Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [9]
In his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? , written as he was preparing to run for governor of California, Ronald Reagan painted the scene of his birth in patriotic colors: “My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that 1 5
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he was white when he said shakily, ‘For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?’ ‘I think he’s perfectly wonderful,’ said my mother weakly. . . . Those were their first opinions of me.
As far as I know, they never changed during their lifetimes. As for myself, ever since my birth my nickname has been ‘Dutch’ and I have been particularly fond of the colors that were exhibited—red, white, and blue.”3
His brother, Neil, born in September 1908, recalled the event in less glowing terms. “[T]hey came to me—I’d been sent to the neighbors for a couple of days—[and said,] ‘Now you can go home and see your baby brother,’ and I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I went home, and for two days after I was home, I would not go in the room where my brother and my mother were. I didn’t want any part of a brother. I had been promised a sister by my mother and father. That’s all I wanted. I guess that shows you how early in life I determined not to be queer. I was strictly a girl man.”4
Neil Reagan also said, “Ronald is my mother’s boy and I’m my father’s boy.” One way to illustrate what he meant is to compare how the two brothers remembered their youth. “We were poor, and I mean poor,” Neil said.5 “We were poor,” Ronald said, “but we didn’t know we were poor.”6
Another way to put it: the first son drank, the second didn’t.
Reagan’s biographers, following his lead, have presented Nelle and Jack Reagan as a case of opposites attracting. He was Irish Catholic; she was Scots-English Protestant. He could be moody, cynical, and stubborn; she was determined to be sunny, idealistic, and understanding. He was a charmer, a storyteller, a chain-smoker, a binge drinker. She was a do-gooder, a Bible-thumper, a teetotaler. He was a bit of a clown; she was a bit of a saint.
But they also had a lot in common, starting with their immigrant rural roots and their mutual desire to transcend those roots and make something of themselves. Both Jack and Nelle were amateur actors, autodidacts, and stylish dressers who stood out in the series of small Midwestern towns where Jack went from job to job and Nelle fixed up rented home after rented home. Both felt a need to be different, which expressed itself in Nelle’s poetry writing and elocution recitals and in Jack’s political views—he was an outspoken Democrat in solidly Republican rural Illinois. There was a whiff of bohemianism in their insisting that their sons call them Nelle and Jack, not Mother and Father. Both loved an audience; Jack’s preferred venue was Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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the saloon, Nelle’s the church. Jack liked to joke: “Jesus walked barefoot . . .
but then, He didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did He?”7
One of Nelle’s mottos was “To higher, nobler things my mind is bent.”8
The Reagans were strivers, joiners, dreamers—they wanted more out of life for themselves and their sons. Her bourgeois yearnings were matched by his “burning ambition to succeed,” to use his son’s phrasing.9
In this they were hardly alone in early twentieth-century Main Street America, where Horatio Alger heroes were lining up for membership in newly constructed country clubs. Upward mobility has always been the great American motif; the self-made man and his social-climbing wife are all-American archetypes; the house on the hill is still the American dream.