Bob Spitz reveals how his Democrat-turned-biographer journey uncovered Reagan's dyslexia, tax debt, and FBI informant past, detailing the controversial Iran-Contra missile sales that failed to secure hostages. The biography exposes Reagan's emotional disconnect from his children and his tragic Alzheimer's diagnosis, while Spitz contrasts this legacy with modern fears of Donald Trump's radicalism, arguing both parties ignore America's true direction. Ultimately, Reagan stands as a complex 20th-century icon whose flaws and achievements demand honest reevaluation beyond partisan narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
So, with all the people you've talked to over the years, and that is, you know, the who's who, why Reagan?
Ah, wonderful question.
When I had finished The Beatles and finished Julia Child, I was looking, of course, for another biography to write, somebody big, somebody juicy.
And my wife said, you know, there are two characteristics to all your books.
You write about people who are beloved and people who have changed the culture.
And so we sat down to make a list of people who could fill that.
And it was incredibly difficult.
We looked at all the Kennedy-Centered nominees and the presidential medals.
And there was nobody who really encompassed both things.
And my wife said, what about Ronald Reagan?
And I went, absolutely not.
Because you're a Democrat?
I'm a lifelong Democrat.
In fact, I don't think I've ever voted for a Republican.
I'm just not wired that way.
Right.
And so I rejected it out of hand.
I talked to a lot of people, and my Democratic friends thought, you know, I'd abandoned the cause.
And my Republican friends, and I have more Republican friends than you might imagine.
Both of my Republican friends thought that I lost my objectivity.
I wouldn't have the objectivity.
Right.
Can I insert something here?
Yeah, sure.
I learned when I was at CNN, I assigned a monologue about Reagan to the best writer on the staff, but he was liberal.
And I got it.
I was traveling, and so I didn't write it myself, and I get it.
Yeah.
And I read it, and it was good, but it was completely hollow.
And I called him up and I said, Hal, what is this?
And he said, I tried.
He didn't like Reagan, and so he couldn't connect with him.
He just couldn't connect with him.
You have to find something to admire in the person that you're writing about.
And I decided I wanted to do that right away.
This was a man who was beloved to so many people in America.
And he was, you know, he's often referred to by people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
They've cited him.
And so I thought, I need to learn why this man has these qualities that I never embraced before.
I will tell you, I was really shocked when I read the book because it is written as if it, I don't want to say this wrong, as if it was written by somebody who liked him.
Well, it doesn't like him, actually.
It doesn't mean that it's a revisionist history or anything like that.
It's just you did find.
So what did you, where did you start with, I got to like him?
You know, I always believed that you don't know a person until you know where they come from.
And so I went to all of his little hometowns.
I went to Illinois.
I traveled the circuit.
And I really found him.
I located the soul of Ronald Reagan in Dixon, Illinois.
I mean, I totally got him there.
And I went to his college where he found his voice and decided that this was a man who had a lot of substance that had eluded me all these years.
And so would I vote for him now?
I still don't adhere to his policy.
No, no, I still don't adhere to his policies.
But that doesn't mean that I can't really like the man and respect him.
I think we have a problem in society where we everybody's a cartoon.
And they're not.
You know, the one thing about Reagan was there was a lot of depth to him.
You bet.
You know, if you really read his writings, not stuff that's just been pumped out for him, but his writings, he's very deep.
I'm interested in how when you got to Dixon, because a lot of people, even if you find Reagan, Reagan is this guy who's a real throwback, a very frank Capra.
Yes.
Okay.
In many ways.
Right.
And a lot of people just find that hokey.
They don't find that real.
How did you break through that?
How did you find the genuine person and not the cartoon?
Well, you actually led me into it.
His writings.
I saw a lot of his early writings as a student in high school, as a college student, and as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
And these were speeches he wrote longhand on his yellow tablets that are not in the library.
No, they're his private papers.
And I was, I think, one of two people ever to have access to Ronald Reagan's private papers.
And the first person, Ed Morris, never unwrapped them.
You're kidding.
Nope.
They were still bound with the tape and everything that came out of the Oval Office.
And these were the papers that were by his desk that he went back to time and again to look at, to shape a lot of his views.
And so the speeches that he wrote as a kid, the stuff that he wrote as president of the Screen Actors Guild, page after page of yellow line paper in his handwriting, were truly amazing and showed me the whole character of the man right there.
So did you find, because he is, I mean, he's an actor.
He's a showbiz guy.
Yes, he is.
He understood that part.
Yeah, politics is show business.
Right, right.
So in your book, you talk about the moment, and I want to come back to this, but you talk about the moment where he is about to go in with George Bush for the debate.
It's very dicey.
And he says, excuse me, I paid for this microphone.
Absolutely.
That's a line.
From a movie.
From a movie.
Yes.
So how can you tell the difference of where the Ronald Reagan actor and the learned performer and the genuine article was?
Yeah, it's a real amalgam.
You really have to look deep to find where that cleft is.
I think most of the time that Reagan was really sincere in his life.
And yet when he needed a crutch, when he needed something, he drew on movie lines.
One thing that people don't really understand is that the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars, came out of a movie when he was a young actor at Warner Brothers.
He played secret agent Buzz Bancroft, and they built a bubble over the United States that would shoot down rockets.
I mean, it's wonderful.
And yet Reagan, he really believed that that would work.
And it was deep in his soul.
And so there was a lot of childness.
Whoops, I'll say that again.
A lot of childishness.
Yes.
Got it in him that he used to formulate a lot of his stronger ideas.
So let me just stop here for a second.
The Star Wars, because I've only made it to the election.
I mean, this is a presidency.
So Star Wars.
How much of that was bogus?
Yeah.
I mean, how much you say he believed in this, but it's my understanding that he was a very shrewd negotiator that, yeah, we're working on this, but we're really not working on this.
Yeah, Bud McFarlane, his national security advisor, told me that they always had a feeling that Star Wars wouldn't work, but they needed to convince the Soviet Union that it would and that it was really in development and they were heading towards implementation.
That was part of the ruse.
I mean, they called it the sting because in a way it was a little like the sting and whether it worked or not didn't matter at all.
It's how Reagan sold it.
And he did.
He sold it to Gorbachev all the way.
All right.
From Alcoholic to Optimist00:08:20
So let's go back to his childhood.
Just give me the high points of the things that you found.
I mean, there's a ton of books.
There was just the Reagan book that had been released in the last couple of years.
You come out with 800 and some pages.
So tell me what I find in here through your eyes that tells me something new about him.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you.
Part of it is my Democrat eyes.
I go in there with no preformed judgment.
So I rely on the biographer's craft talking to new people.
I found schoolmates of his who were still alive.
104-year-old woman who not only worked with Reagan, but worked with his father Jack and his brother Neil, who could really tell me how they lived as a family.
And she sent me to other people who knew the family well.
So tell me about his family.
Yeah, he came from very humble beginnings.
I mean, they were poor.
They were really dirt poor.
There were times that Reagan didn't know if they were going to have enough food on the table for dinner.
And so, you know, his dad was a gregarious guy, but an alcoholic who couldn't hold a job.
And often they had to move under the cover of night when the rent came due.
Tough on a young kid.
What did that teach him?
You know, it taught him resourcefulness.
It taught him to depend on himself.
But he never lost sight of how much he loved his parents, even when they might not have been giving him the best advice.
Where did that come from?
I think when things are falling around you and they're not working well, you turn inward.
I don't know where that comes from.
I think it's God-given in a way.
He had a different optimist.
Oh, incurable.
Right?
Yeah.
He was an optimist.
And what made him so contagious was he believed it.
And when somebody actually believes it, you know.
And they can sell it to you.
Correct.
Yes.
So good or bad, he believed it.
He believed Star Wars.
He believed that tomorrow is going to be better.
But he didn't have a childhood that said tomorrow's going to be better.
That's right.
I grew up in an alcoholic family.
That's not fun.
Where did he find that spark?
Yeah, books.
He lost himself in books.
His mother took him to the library.
His mother was a very pious, religious woman who often was more involved in the church than in her family.
And these were two parents who were so wrapped up in their own lives, his mother with her religion, his father with his job and his alcoholism, that young Dutch couldn't even see.
And they never took him to get glasses.
He accidentally picked up a pair of his mother's glasses one day when he thought he couldn't study, he was reading backwards, he was dyslexic, he couldn't play sports because he couldn't catch a ball.
He accidentally picks up his mother's glasses one day.
He was 12 years old.
Oh, my God.
12 years old.
So all these developmental years, he can't see where he's going.
He can't see in front of him.
He can't see the school of the blackboard in school.
He picks up his mother's glasses and puts them on, and the world opens up to him.
He did it himself.
His parents weren't there to do it for him.
Unbelievable.
So Reagan always had to get by on his own, on his own wits.
When he goes to college, he wasn't going to college.
He couldn't afford it.
His father told him he couldn't pay the money to send him to school.
So Reagan takes his girlfriend to a college that's way above his station just to help her unpack.
And when he gets there, he realizes, I am not going back.
I am getting into this college and I'm going.
And so he goes to see the dean, and on the spot, they create a scholarship for him.
Unbelievable.
Yes.
And to supplement it, he takes four different jobs.
He works washing dishes.
He works as a janitor.
He works in a plant.
And when he has enough money just to get by for himself with a little leftover, he brings his brother to school and pays for some of his way as well.
This guy was resourceful.
He believed in a goal.
And it's interesting that he never wound up at MGM, which was the white picket fence studio.
He winds up at the dark studio, Warner Brothers.
So But we've jumped ahead a little.
Yeah, so let's kind of stay in his teen years and his college years.
What was his view of who he could become or that he wanted to become 15, 16 years old?
Yeah, well, he read a book, and I'm having a senior moment because I'm that really gave him a boyhood hero.
And it was somebody, it was a character who was not only idealistic, but worked through his father's alcoholism and found religion and found faith and used faith to go forward.
And Reagan started to put it all together through that book for himself.
That became his backbone.
When he goes to college, he goes to a school that is underwritten by the Disciples of Christ, his mother's church.
And there he gets a taste of socialism.
They had socialistic principles, this Disciples of Christ.
And he starts to think about politics all the time.
And he finds his voice.
He leads a student protest.
In fact, it's a wonderful story.
They are shutting down the school to have a student protest.
And the seniors don't want to speak to the rest of the school to get them to shut it down.
Because the seniors might have sacrificed their diplomas.
So what do they do?
They pick out a freshman, a freshman who they think, you know, he's just kind of a big mouth and we'll put him up to it.
And Reagan makes the speech in front of the entire student body that gets applause, shuts down the school, and there it is.
Reagan finds that he can communicate.
He's got that communication skills, and he has charm that goes with it.
And he puts it all together.
And right there at Eureka College, we see the formation of Ronald Reagan that will take him through three, four different professions.
But he is not the Ronald Reagan that becomes president.
No, he was getting C's and Ds in school.
I mean, he did not do very well.
Ronald Reagan, I love to say, wasn't a deep thinker, but his thinking was deeply felt.
I think that really sums up the man.
Tell me the difference.
He believed in his ideals.
He formulated his ideals based on his faith, based on principles that came from his father's politics, by the way, Democratic politics.
His dad was a Roosevelt Democrat, and he believed in advancing the working man, people who were underprivileged.
He took that Rooseveltian ethic and he turned it to the right and into conservatism and fused them together.
And that became Reagan Republicanism.
Flirting With Communism00:08:38
So where did, because he goes out to Hollywood.
Yeah.
Yes.
When did this first happen?
When did he say, I think I can be a star?
Well, actually, he was in a few plays in college, loved it, got the acting bud.
But what he wanted to be more than anything was a sportscaster.
Ronald Reagan loves sports.
In college, he was on the football team, fifth man down on the bench, running back, last man on the bench.
But, you know, he played pretty well.
He couldn't see the ball until he was 12, I'm sure.
Exactly.
So he had a lot of making up to do.
But he gets a job as a sportscaster.
WHO?
Exactly.
In Davenport, Iowa.
And then he moves to Des Moines and literally in three years becomes the voice of the Midwest.
I mean, really, people in eight states listen to Ronald Reagan every night, whether he was doing the Cubs or the White Sox games or interviewing Amy Semple McPherson or Gene Autry or whoever was coming through town.
He became a star.
Hollywood, he could have forgone Hollywood and just had a great life as a broadcaster in the Midwest.
He loved doing it, but he still had that acting bug.
And so one day when he's gone out to the Cubs spring training in California, he makes a detour to Hollywood.
He was not an Orson Welles type.
Oh my gosh, no.
Yeah.
And I mean that in their many ways.
Yes, exactly.
But in the way that his radio was him.
Yes.
Where Wells was always creating or playing a character.
So when he's doing radio, he's honing his interpersonal skills and who he is.
That's right.
Not the performance.
Exactly right.
Does that make a difference, do you think, in his life?
I think it does because when he got to Hollywood, Hollywood was looking for more nuanced stars.
You know, Bogart was there.
Jimmy Cagney was there.
Spencer Tracy was there.
They were all in the studio with him.
Betty Davis.
Reagan didn't have the nuance.
Reagan was himself on the air when he was an announcer.
And when he gets to Hollywood, he's basically limited to roles where he was himself.
Although I'll say the one character where he, you know, the role that always transformed him, Kings Row, was his favorite role.
He really goes off the reservation there and tries something different.
But I think Reagan was nervous to do that.
He loved playing Cowboys.
He loved playing guys who rode to the rescue.
It was part of who he was.
It was his persona.
Who is he friends with in Hollywood?
Not many people.
Why?
He had always been a loner.
He didn't have many friends in high school either, nor in college, although he lived in a fraternity house.
But he always kept to himself.
When he gets to Hollywood, it's odd because his friends are mostly Republicans.
Dick Powell was his closest friend, an ardent Republican.
And Robert Montgomery, also an ardent Republican.
And they always worked on him.
Those guys fought like cats and dogs.
But the thing was, they really respected each other's opinions.
And at night, they'd fight like crazy, and then they'd go to Chasin's and have a couple drinks together.
So, but he is still, he's when he goes to Hollywood, he still believes in Died in the Wall Democrat.
Yeah, I mean, FTR Democrat, big government programs.
Absolutely right.
Leaning socialist kind of.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No doubt.
In fact, he flirts with joining the Communist Party.
He had to be talked out of it by an actor.
By an actor.
Right.
An actor said, Ron, I don't think you really want to do this.
And it was a Democratic actor who said, those loonies are way too far to the left.
Wow.
Stick to Roosevelt politics.
Don't go there.
And Reagan listened to him.
Did he ever attend a Communist Party meeting?
He didn't attend a Communist Party meeting, but he went to many different meetings of little organizations that were supposed Hollywood lefty organizations that really leaned that way.
Reagan still didn't understand how far left that might have taken him off the deep end.
Right.
So what was his turning point?
Did it come because I want to stay here in the early years.
Sure.
I know in the 60s, in the late 50s, things changed for him.
Where is the turning point early?
Where does it start to wake?
It's actually a humorous little anecdote.
Reagan went into the Army.
He worked for the first motion picture unit, and he basically served in L.A., in Hollywood, making training films for servicemen and also for the Enola Gayplane that flew over Japan and dropped the bomb.
While he was in the Army, he read that soldiers during the First World War were forgiven their taxes when they came out of uniform.
So Reagan figures, you know, I'm not going to pay my taxes for a couple of years.
Oh, my.
Yeah.
They'll probably forgive do the same thing.
And of course, it didn't happen that way.
So he gets out of the Army and he finds that he's $90,000 in debt to Uncle Sam and starts feeling like big government has its hand in his pocket all the time.
And that's when Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery start to go to work on him.
And there was a very strong community of Republicans in Hollywood during that time.
It wasn't a big number, but it was a lot of major people who...
John Wayne?
John Wayne, yes, absolutely.
Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna, another comedian, and a half dozen other artists.
And they all knew each other.
And Reagan saw them socially and little by little started to really appreciate what they were saying to him about big government, smaller taxes.
You can see it forming right there.
Reagan conservatism.
So he is, he kind of leaves acting and becomes the head of the Screen Actor Guild, the actress.
He was still acting while he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, but his career was really on the wane.
When he comes out of the Army, he's a little too, he's getting a little too old to play those boyfriend parts.
And there are other stars like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and James Dean, who were nothing like him, who are starting to come up at this time.
What was the for Ronald Reagan?
What was the McCarthy era like?
Yeah, it was really, it was really cataclysmic in many ways.
I had a really incredible experience in understanding his involvement.
I had been communicating with somebody who was involved in this by email who lived in Paris.
And my wife and I were headed to Paris, and I said, can I come over with you and discuss Ronald Reagan?
Because you were involved with the formation of the Screen Actors Guild.
And so I got to spend three hours with Olivia de Hafland.
Wow.
Yes, who was just about to be 100, who rarely sees anybody, and who said, Ronald Reagan, please come.
I want to tell you all about the blacklist and the Screen Actors Guild and the politics of the studio at the time.
I will say that we talked for about three and a half hours, and she drank me under the table.
You're 100, you're allowed to do it.
You bet.
I figured I could be 100 by following her leave.
Chaos in Hollywood Paris00:05:03
That's right.
She told me that Reagan was a very strong leader and didn't know which way to, but didn't know which way to turn politically at that point.
He discovered that a lot of the people who were causing the union trouble in Hollywood were his old lefty friends who were flirting with communism or outright communists, and he could not abide.
But of course, there was violence involved in a lot of these union strikes, too, at the time at the studio.
Reagan was right in the middle of it.
Very early on, he became an FBI informant.
And he reported on activities.
I think this must have been really hard living in that era because communism, they were our allies during World War II.
Yes.
And, you know, FDR.
I know a lot of communists who I like.
So it doesn't have the weight that it took almost immediately after World War II.
Right.
At one point, Reagan says when they ask the Screen Actors Guild to throw at anybody who's communist, Reagan says, I don't throw anybody out who has a different political leaning than I have.
So for him, it was still a political leaning.
Right.
It wasn't the enemy of the state.
The evil empire.
The evil empire.
Was he if I could go back in American history and watch a time period, I would go back there.
Because I think we're repeating some of those same things.
I fear that you're right.
Yeah.
And so I have a difficult time with anyone who tries to silence anyone.
You know, where in a constitution does it say I can't express your opinion.
Can't express my opinion.
I can't be a communist.
It can't be a violent communist, but where does it say I can't believe in those things?
How conflicted was he?
Not on necessarily communism good or bad, but the shutting down of people because he seems to be later in life an icon for the Bill of Rights.
You bet.
And compromise.
Right.
Where is he?
How much of a conflict is he in?
Oh, I think he was in personal chaos during this time.
These people who were communists had been his friends.
He knew them, a lot of the screenwriters personally.
He had worked with a lot of them, liked them, thought they had sharp minds, and yet he realized that they were creating a havoc that was more insidious than he had seen on the surface.
Yet he spoke as the president of the union for all the actors, all the people who were involved.
So he was really conflicted all through this.
During the blacklist, when he's asked to go and name names, he was tormented by it.
He decided to name a few names that had already been named.
But he was very careful in his comments.
When I went back and read that, because I recreate all the strike tension and all of the violence in the list, in the book, I got a sense that Reagan was a torn man, just tormented by the whole thing, didn't know what to do, had to steer through that very carefully.
We don't have to stop here, but if you want to stop for just a second, because I am fascinated by this time period and the things that we're repeating now, we have calls for violence.
We have calls for silencing people.
We're not at the name names, but I could see us getting there.
And on one hand, you want to be able to say, no, they have absolutely, everybody has a right to speak their mind, but violence is starting to come into it now.
How do we, are we going to navigate, what are we missing from in this time period, if anything, that maybe they had in that time period that we need to revive quickly?
Respect for the knowledge that not everybody has to have your opinion.
There are other opinions.
That doesn't mean those people are out to get you.
It just means that they don't believe the same thing you believe.
A Uniter Not Divider00:08:33
You know, it goes further and deeper.
It has to do with religious respect as well.
And, you know, Reagan makes that incredible speech at the end of his presidency, the last speech that he makes to the American people where he talks about that shining city on the hill.
It is the best speech he may have ever given.
I think so, where he says, and boy, does this have shockwaves today, where he says, if the cities have to have walls, if the cities have to have walls, then the walls have doors.
And everyone who wants to live in peace and harmony should be allowed to come through those doors.
I mean, wow, it's chilling when you think of what we're going through today.
And he warns about how parents need to teach the things that were automatically taught through society.
And we have lost all of those things.
You began this discussion, Glenn, by asking me of what I latched on to to really take myself through this book.
And it was really the realization very early on that Ronald Reagan always believed in the goodness of the American people.
He was a uniter, not a divider.
And I found that so attractive so that when I, you know, reprobate liberal Democrat, set out to write a book about really the father of presidential conservatism, I had plenty to admire from the get-go.
And that's what really pulled me through it.
Real quick, and then we'll go back to the book.
Sure.
Do you see anybody now cut from this cloth?
Well, no.
None whatsoever.
And that's really frightening because, wow, do we need somebody like that right?
We do.
I'm hoping that someone comes out of the woodwork, someone we never expected.
I mean, I'm sure you won't like to hear this, but I was a great fan of Barack Obama's.
And I thought he, you know, there was never a scandal while he was in office.
And I think he really had dignity and he didn't disparage anybody.
I would like to see a Republican step out of the woodwork like that and emerge.
I would like to see two candidates, opposite parties.
When a conservative can look to the way things were, people were behaving during the Obama administration, say, ah, remember the quaint old, good old days?
You're saying something.
Yeah, because you really are.
Every side, every position, every institution has gone insane.
I wasn't a fan of George W. Bush.
Boy, would I love to go back to the George W. Bush?
That seems quaint, doesn't it?
You bet.
It really does.
Yeah.
I need somebody that I can believe in as an American.
know I'm looking for somebody that I can look up to.
What was, I keep saying this, but then we will go back to the book.
Yeah, sure.
This is about, this question is about him.
Yeah.
In looking at the country and trying to find what the heck do we do, I have found that we've lost the unum in E pluribus unum.
We don't remember what we came here for in the first place.
What we have.
And it's the idea in the Declaration of Independence, and it is the Bill of Rights in practice, in actual practice.
We've never been perfect, but we've always been striving for that.
The two greatest documents in World War II.
In history, we're not even talking about those things anymore.
Right.
What was his, was that what he was?
When you get down to it, you boil it down.
Was that his message that we connected with?
I think Reagan knew the Constitution and the Bill of Rights backwards and forwards.
And he knew them not from when he was governor or president.
He knew them from when he was a young boy.
He memorized those documents.
And I think he kept all of that close to his heart.
And when you keep that close to your heart, it translates into what kind of a leader you're going to be.
So, Bob, how do you, because you say he was a uniter.
He was optimistic.
He really believed this.
He was a, I don't remember how you said it, a deep thinker.
I said he wasn't a deep thinker, but his thinking was deeply felt.
Okay.
But he was not a dummy.
Oh, by any means.
No.
So he's not sitting around and pondering deep thoughts, but he's not a pushover when it comes to that.
That's the opposite of what half the country believed about Ronald Reagan.
Oh, yes, you're right.
So how do we cut through and not make one president into a monster, and then the next time they make him into a monster?
How does somebody who is genuine survive?
Yeah, that's tough.
But here's the short answer.
Read my biography.
Read biographies of great men, great historians, great figures in history, and learn about, learn that they're more than what you said at the beginning, a cartoon character.
John F. Kennedy had the same kind of spirit as Reagan.
I don't know what party either of them would fit in at this point.
Yeah, neither.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
But both of them, with really almost the same message and the same packaging, they'd be successful today, wouldn't they?
Oh, I think so.
I think it's like the second coming.
People are waiting for that person to emerge out of the mist and put this country back together again.
You know, it's not about making this country great.
This country is pretty darn great.
It's about making us realize what we have, all the great things that we have, and the ability to work together and to respect each other.
I have a very large collection of American history, and because of a conversation I had with my daughter, I have a very large collection of some of the worst things in American history.
Dreamers and Dissent.
I've read the book.
Okay, so if we don't know both sides, we're fooling ourselves.
We are neither bad nor good.
We're both.
Winston Churchill, he was both.
Exactly right.
John Kennedy.
He was both good.
It's both.
Did Reagan connect and know the dark side of America, what we could be and what we had been at periods of our life?
I think only on a surface level.
Reagan looked at a lot of things surface-wise, and so he would connect with things like our military-industrial complex has fallen apart, and I've got to put it back together again.
You know, Ronald Reagan thought in big ways.
And that's when I said, and stories, and that's when I said he wasn't a deep thinker, but the thinking was deeply felt.
That's one of the things that I hoped in the book to convey to people that while you might have thought he was Ronnie Reagan and the Hollywood bedtime for Bonzo, there was a guy who might not have been the most complex thinker, but he was he thought in wonderful ways.
Deeply Felt Thinking00:13:26
I don't think I answered your question, though.
I don't think so either.
Want to try it again?
Yeah, ask me the question again.
Did he understand the dark side?
Yeah.
I don't think so.
I think he looked at things through rose-colored glasses, hence the Star Wars, hence Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.
So, for instance, somebody I would imagine he liked, Eisenhower.
Very much so.
I think one of the last really truly honest, brave speeches anyone has given in the Oval Office was Eisenhower.
If you read that entire speech of the industrial complex, did he take that into consideration at all?
He did.
He read Eisenhower backwards and forwards, and he went to speak to him quite a bit.
And Nixon as well.
He always looked to Nixon.
I have a...
What did he learn from Nixon?
Yeah, he learned how to be a little more political from Nixon.
He received an 11-page memo from Nixon right before he chose his cabinet in the first term.
And Nixon laid out all the do's and don'ts for him.
It was pure Nixon strategy.
But Reagan really absorbed a lot of it.
I mean, he respected Dick Nixon.
What did he learn from Eisenhower?
I think he learned how to be a compassionate president from Eisenhower, how to, this is an interesting thing, how to be the president for all the people, which he felt that was Eisenhower's greatest quality.
Here's a really interesting thing about Reagan that you might not know.
As governor of California, he signed one of the earliest therapeutic abortion bills in the country.
This was six years before the Roe v. Wade decision.
Now, Reagan completely was against abortion.
Why would he do that?
So I called Tony Bielenson, who is now deceased, who was a Democratic Assemblyman from Hollywood, who proposed that bill and saw it all the way through.
And he said, Reagan opposed it from the beginning, but I convinced him that 62% of the California residents were in favor of it.
And Reagan said, I'm willing, if 62% are willing, I'm willing to look at a study that you find to bring it to me.
And he said.
He saw us trust the people.
Trust the people.
And he saw that more than 62% were in favor.
And he opposed it, but he signed it because he said, I'm the governor of all the people, not just some of the people.
Now, what a remarkable, this ties into a lot of things you were saying.
The governor of all the people in every state, in every city, in every room, people have different opinions on things.
And Reagan decided, if I'm going to be the leader of, if you've entrusted the leadership to me, then I'm going to listen to you.
Where is that today?
So it's strange because some would say, oh, well, that's just governing by polls, which is not.
No, no, it's not the case.
What's the difference?
I think if you're governing by polls, then you don't bring anything of yourself to it.
And there were so many other bills where the polls were strong, but Reagan wouldn't destroy the environment, the seashore in California, even though the polls told him they wanted development on the seashore.
He became the environmental governor.
Go figure out.
How did this guy get to be the evil Ronald Reagan?
Well, as you said, that was the cartoon character, Ronald Reagan, that, you know, the press and the media gave to him.
And, you know, he was an actor, so he was easy prey.
But deep down, he had a strong core.
That's what I discovered.
He had a really strong core.
Let's skip ahead and go and go into his presidency just a little bit.
Yeah.
First, tell me about, and I have not reached it yet.
Tell me about the Iranian when he lifts his hand.
I remember Reagan was the first president I voted for.
And I couldn't vote in 1980.
But I remember him lifting his hand and then hearing that the hostages were being released at the same time.
Well, they had always sensed that the hostages were going to be released.
People always said, well, they were worried about the October surprise.
Not the case at all.
Was it Jimmy Carter that negotiated that?
Or was it a combination of the corrections?
No, no, no.
It was Jimmy Carter.
And Reagan really acknowledged Jimmy Carter and all his efforts.
On their ride to the inauguration, the presidential ride where the outgoing president and the ingoing president share a car together.
They didn't talk much.
They didn't say anything because Reagan knew that Carter had been up for four nights straight negotiating.
Warren Christopher, his Secretary of State, briefed the Reagan cabinet all the time.
They kept each other in the loop.
And the Reagan people assured Carter that if Carter brought the hostages back, the Reagan people were going to make a very big deal of Carter's initiative.
The Ayatollah, on the other hand, wasn't about to bring them back until Reagan was president because he was scared of this guy.
I mean, Reagan came with the reputation of being a saber rattler and had once said that, you know, he could turn Tehran into a parking lot very quickly.
So they decided to bring him back.
The wheels were up as Reagan was being sworn in.
In fact, Dick Allen, who was a national security advisor, told me that he got wind of it as Ronald Reagan was taking the oath, and he duckwalked down the aisle, tapped Reagan on his tuxedo pants, and handed up a piece of paper that just said, wheels up in Tehran.
And Reagan turns around, classic Ronald Reagan, and he winks at him.
And he puts the paper back in his pocket because he did not want to steal Jimmy Carter's thunder at the inauguration.
Wow.
That tells you a lot about that guy.
Yeah.
The Evil Empire speech.
Yeah, I think that's one speech Reagan would like to take back.
He wanted to underscore how strong he would be with the Soviet Union.
And, you know, in his first term, he has three different Soviet premiers to deal with.
They all died, one right after the other.
And he had no regard for either of them.
They were hardliners.
They made it very clear from the get-go that they weren't going to negotiate with him.
And Reagan wanted to make it clear that he wasn't somebody to be taken lightly.
In fact, he tells, I believe it's Bud McFarlane at one point, you tell that Russian negotiator you're talking to, you work for one tough son of a bitch.
He wanted to make a point.
But I think he regretted calling it the evil empire because it came back to haunt him in a few times with his negotiations with Gorbachev later on.
He got a lot of flack for his stance and, you know, he's a warmonger, etc.
Yeah.
Was he or was he I've always wanted to, I thought the president is always best when he has kind of a twitchy eye.
Not to the American people.
It's bad when the American people are like, good God, I think he might do it.
But to the adversary, somebody who has that cowboy spirit, like, you don't know, I might just pull a gun on you.
That's right.
So was he the cowboy with a twitchy eye or was he prepared to blow up the evil empire?
He was never prepared to blow up the evil empire.
Never.
Never entered his mind.
He thought mutually assured destruction was the craziest thing he had ever heard of.
It was.
It was.
And he wanted to be known as a man of peace.
In fact, we owe Nancy Reagan a great debt.
Nancy Reagan, as I was writing this book, I thought, well, you know, I had written a book.
I was the Beatles biographer.
And Yoko Ono was the heavy in the Beatles' biography.
People always think that it was Yoko who broke up the Beatles.
It wasn't.
And I thought, well, here I have my Yoko Ono character from the outset.
It's Nancy Reagan.
And wow, I couldn't have been wronger than wrong.
Nancy Reagan had one thing in mind.
And this goes back to your question about would he have blown up the Soviet Union.
She had one thing in mind, and that was to preserve her husband's legacy for the future.
And she wanted him to be known as a man of peace.
And so very early in the first term, she keeps saying to him, make peace with the Soviet Union.
Find some common ground that you can talk to them.
And when Reagan's in the hospital after the assassination attempt, he writes what his staff thought was a very fluffy letter, handwritten to Brezhnev, saying, if we could only sit down and talk like two men across the table, I know we could solve all the world's problems.
Typically, Ronald Reagan, you know, they decided not to send that letter.
Mike Deaver said, they've always been telling you not to send those things.
You're the president.
Tell him to go to hell and send it.
But he ultimately didn't.
He basically wrote that same letter to Gorbachev later on.
So, you know, Ronald Reagan was never looking at war as a possibility.
He was looking at peace all throughout his presidency.
And that comes, excuse me, by the way, from his childhood.
It's what his mother taught him.
Yeah.
But he had a reasonable partner with Gorbachev.
He did.
He did.
He found a man who was not a rock-hard ideologue.
Gorbachev was a lot harder than we think.
You always envision him as like this cuddly little guy.
He wasn't.
He was a communist.
He was a communist.
But you know what?
Ronald Reagan, and this is when he knew he had Gorbachev.
He came away from their first meeting in Geneva, shaking his head.
He learned something.
Gorbachev kind of intimated that he believed in God.
And Reagan couldn't get over this.
It was a communist who believed in God.
And he saw that as an opening.
Yeah, that was...
And how did that play out?
I...
I think it kept bringing Gorbachev back to the negotiating table.
When they get to Reykjavik later on, they are this close away to eliminating nuclear weapons.
This close, Glenn.
And Reagan ultimately walks away from it.
But I think it played out because these were two men who found that not only could they talk to each other, but they weren't closed individuals and they both wanted peace ultimately.
And Gorbachev has, of course, been excluded now for it.
How difficult was it for Ronald Reagan to walk away?
It was the most difficult moment, aside from the challenger blowing up, the shuttle challenger, in his presidency.
Jim Kuhn, who was his executive assistant with him every day, all day, told me that when he got into that car and left Reykjavik, he was consumed with anger, like he had never seen Ronald Reagan before.
He was angry at the situation, angry that they were that close and neither man could get further, and just angry with the world at that time.
The Iran Missile Crisis00:07:23
I mean, he really, he had a brief moment where things got very dark for him.
Was there ever a time, I remember I lived in Washington, D.C., Yeah.
And it was the time of KAL 007 going down.
And I remember, I was on the air, and I remember keeping the old teletype door open so I could hear the bells and the warnings.
And I was thinking, I am in the blast zone.
Was there ever a time we were that close?
I think the only time, and this is just a strange story, and John Poindexter, his third advised security advisor, told me this story.
The trickiest time was when the Achille-Laro incident occurred.
And the two guys who shot Leon Klinghoffer got away, and they were being housed by Hosni Mubarak.
And he had put them on a plane to let them escape.
Mubarak told Reagan, oh, they've left Egypt a long time ago.
But Israeli intelligence said, no, they haven't left.
We have men who have seen them here, and we know what plane they're leaving on.
So Reagan sent up three fighter planes, one with their lights off, to tail the jet.
And they used flashlights to see the tail number to make sure they had the right plane.
They had to hunt around in the skies.
He sent a jet up behind him and a jet on either side of the plane.
And they turned their lights on at one time and told them that they had to land because we wanted those two terrorists.
Poindexter had called Reagan, who was giving a speech at the Sarah Lee factory in Chicago of all places, and said, there's a good chance that they will not land the plane.
And Reagan said to him, then bring it down by any means necessary.
So that was the one time that we came close to an international incident that might have steamrolled into something much, much bigger.
Do you think if Reagan could see where we're at now with Islamic extremism, he would have treated Beirut differently?
Oh, I think he would have treated Beirut differently the day after that Marine barracks blew up.
What do you think he would have done?
First of all, he would have retaliated.
He wanted to.
The orders were given.
He gave them to McFarland to go in there and get those guys.
We knew where they were.
We knew where their camp was.
And Casper Weinberger called Reagan that night, bypassing the White House phones, and he called through the office of the Marine who carries the football, knowing that nobody would be able to intercede.
And he talked Ronald Reagan out of retaliating.
McFarlane told me he was furious with Weinberger.
I mean, it was against the whole American policy at the time and the orders that Reagan had given.
And we didn't retaliate.
And I think Reagan would have gone in there and wiped them out.
And Beirut might have been a different place.
And exactly right.
It wouldn't have pulled the plug on that.
Iran-Contra.
Yeah.
Did he know?
I think he knew.
Why do you say that?
Well, you know, I had the luxury of talking to all his advisors.
I spent 80 hours with Bud McFarlane.
I spent about 45 hours with John Poindexter.
McFarlane told me that he first broached the subject to Reagan when Reagan was just coming out of anesthetic.
He had been having a little polyp removed.
And he went in and said, Reagan had one thing in mind, and that we had seven hostages who were still in captivity.
And they were around the Middle East.
And he wanted them home.
He had met with families, and he was a sentimental guy.
His advisors told, please don't meet with the families because they knew it would pull his heartstrings.
But he wanted those hostages home and he wanted them home for Christmas.
Yeah.
So McFarlane lays this out.
We can bring the hostages home.
Here's a way we can do it.
We've found a faction in Iran who are, we believe, moderates.
The Israelis have told us they've identified some moderates.
And if we give them a number of missiles for which they will release the hostages, they might, with these missiles, have some power and overthrow the Ayatollah one day.
Reagan only heard what he wanted to hear.
He heard, bring the hostages home, overthrow the Ayatollah.
Absolutely.
And he said, yeah, let's explore that, bud.
Well, once you say, let's explore that, all the machinery went into play.
And unfortunately, McFarlane had an associate, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was more than happy to really make it happen.
Yeah.
And I think it snowballed from there.
But along the way, Reagan was told that this could be illegal.
There was a meeting in the residence of the White House with all the top brass.
was McFarlane and Poindexter and George Bush and Weinberger and George Schultz.
And Weinberger and George Schultz had never heard of this before.
And they were beside themselves.
They said it was absolutely, I mean, Schultz told me, he said, this is absolutely illegal.
Don't do it.
And Reagan, he kept wanting to pursue it because, you know, a little more leeway and we'll get a hostage back.
Well, they gave them 500 tow missiles.
We got no hostages back.
So we gave them another 500 and we got one back.
Not all seven that they promised.
Soon they were talking about, you know, sending 3,500 missiles over, which they did, they did.
Through the Israelis, through back to Iran, so that it couldn't be traced.
See, we weren't giving the missiles to Iran.
The Israelis were giving them to Iran from their stockpile of missiles we had given the Israelis, and those missiles were kind of out of date.
Then we said, we'll replenish your stockpiles after you give them.
Oh, boy, just, it snowballed and snowballed and snowballed.
And at one point, somebody said to Reagan, you know, this isn't going the way we want.
If this ever gets out, you know, we're really going to be in trouble.
And he said, well, let's not tell anybody.
Snowballing Into Disaster00:08:48
Oh, jeez.
So did he know?
He knew.
He knew.
It was breaking the law.
The Boland Amendment was in place.
It was against American law that we had established.
But he did it because he wanted those hostages back.
I have a postcard, a little letter written on Ronald Reagan stationery.
And it was written to his daughter Patty the day that it came out in the press that he had Alzheimer's.
It is the most heartbreaking letter ever where he talks about, I remember the little girl who used to sit on my lap and ask me to marry her.
She sold that for drugs.
Tell me about his tell me about the last few years and the and not only the slipping away, but the slipping away of the family.
Yeah.
Well, let me at least set the scene for you with the Alzheimer's.
His chief of staff, Fred Ryan, who was there the day he was told, really laid it out.
And it's one of the saddest scenes in the book.
Reagan had no idea.
And he was at home with Nancy.
And she said, Ronnie, we really have to tell you a few things.
So let's go into the library.
And she sits him down and she brings Fred Ryan into the room, who's going to be their chief of staff post-presidency, and his doctor.
And she said, the doctor has something really important to tell you.
And he tells Reagan that he has signs of Alzheimer's disease.
This was no shock to Ronald Reagan.
His mother had it.
His father had it.
His brother died of it.
I'm sure he knew it was coming.
It was on the horizon.
But while the doctor and Fred and Nancy are talking about how we're going to get through this, Reagan gets up out of the chair and walks over to a little desk that's by the window in his library.
And he sits down and he writes that letter to the American public explaining what he's going through and what they can expect from him.
Wow.
And he writes it in longhand.
And if you've seen that letter and it was published, there are no crossouts.
It's intact from the first draft.
And he gives it to Fred Ryan.
He walks over and interrupts the conversation and says, Fred, you know, I think we should put this out.
Get somebody to type it up.
And Ryan looks at it and he said, Mr. President, we're going to put this out in your own handwriting.
We're going to send it to the press.
We're going to offer it to all the newspapers.
This has to go out this way.
And that was, it's really an incredible moment.
The head of the Reagan Foundation told me she cried when she read that scene in the book because it's Reagan.
How did it affect him?
You know, six months out of office, on July 4th, he and Nancy are taking a horseback ride in Mexico at the home of the ambassador.
And he falls off the horse and he hits his head.
And, you know, I'm not a doctor, but everybody who saw him thereafter says this was the beginning of the end.
He starts now to slip away very quickly.
And friends told me about how he would come to parties at their homes in LA.
And, you know, he would sit in a chair and he just wasn't himself anymore.
He got snappish with his family and with some of the younger kids, the grandchildren.
But he still went to the office every day, read the Hollywood trades every day.
I mean, he stayed active as long as he could.
Did the family ever come back at all?
Not really.
Not really.
It was all very superficial.
He said in this letter, he said, I don't even remember what we're arguing about anymore.
Yeah.
Well, it wasn't so much divisiveness.
It was just that there was, I think there was a lack of the parental expression of love there.
The love that Reagan had gotten from his mom and dad, he didn't know how to translate to his kids.
And it's, I think, the one flaw, serious flaw in character that's in my book.
He was never there for his kids.
His kids have told me that he never put his arms around them and told them that he loved them.
It's so strange, isn't it?
So strange, a man who had a huge heart.
And yet he loved Nancy and seemed to really be affectionate with Nancy.
But I think he didn't have love in his heart.
I think there wasn't room for anybody else in his heart.
I think it was, I mean, he loved his, did he love his kids?
I'm absolutely certain that he loved his kids.
He didn't know how to relate to them.
You know, he wasn't, he could be a touchy-feely guy if he met you, but to his family, he just wasn't that way.
There's a scene in Michael Reagan's book where he's graduating from high school, and the guest speaker is Ronald Reagan.
And when Michael walks up to get his diploma, Reagan shakes his hand and says, and your name, young man?
And he goes, Dad, it's me.
It's Michael.
And he said there was something in his eyes.
His father just didn't make the connection.
It was a performance.
When it came to family, he wasn't the family guy.
And I guess Nancy really wasn't the warm and fuzzy man that some mom that somebody like Patty and Ron needed.
Do they love their parents?
They do.
They do, I think.
But it was a difficult, as so many of us have difficult relationships with our parents.
They did.
You started this because you were looking for somebody.
You said two things. Change the world and... Beloved.
Where does he fit in the 20th century?
His life is framed by the 20th century, Glenn.
This is the most wonderful thing about my job as a writer.
I get to write about the Midwest and the settling of the Midwest, about the birth of broadcasting games on radio, about coming to Hollywood just two years after three years after talkies with all the studio politics and the golden age of cinema and the birth of conservatism in the Republican Party.
What a life.
Where does he fit into the 20th century?
Was the 20th century.
He was the walking 20th century.
And that's why I feel like this, together with the Beatles, is a life's work.
I've asked people, I'm a big fan of Walt Disney.
Yeah.
And I've studied him.
I've read his papers.
I've gone through his diaries.
Yeah, my friend Neil Gabler wrote his biography.
And I've asked people before, try to imagine an America or a world without him.
Yeah.
And you can't.
Right.
I mean, it was so all-encompassing, and it gave us a Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, they gave us this sense of the little guy struggling, but they're going to win and it's happy.
Right.
You know?
Imagine a world without Ronald Reagan.
Absolutely.
It's hard.
It's hard.
And this is why I have led such a charmed life.
I wrote about the Beatles, who have changed the way we regard music in this world.
I wrote about Julia Child, who changed the way we eat and live.
And now I get Ronald Reagan.
I mean, wow.
Would you come back?
What a third act.
Would you come back and talk to us about the Beatles and Julia Child?
Living In Those Times00:03:40
Oh, absolutely.
I'd love to.
I'd love to.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
Thank you.
This was great.
My pleasure.
I thought that was fantastic.
Wow.
Was that good for you?
It was.
You were the easiest guy to talk to.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And I have to tell you, you know, Glenn Beck in my household when you were on TV was.
I know.
I know, I know.
But I knew that this was going to be a really easy talk.
Because I've listened to some of your shows, you know, now, and you are a wonderful interviewer.
You really are.
Yeah.
And really, in a lot of ways, and my liberal friends will kill me for saying this, the voice of reason in so many ways.
Can I tell you, that's what Tom Brokoff said on election night.
He said, what kind of world do we live in?
Because I had just done an interview.
And they said, well, he said, what kind of world do we live in when Glenn Beck is the voice of reason?
Yeah.
And I was just as freaked out by that as well.
Like, we are in deep trouble if I'm the one who's going to be able to do it.
Yeah, but guys like you, guys like me, guys who've had strong opinions about things before, who have something deeper in their heart, can sit back and say to themselves, I'm not going where this world's taking us right now.
I'm going to believe in my core values, which Reagan did as well.
May I leave you with this?
Because you just said that.
I brought my family over to Auschwitz in 2012.
Pretty stunning.
Yeah.
And I wanted my older kids, as well as myself and my wife, to decide who we are.
If the world ever goes insane, who are we?
Yeah.
And I lined up a conversation with my family and this woman who was one of the righteous among the nations.
And she gave me the best piece of advice.
And I think we are living in those times right now.
She said, I said, I believe everybody has the potential of being a righteous person.
You know, everybody has the potential of doing what she did.
How do you water the seeds?
And she looked at me, perplexed, and she said, you misunderstand.
The righteous didn't suddenly become righteous.
They just refused to go over the cliff with everyone else.
And it's all we have to do is just remind people, you know better than this.
Stop it.
Stop it.
The one question I'm glad you didn't ask me, which everybody else does, may be too obvious, is how would Ronald Reagan have felt about Donald Trump?
I think you would be ashamed.
Horrified.
Horrified.
You know, I'm a New Yorker.
We know Trump.
I know Trump.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've heard me speak about Trump.
I have.
I think this is the darkest and the scariest I've ever felt as an American.
I agree.
I was concerned about Barack Obama because of the people he surrounded himself with early on that no one would recognize.
All you have to do is take the skeletons out of the closet, show everybody, and explain it.
Nobody would.
And the fact that we were starting to grow apart and not only grow apart, but grow the power of the office and the media.
That's dangerous.
Very.
And I warned on Fox over and over again.
Warning About Trump00:01:13
Don't do this, Democrats, because someone's going to come and it may be on our side and you're not going to like it.
And here he is.
I never saw Donald Trump coming.
Me neither.
He is everything I warned about.
He is.
I never could, never could have predicted this.
I thought the country had more common sense than this.
You think you did.
It was my people that I had been talking to forever.
I said, I almost left broadcast afterwards.
I couldn't.
It gets darker every day.
It does.
And I don't know where we're going with it either because I was really concerned.
What was it yesterday when the Democrats came out and said they have to be not more radical, more ruthless?
Oh, dear God, don't play that game.
Don't.
Right.
No.
Don't.
We need some fresh voices in here very quickly because the old order doesn't know how to deal with any of this.
And they're dealing badly with it.
I know.
Thank you.
This was great.
Thank you.
Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be Discovered by other