Ron Reagan, the youngest son of President Ronald Reagan, said the instigation for his recent bestseller about his father was to try to answer the question of what made his famous dad tick. He wanted to know what was at his protected center that he never let his family see?
An entertaining speaker, the avowed liberal told the crowd at the July 7 breakfast meeting of the Magnolia Rotary at the Seattle Yacht Club anecdotes and insights into the writing of his bestselling biography, My Father at 100, A Memoir.
Reagan said he never imagined writing about his father and family. He certainly didn’t want to write a political book about his father because he knew that either the political right or the left would roundly criticize it. If he wrote anything critical of his father, he knew that conservatives would dismiss it. He also knew that liberal pundits would attack him if he wrote anything nice about his father.
But while talking with his mother, Nancy Reagan, he started thinking about the fact that 2011 marked his father’s 100th birthday and how much the world had changed in those 100 years. He also wanted to explore the inner man who had remained a bit of a mystery, even to his family, but would eventually become the 40th president of the United States.
As for the research, Reagan joked that “it is exponentially easier to research a book about your father when you’ve got a presidential library to visit.”
Reagan talked about looking at old annuals and report cards from when his father was in school and finding pictures of his grandfather standing on a boardwalk in Tampico, Ill., with horse-drawn carriages on the street. He estimates the year the photo was taken to be about 1911.
“Here’s a man who grew up hearing the beat of horse hooves and died having ended the Cold War,” Reagan said of his father. “All these changes he lived through tended to bewilder him, as they would anyone.”
Reagan found his father to be an undersized youngster and blind as a bat. Ron Reagan’s grandfather, Jack, was an alcoholic and couldn’t hold a job, so young Ronald Reagan moved constantly with his family. The future president spent a lot of time alone, making up games and adventures using the items from the old West he found in the family attic.
Reagan said that he believes the defining experience for his father was the seven years he spent as the lifeguard on the Rock River. Beginning when he was 15, he saved a total of 77 people from possible drowning. It was the heroic kind of role the young man would carve out for himself in Hollywood movies and in the stories he spun about his own life on the political circuit.
“For the rest of his life, he saw himself as a lifesaver,” Reagan said of his father.
During the question and answer phase of the talk, Reagan said that the one bromide he remembers his father always repeating was that “Gentlemen always do the kind thing.”
Reagan said his father always treated everyone the same: with kindness and dignity, whether they were the Queen of England or someone shining his shoes. But he also was never intimidated or seemed out of his depth with anyone or in any situation.
As for the flap created by him writing one line in the book about how he guesses that his father must have had Alzheimer’s Disease while he was in the White House, Reagan said he was surprised by the people, including his own brother Michael, who have used the line to “paint the book into something it is not.”
He said he doesn’t believe that his father suffered from dementia while in the White House, just that the disease must have been present.
Reagan said after the meeting that he and his wife first moved to the Magnolia area of Seattle about 17 years ago after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. He said he and his wife, a practicing psychologist, fell in love with the neighborhood.
“It’s an ideal location,” Reagan said of Magnolia. “It’s close to everything, but separate at the same time. It’s like its own little island.”
As for the future, Reagan said he would like to write another book, but isn’t sure yet what the subject might be. In the meantime, he plans to continue working with Sirius Radio and also continue working with various television shows, including “Hardball, with Chris Matthews.”
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