a little boy, I heard much about Ronald Reagan, who by then had become a famous, if never quite excellent, movie star. My friend Jimmy Gorman lived in one of the many houses that “Dutch” Reagan had lived in throughout the town. (His ne’er-do-well father had a habit of stiffing landlords of several months’ rent before moving on to the next domicile where he would summarily stiff that owner. By all accounts, Jack Reagan was not an admirable man.)
Reagan graduated from Eureka College in Illinois, where Edmund Morris was also a contemporary student. Morris was to complete a prize-winning two-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan requested Morris to write his own official biography. Morris knew Reagan slightly in when the future President was a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River in Dixon, but he knew him better in college. Fifty years later, the President decided Morris would be the proper man to write his life story. Since Morris first knew Reagan as Dutch, Dutch he was called in the excellent biography. Morris did not identify strongly at all with Reagan’s politics, but he was captivated by Reagan the man, as was I, reading the biography.
It happened that I started Dutch on a flight to Arizona last November. Lois and I went there to see friends and to spend a few days with a cousin of mine, Stevie Stuart. I am partly of Scottish descent, and related, apparently, to the Stuart monarchs of Scotland, although that is a distinction that in my opinion is not distinctive and is even eminently extinguishable. But Stevie revels in her Scots heritage, and in the Quaker Oats Company, of which her direct forebears (and my very much less direct ones) were among the founders.
When Stevie saw me reading Dutch, she bequeathed me her copy of The Reagan Diaries, selected readings from the daily diary Ronald Reagan kept during his White House years. Mr. Reagan had never kept a diary before, but he thought it would be a good idea to do so as President. Indeed it was. It is a fascinating book, edited, incidentally, by the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley frequently appears on television news programs, especially these days.
Frankly, I could not imagine ever being enraptured by reading every word of Dutch and the 767 pages of The Reagan Diaries, but I was, and I did. And it all happened serendipitously because I got such a deal at the Hilton Head Library Auxiliary Used Book Emporium.
In every presidential election from 1960 through 1976 I voted for the Republican candidate. I was raised in a Republican family, starting in Dixon, and it seemed like the proper thing to do. However, when Ronald Reagan challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980, and I was not quite ready to vote for either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, I voted instead for John Anderson, an independent presidential candidate from Rockford, Illinois, about forty miles up the road from Dixon. Anderson was a moderate Republican who represented that congressional district in northern Illinois. He seemed like the best of the three candidates to me. Reagan crushed Carter, and both of the major candidates obliterated Anderson. So much for my first and last foray in voting for an independent presidential aspirant.
Anyway, all these memories came back to me as I paged through the biography and the diaries. By means of both, I gained an appreciation for Ronald Reagan that I am forced to admit I had never allowed myself to acquire. I still am opposed to most of his political decisions and stances, but surprisingly I came to admire the man.
In his youth, and through his first two decades in Hollywood, when he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was an FDR Democrat. Then, through a variety of factors, he became not only a Republican, but an usually conservative one at that.
However, Dutch (to use the Morris nomenclature) was temperamentally very unlike many of today’s conservative GOP members, both in and out of Congress. He was basically a peaceable soul who detested confrontation. Certain Presidents revel in firing subordinates, as has recently become apparent. Reagan was not such a President. Perhaps because of his strained relationship with his father, he always wanted to try to get along with everyone, and he succeeded with nearly everyone, even when others strongly disagreed with his policies.
Lyndon Johnson was a consummate arm-twister. Reagan was a masterful schmoozer and raconteur. Politically, his sunny demeanor served him well, first in Sacramento and then in Washington. Those who hated Ronald Reagan the man were probably, by definition, hateful individuals themselves.
This is not to say that President Reagan was the brightest bulb ever to illuminate the Presidency, nor was he the most educated student of American history who ever resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To his credit, he was a man who surrounded himself with able advisors and administrators, and then he let them do their work, never undermining them, even if perhaps they occasionally needed some presidential guidance. (Iran-Contra and Ollie North come to mind.) He believed a presidential administration should administer, and he encouraged them to do just that. Some Presidents come across as micromanagers. (Messrs. Carter and Clinton come to mind.)
In the biography and in the diaries, Reagan never appears to be a pushover. Unfortunately, however, because dementia without question began to cloud his judgment and his personality in his last two or three years as President, aides and Cabinet members had to step in to administer Reagan policies when the President himself was no longer capable of administering them. That trend is not evident from the diaries, but it is obvious between the lines in the biography.
Edmund Morris is much more favorably disposed to the humanity of Ronald Reagan than he is to his subject’s politics. Reagan specifically asked Morris to write his biography because of his lifelong – if also rather tenuous – association with the famous writer. Reagan probably based his momentous decision on Morris’s first volume about Teddy Roosevelt. He never looked over Morris’s shoulder during the lengthy process of the completion of the biography. When the President did read the skeptical accounts of his politics in the book, he never attempted to try to convince the biographer to alter or soften his words.
To me, that is a great testimony to the personal integrity of Ronald Reagan. The President trusted his biographer, and he accepted the biographer’s appraisal of his policies, even though he surely had to disagree with several parts of that appraisal. The President had agreed to the arrangement that Morris would write the book without any alterations demanded by the primary subject, and Reagan kept his side of the biographical pact.
It is in the diaries where the Real Reagan is most clearly revealed. It is no less than astonishing that Mr. Reagan was sufficiently disciplined to write from one to five or six pages every day about what happened during that day in the affairs of state and in his own personal life. The only time he did not make daily entries was for several days after the assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, when he hovered near death.
Reagan had never kept a personal journal before, but he thought it might be helpful to history and historians if he were to inscribe his daily thoughts and feelings about events large and small during his eight years in the presidential office. No other President before or since has ever followed that course. Reagan scholars shall forever be in his debt because of his remarkable self-determination.
One feature of the presidential personality which is authenticated through the diaries is Reagan’s devotion to his wife. Scores of times, when Nancy was away from the White House for a day or more, he noted how much he missed her. Their marriage was surely one of the most influential in determining how a President conducted himself while in office. Exactly how much Nancy Reagan affected her husband’s thinking and actions can never fully be quantified, but without question she was his primary adviser throughout his presidency.
The many glimpses into the presidential mind in the diaries are enlightening, heart-warming, and revealing. As a particular example, Armand Hammer, the businessman and Russia-expert, told Reagan he thought the President would get along well with President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. Reagan wrote, “He’s convinced ‘Gorby’ is a different type than past Soviet leaders & that we can get along. I’m too cynical to believe that” (p. 337). Nonetheless, when the two world leaders finally met, they immediately hit it off. Ronald Reagan may well have been a large factor in Gorbachev deciding to “tear down that wall.”
Reagan was notoriously not good at remembering names. But in one entry in the diary, he noted meeting George and Barbara Bush and seeing their “small brown and white dog – Rex” (p. 615). He remembered Rex’s name, but he had a hard time with human monikers. I don’t fault him for that; it was a sign of a unique trait in the Reagan personality.
Every entry in the Reagan Diaries was hand-written and clearly legible. Douglas Brinkley had four typical examples printed on the first and last two pages of the book. As someone whose handwriting has become almost illegible over the last few decades, even to himself, I ooze with admiration for that remarkable ability of Ronald Wilson Reagan. He did not begin these daily entries until he was seventy years old, and he kept doing it, even with dementia, until he was seventy-eight. What a remarkable human being!
In his years at Eureka College, Edmund Morris described Reagan as someone though “manifestly a loner, Dutch was never alone” (p. 67). It is instructive that so affable a man as Ronald Reagan, who had so many friends, seemed internally to “need” none of them, with the exception of the one irreplaceable person in his life --- Nancy Davis Reagan.
Many contemporary conservative Republicans describe themselves as “Reagan Republicans.” In terms of how they conduct themselves in day-to-day politics, some are, and some are not. Ronald was never mean in his political behavior. He was firm, even stubborn, but never mean.
Too many contemporary Republicans --- and Democrats --- are fundamentally pugilistic, and little else. They do not perceive politics as the art of the possible, but rather as the art of the prod-able. They will do anything they can to ram through their policies. Debate and discussion have become archaic. Political machinations is the name of the game.
Having read Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan and The Reagan Diaries, I would have to say that those fifteen-hundred-plus pages did not turn me into a Reagan Republican, nor any other kind of Republican. But they did turn me into something of a Reaganite.
Everyone has faults, as did Ronald Reagan. But for all his faults, he was a good man, and he served his nation well and nobly. I never felt a kinship with him until I learned much more about him than I had read in newspapers and magazines while he was in office.
And who knows: maybe the many references to Dixon in both books made me sense him to be a kindred spirit whom I never knew was one, even if he did live in Jimmy Gorman’s house. When he lived there, he was a little older than I was when our family moved away from Dixon. To the future President, Dixon may have been a shining city set on a hill above the Rock River, where, by his own careful count, Dutch Reagan saved seventy-eight (or was it eighty-seven?) people from drowning. He kept track by carving a notch in a tree limb beside the river.
The tree and its limb have long since disappeared. But Dutch and his memories shall continue for years to come. Long live the pleasant memory of Ronald Reagan.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. wwwchapelwithoutwallshhi.org.