Ronald Reagan Myths and truths EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. LOU CANNON: He had had a mystical streak in him. He just was sort of driven by something that I don't think any of us, including me or Nancy Reagan, ever fully figured out. Reagan told me that when he was in college -- in Eureka College -- that he had gone, I think just for fun, to this fortune teller who reads your hand. Anyways, the fortune teller predicted that he'd be president. The fact that he remembered that 20 years later said to me that some part of him harbored a notion that, well, he could be. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's Lou Cannon. And I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post. This is the 39th episode of “Presidential.” PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For such a recent president, there is something kind of surprisingly mystical and mythical, even, about the way that Reagan's legacy lives on in American culture. So, for this episode, we're not going to spend too much time on the nuts and bolts of economic policy in the 1980s or what was going on in Afghanistan or the air traffic controllers strike. No. We are going to focus instead on some of the myths and the narratives that have enveloped Reagan's legacy. So, politicians today invoke his name constantly, as you're sure to have heard many, many times this election year. So, we are going to take a look at where the image of Reagan today lines up with or veers off from the reality of who Ronald Reagan -- the man, the president -- really was. And with me here to help separate that fact from fiction is a reporter and a biographer who's considered the ultimate Reagan expert, and that is Lou Cannon. LOU CANNON: Thank you. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Lou, thank you so much for doing this. LOU CANNON: You're welcome. I'm happy to do it. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You were The Washington Post senior White House correspondent covering the Reagan presidency. You covered his governorship. You've written five books about him. So, you know, to start off, why do you think it is that today there's so much collective nostalgia for Reagan? LOU CANNON: I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is I think people want to hark back to a time when things seemed better, when presidents were respected. In the actual time, there was a very partisan division in Reagan. But I think looking back at him, overall, people saw him as a leader of the country. The other reason is that the Republicans have not really had a successful two-term president since then. George H.W. Bush might have been, but he was defeated in his re-election campaign; and President George W. Bush is still a very controversial figure, primarily over the Iraq war. So, I think that, to the Republicans, Reagan represents success. And I think to all of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents -- and I include myself in that, there's a sort of a glow, a memory, of a time when Americans were able to come together and get things done. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, so now why don't we just back up more toward the beginning. I'd love to hear what you think were a couple of the most formative aspects of his childhood. What to you stand out as most important to know about his upbringing? LOU CANNON: Ronald Reagan grew up in the great American midland in the very center of the country in Dixon, Illinois, which he considers his hometown. And it was a time before -- and right after -- the First World War, when Americans collectively felt a great sense of isolation from the rest of the world but also a collective sense of being safe in the world. And I think some of that is inside Reagan. In his own specific growing up, however, even though, he has -- he would like to, in later years, represent it as some -- as he put it in his early biography, 'Huck Finn ideal,' it was a difficult childhood. His father was a nomadic salesman -- a shoe salesman, mostly -- and he had a drinking problem. They moved all around Illinois in all of his formative years. So, Ronald Reagan grew up -- he didn't really have any company. You can't make friends when you're moving from one school to another every year. And he became happy, I think, in the company of himself. I think that's very important in his formative years. He also developed -- there was an outside to him. Nancy Reagan would call it 'The Barrier.' There was a part of him that you just couldn't get get through to, that he kept to himself. So, I think that in both the ways that he was really a child of the country -- of the heartland of our country -- but an inner-directed person in many ways. I mean, there were always two sides to Ronald Reagan. He loved the stage, but he also liked his own company. And I think the combination of that is what made him what he was. I don't want to leave this, though, without mentioning his mother, who was the decisive influence in his life. She was a religious person, but she also. had the flair for the dramatic. She would put on Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 all these theatricals at their church, which was a Disciples of Christ -- often called a Christian church. And Ronald Reagan was in them from the time that he was three. He always said he'd like the stage. There was sort of a ham in him, and his mom is the reason for that. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Something that seems just so easy to forget when you think about Reagan as the conservative icon is the fact that he grew up in a family of Democrats and that he, himself, was a Democrat for a good chunk of his life, right? LOU CANNON: It's interesting that his parents were Democrats in a Republican county. But I think what's more significant is the fact that this was the depths of the Great Depression, when Ronald Reagan grew up. And his father was put in charge of distributing relief in the county, and his brother also got a government job in the distribution of aid -- usually food aid -- to needy people. And so, Ronald Reagan grew up -- it wasn't so much a Democrat, as that he adored Franklin Roosevelt. He gave a pretty good broomstick imitation when he was in Eureka College. He used a broomstick as a microphone and could do that paration of FDR saying, 'Everybody in my day knew: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' He could do that very well, and do a passable FDR imitation. It's an interesting thing about Reagan -- and I think it says something to loyalty and also childhood feelings -- he never, ever forgot his gratitude to FDR. Even when he became a conservative Republican, he never said a bad word. You can search all the Reagan writings and speeches and you'll never hear a bad word about Franklin Roosevelt. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he ends up a radio announcer and then an actor then, eventually, he's president of the Screen Actors Guild for five terms. And, I mean, his acting career always comes up as one of the first things when you hear about the story of Reagan and his persona. Do you think it was really a central to his skill as a politician as we tend to think that it was? LOU CANNON: Let's not overlook the radio part of his career. His great asset was his voice. He knew how to modulate -- when to speak softly and when to speak dramatically. And although he did very well on television, I think his gift was his voice, and it played all the way into his later-year politics because during the period after he was governor and before he was elected president -- and that's a six-year gap -- he kept himself in touch with the American people with these weekly radio programs. I don't want to get too far ahead of this story, but I can remember a lot of people, including people in the Reagan White House, who thought that his insistence on doing the Saturday radio broadcast when he was president was a waste of time. Well, guess what? Every president since has done it. It's a good way to reach a segment of the American people, and the segment was, of course, much larger when Reagan was an announcer. And when he came to Hollywood, he absorbed the culture of Hollywood without being changed by it. The directors liked him because he memorized his lines. He wasn't temperamental. He showed up on time. Then, he got his break in a movie called, 'Knute Rockne, All American.' He often got good reviews in pictures that were panned, and he connected with the American people. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, so maybe that leads into -- there's this question that I've asked on just about every episode: Humor me, but what do you imagine it would be like to go on a blind Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 date with Ronald Reagan? LOU CANNON: Well, a lot of people did go on dates with Ronald Reagan between the breakdown of his first marriage and meeting Nancy Reagan.