Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [40]
Reagan lived in Des Moines between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six—an attractive, enthusiastic, unattached young man, a local celebrity making good money in the middle of the Depression, a big fish in the small pond that was the capital of the Hawkeye State. Bland, drab Des Moines, with a population of 145,000 and the home offices of innumerable insurance companies, was the largest city Reagan had lived in, and he found it exciting. Civic organizations asked him to give speeches at their 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House banquets, the Dispatch made him its sports columnist, he dated prairie beauties with names like Jeanne Tesdell and Gretchen Schnelle. Cy’s Moonlight Inn, a former speakeasy on the edge of town, and Club Belvedere, the capital’s only real nightclub, with chorus girls and a casino, were his regular hangouts. But he never gambled and was always careful not to drink excessively. He was most comfortable, it seemed, with the friends he made at Drake University, some of whom belonged to his fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon), many of whom were fellow Disciples of Christ. On fall weekends he was field announcer at Drake’s football games, and for a year he shared an apartment with an assistant coach at Drake. When Nelle came to town, he and his Drake friends took her out with them. It was all very wholesome: Dutch and his buddies had formed a barbershop quartet and often sang at Cy’s on Saturday nights.42
Reagan took up riding in Des Moines and, according to his memoir, it was there that he first heard the saying that would become a lifetime motto: “Nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.”43 In order to ride the horses at Fort Des Moines, he joined the cavalry reserve, but he had to cheat on his eye test to earn his commission as a second lieutenant in the 14th Cavalry Regiment.44 For a while he dated a blue-ribbon equestrienne he had met while emceeing a horse show; as the romance became more serious, however, their religious differences—
she was a devout Catholic—became a problem.45
He kept in excellent physical condition by swimming regularly in the pool at Camp Dodge, another major military installation just outside the city. In Des Moines, too, he apparently developed his predilection for the brown suits that would raise eyebrows when he was president. He liked tooling around the Iowa capital in his beige convertible in tawny tweed jackets, puffing on a briar pipe, evidently aware of his snappy, color-coordinated image.46
On September 4, 1936, his hero came to town. FDR had been nominated for a second term that summer; in his acceptance speech he declared, “This generation has a rendezvous with destiny,” a phrase Reagan would use twenty-eight years later in his famous speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. During the campaign Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune claimed Roosevelt was the candidate of Moscow, and as election day approached the paper constantly reminded its readers of how many days remained “to save your country.”
(McCormick ordered his switchboard operators to repeat this message to Iowa: 1933–1937
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all callers.) McCormick wasn’t alone: across the country, from Beacon Hill to Nob Hill, America’s rich were angrily telling one another that Roosevelt was “a traitor to his class.” FDR counterattacked on the radio. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told his listeners. “They are united in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”47
Between broadcasts at WHO, Dutch entertained his colleagues, of both parties, with his affectionately mischievous imitations of the Fireside Chats. He also plugged his candidate whenever he could on his radio shows.48 And it was with a mixture of awe and excitement that he watched FDR drive by the WHO building in his open limousine, waving to the crowds, on his way to the Great Plains Drought Committee conference with Midwestern governors.49 Two months later, Roosevelt