Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [99]
Ronald Reagan was crushed to hear the news of FDR’s death on April 12, 1945. Nearly fifty years later, Elvin Crawford, who served with Reagan at Fort Roach, remembered how upset he looked: “That weekend I had to stay over at the base, and Ronnie was Duty Officer. Saturday afternoon the whole place was empty. I saw him coming down Main Street, past Stage 2, with his head down and slowly shaking. He seemed really stricken, like he had a migraine. When he looked at me I saw he was in despair. ‘Oh, ser-geant, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.’”55
Eighteen days after the President’s death, Hitler committed suicide as Allied troops closed in on Berlin; Victory in Europe was declared on May 8. Shortly after, raw footage filmed by FMPU combat-camera crews at German concentration camps arrived at Fort Roach to be edited for viewing at the Pentagon. Reagan was among the handful of officers on the base Ronnie and Jane: 1941–1946
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to see the “ghastly images,” an experience that only intensified his anti-Fascism, as well as the sympathy for Jews and other minorities drilled into him by his father. Reagan would later say that he kept a print of one of these films to show his children.56
Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and Reagan was released from active duty later that month, although he was not officially discharged until December 9.57 “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps,” he would later write, “all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in all these postwar ambitions.)”58
Reagan had every reason to be optimistic. The victorious Allied Powers were in the process of setting up the United Nations, Lew Wasserman had a seven-year, million-dollar contract from Warners ready for him to sign, and Jane and Maureen were waiting at home with an adopted baby boy named Michael Edward Reagan. What’s more, he was now looking at the world through contact lenses and, as cumbersome as they were, he found them preferable to the options he’d had since age thirteen—thick glasses or extreme myopia.59
With his uncommon ability to be sentimental and elegant at the same time, Reagan writes in his memoir: “Michael came to us in March of 1945—closer than a son; he wasn’t born unasked, we chose him.”60 The legal arrangements had been handled by Betty Kaplan, one of Jane’s bridesmaids, and her lawyer husband, Arthur; on March 18 they delivered the infant to the Reagan house, where Lew and Edie Wasserman were keeping the new parents company. Michael had been born three days earlier to a twenty-eight-year-old would-be actress from Kentucky who had had a wartime fling with a married Army Air Corps man. Jane had gone to meet her first in the hospital.61
Modern Screen reported, “In a world where there are many children who never have proper care or love and who never know real home life, Jane thinks it is important for people like herself and Ronnie to add, from the outside, to their family—and then to regard the newcomer as flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone.”62 The family would later say that four-year-old Maureen had wanted a baby brother so badly that she tried to buy one on a shopping trip to the toy department of Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills with her father, and that when Michael was brought home, she ran to her 1 6 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House room to get her piggy bank and gave her entire savings, 97 cents, to a woman from the adoption agency who had presumably accompanied the Kaplans.63
In her 1989 memoir, First Father, First Daughter, the late Maureen Reagan wrote, “It’s always been my understanding that my parents didn’t think they could have any more children naturally. I’ve also sensed that my mother didn’t want to go through the pain and suffering of childbirth again, not after what I’d put her through. She can tell you the most