Michael Reagan recounts his upbringing at Chadwick School, his father's pivot from Hollywood to politics after Robert Kennedy's 1954 ouster, and the creation of "A Time for Choosing." He details life under Secret Service protection since age two, the 1981 assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr., and his father's philosophy that the Democratic Party left him. Highlighting cross-aisle friendships with Tip O'Neill and Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan critiques modern polarization while outlining the Reagan Legacy Foundation's work supporting USS crew families and honoring WWII veterans. Ultimately, he advocates for restoring dialogue and shared values to heal American political divisions. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't even know if bizarre is the word, but it seemingly is a bizarre level of fame because there's a political element and a Hollywood element and you combine those two things, and especially the way these days where politics and Hollywood have become the same thing, It's a unique place.
So let's, let's do a little, we're going to spend the first half doing a little bongo and talking about your dad and your mom and the family and all that.
So just tell me a little bit about just growing up.
Well, you know, growing up, essentially, because people think, hey, you're so lucky.
I used to get that at school.
You're so lucky your parents are rich or famous.
And you go, yeah, but I'm boarding at school at six years old.
And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
That era of Hollywood children, that's why we all grew up mad at our parents.
Because we're boarding at school, six years old.
I'm at Chadwick School, Rancho Palos Verdes.
My sister's four years older than me.
She's there also.
And people are saying, how lucky you are as you're crying yourself to sleep every night.
And so we did.
We grew up angry because we were very jealous of the parents or the children who got dropped off by their moms and dads every single day at school and then got picked up.
And we didn't get picked up.
And so we grew up a little angst, if you will.
Some of us wrote books about those days and that era.
She just won an Academy Award in 1948, Best Actress.
Back in 1948, my dad was, you know, doing Hollywood.
He was president of Screen Actors Guild, dealing with all those issues.
They got divorced in 1948, so I was living with my mom at that time in Beverly Hills.
I'd say to my mom, Mom, I want to be in your business.
And she would say, no, no, you don't want to be in this business.
It's really tough.
It's a tough grind.
You never know if you're going to make it.
And I'm thinking to myself, I'm living in a mansion in Beverly Hills.
We've got a maid.
We've got a cook.
We've got a Cadillac.
Two stories.
I said, I kind of like this industry.
Maybe you just don't want the competition from a child.
And so that's how I grew up.
But you know something?
It was really a great life at so many levels because my parents never forgot where they were from.
My mom was from St.
Joe, Missouri.
My dad from Tampa, Illinois.
And they brought those values with them when they came to California.
So Maureen and I, even though not liking boarding at school and being angry at times and missing our parents terribly, really got grounded well with both my mom and my dad, because my dad, even divorced from my mother, never forgot he had another family, even after he married Nancy.
She stayed completely away from it, and she never said anything about my dad when he was president until the day we buried him, and then she said some very nice kind things.
What year did your folks get divorced?
1948, they were married in 1940, divorced in 1948, met on a set of a movie.
And that's where I learned about the tax laws in America.
That's where I learned about America and the greatness of America.
And riding out to the ranch with him, and riding horses, and shooting ground squirrels, and going swimming, and cutting firewood.
I bought him his first chainsaw.
When you become president, that all goes away.
Because now he's got John Barletta from Secret Service, who just passed away a few months ago,
you know, riding with my dad.
And it just completely changes.
You don't have those close moments that, in fact, you had previous.
So my greatest years with my dad was prior to the election.
And the great years after he came out of office, we got to spend time together.
And when he had, you know, that terrible, terrible disease that he had, so many people had Alzheimer's, we probably built the best relationship of our lives.
Because in 1992, I made a decision.
And the decision was, the next time I see my dad, I'm going to hug him and tell him I love him.
And I did that in 1992.
And he hugged me back and said, I love you too.
From that point on, every time we would see each other, we would hug each other and say, I love you.
When he got Alzheimer's, and he got to a point he could no longer say my name, He remembered I was the young man who hugged him alone, hugged him goodbye.
And so when he saw me, he would open up his arms, not able to say my name.
And I'd fall into his arms, and he'd give me that little hug, and I'd hug him.
And one day, we're up visiting Nancy at the house, because you no longer visit with Dad, and We'd be there, and I got up to leave and got to the car, and Colleen says to me, you forgot something.
I said, what did I forget?
Look at the door.
I looked back at the front door of the house, and Dad had remembered that I had forgotten to hug him goodbye.
So when you see all those pictures of him, it's real, as opposed to now where everything is so staged, every time a politician shows up anywhere in a hat with this, or holding the pitchfork, or just anything that's new now, it's so staged.
So when you hear these guys' names now, Manafort and Stone and some of the others, that they're so in the news lately with all this stuff, what does that ring to you?
You know, I was in my office, Secret Service, I was in a business meeting in my office, and the Secret Service agent came in, said there's been an assassination attempt back in Washington, everything's okay, it was Mike Lootie.
And he was my agent in charge of my detail that day.
And he said, everything's okay, he closed the door, and I went.
People looked at me like, that was cold.
I said, yeah, that was cold.
So I picked up the phone call at the White House, asked for Nancy.
Nancy wasn't at the White House.
I walked out and said, Mike, my dad's been shot.
He said, no, he's fine.
I said, no, Nancy's not at the White House.
There's only one reason she wouldn't be at the White House, and the car was on the way to the White House.
If she's not there, she's someplace else.
And I would say that would be the hospital.
And Mike said, no, they say he's fine.
I said, check it.
Five minutes later, Mike says, you're right.
He was shot.
So now we go home.
And, of course, the press just surrounded our house.
We were being held captive, basically, in the home.
And they finally sent a plane out from Washington to pick us up.
But we were asked to stay home.
They didn't want us to rush to Washington for fear the markets would crash, people would think it was worse than it really was.
But it really was worse than people thought it was, because he was very close to death.
If Jerry Parr, who was the Asian in charge that day, if Jerry, if Dad had not coughed up oxygenated blood, they would have gone to the White House and he would have bled to death internally.
But he did, right at the right time, and they went to the hospital.
And I tell the story, when they get to the hospital, they cut the suit off of my dad.
You can now see it at the library.
And I remember the next day, when we were able to see dad, we finally got in very late at night, saw dad 10 o'clock the next morning.
And the humor that he shared with the country, it's the same humor he always shared with the family.
You know, how it changed was, and people have written books, they really need to call family members.
So many people who write books don't.
They think they know everything.
But you know, family members have the inside baseball stories.
You don't want to go there.
And so it's been upsetting.
Some of the things have been said.
How it changed him was that he believed he was truly saved for a reason.
And he became closer, really, to God.
If you will.
And that's where he was.
And a lot of people just misunderstood that he wasn't the same guy.
He wasn't the same guy.
But he did put a gym in on the second floor of the White House, put two and a half inches on his chest, and got stronger because of the bullet in the wound and what have you.
But he just became more, he became closer to God and felt that there was a reason he was there.
So did that then galvanize a lot of the things that he ended up doing in the second term and everything that happened with Russia and Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall and everything else?
So that, he always had that message of freedom in him.
That idea of the individual and freedom and You know, so the line, and you touched on this earlier, but the line of, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me, that's become very, to me, that's like, that's it, because I was a big lefty most of my life, and just in the last five years, I've sort of woken up to what they've become.
I know that's probably funny to you, and if your dad was sitting here, he'd say, well, you're late to the party.
So when he said that, was he really saying, well that, was the effect of what he was saying, I get what happened with GM, was just that when they left me, meaning that they want government to solve everything, and that's just not what I want.
Well, he also said to him, as an aside, he says, and by the way, I promise not to campaign against any Democrats who support it in the next election, which helped a lot, because he had a lot going for him.
But he used the same thing worked with Gorbachev.
You know, same thing worked with all of them.
He just, you know, Ronald Reagan for best friend, as Jimmy Stewart said.
Ronald Reagan for best friend.
He was that kind of a guy.
Easy to get along with.
But he knew what he wanted, and he knew the best way to go about getting it.
Yeah, I mean some of that has to do with maybe some of the acting career and he was at a level of fame that was so absurd that he had lived through the struggle years and No, he had the tough years.
A lot of people don't know about, you know, if you want something, you've got to work for it.
Nobody's going to hand it to you.
My mother taught me that, you know, back when I was 10 years old, I wanted a 10-speed bike.
All my other friends were getting 10-speed bikes given to them by their parents for free.
I went down to Hansort Soccer Arena, Santa Monica.
Picked out a blue 10-speed Schwinn bike.
Went home and said to my mom, Mom, you buy me this and I'm going to love you forever.
No kid's ever done that with his parents.
My mom said, well how badly do you want it?
I said, Mom, I want more than anything.
Good.
Do you want it enough to get a job?
I said, what job?
I'm 10 years old.
She's going to deliver papers.
What?
So she opens up the paper, looking for ads.
Ah!
You can sell papers in front of Good Shepherd Church in Santa Monica, where we go to church on Sunday mornings.
It's available.
Sign here.
I signed a contract with my mother when I was 10 years old.
She loaned me the money.
To buy that bike, and I would pay her back on Sunday afternoon after church with some of the profits I made from selling by the 25 cents for a Sunday paper that was this thick.
But what I made, I give it back to her.
And I asked her, I said, why are you doing this to me?
All of my friends are getting bikes given to them.
She says, because I build men, not boys.
If I give you what you want, you'll be a 40-year-old child.
But if I teach you now that you have to work for what you want in life, you'll be a 40-year-old man, and that's what I built.
All right, so let's just do a little bit more about your dad, and then I wanna spend the rest of the time talking about what you're doing now, and the foundation, and everything else.
So, I think it's pretty fair to say that the fall of the Soviet Union was his greatest accomplishment.
I think if you look at his last speech that he gave, really talked about the things that had been accomplished.
He was a great guy for using we, not I. And he really understood it was a team effort.
And very happy with what he was able to accomplish and being able to work with others.
And I said to Margaret Thatcher the day after the funeral, She came to me, we were having breakfast at the hotel, and she said, oh Michael, about your dad, just think of what we could have accomplished if we'd been elected in 1976.
I said, Lady Thatcher, if you'd been elected in 76, the Berlin Wall would still be up, the Cold War would still be in place.
The fact of the matter is, if he'd been elected then, he would have been out of office, even if he was a two-term president, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came in.
The wall would still be up.
For some reason, fate, you name it, All the right people were in the right place at the right time.
And my dad was that leader, able to work with each and every one of you, Helmut Kohl, you name it, to bring everybody together, Pope John Paul, that ultimately brought down that Berlin Wall.
All of you were on the same page.
Up until that point, all of you were on other pages.
And it's my dad's, that one card he had on his desk, telling what you accomplished and where you can go if you don't worry who gets the credit.
Dad didn't worry about credit.
He worried about getting the job done.
He wanted to bring that wall down.
If you go back historically and listen to my father's speeches, he was talking about that wall back when it was put up, back in what, 1961?
Two o'clock in the morning?
August 13th, I believe?
He talked about that wall from that point forward in his life.
And so that was, that was a seminal thing for him.
Even though they had this adversarial way, they have mutual respect.
And ultimately, you have Sam Donaldson speaking, you know, on behalf of my father at his birthday last year at the library.
He made friends of people who were enemies and got things accomplished, whether it's Pope John Paul, like the Lentz, the Wachelhabel, doesn't matter who it is, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Turn him.
And Mikhail Gorbachev, I worked with Eureka College a few years ago.
We were able to get Mikhail Gorbachev to go to Eureka College, my dad's alma mater, and speak to the Reagan Society at Eureka College about his relationship with my dad.
Wouldn't happen today.
And that's what's sad.
You see things deteriorate possibly when they're at such a great high-level relationship in all areas.
And they had an event celebrating his birthday at the library.
Or not the library, what would become.
And they had a big event.
And Lady Thatcher was the speaker.
And there had to be a thousand people under this tent.
It was great.
And my dad introduced Lady Thatcher to a great round of applause.
And when the applause was over, he reintroduced her.
The exact same way he had just done.
And everybody got it, and everybody applauded again.
And that was the moment where I think the decision was probably made that there's too many people in the room that saw it, that he had to say something.
And that's when the letter comes out in 1994.
The letter comes out November 3rd, I think, 1994, when the letter comes out.
Because too many people in the room saw that moment, if you will.
But everybody who would just give a standing ovation to Lady Thatcher and my dad, stood up and gave another standing ovation to Lady Thatcher
and my dad.
And that was the moment where we knew that it was going to blossom from there to National
Enquirer.
And you didn't want National Enquirer breaking the story.
You wanted the family breaking the story and dad, of course, with the letter he wrote to
the nation.
unidentified
After the letter, he didn't do any public appearances, did he?
I think the last one he gave was in that year, but prior to the letter.
He might have given one, if you will, but it wasn't easy.
He still, I mean, it was just the early onset, if you will, of what he had.
I chaired the John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation for
For years.
I just left it this last year.
And, you know, we just, we're doing a whole program with UCLA and SC and colleges.
We took University of San Francisco, where we took, I think we had $10-11 million in the bank.
And what we're doing is doing matching funds with these universities and creating chairs.
So we turned the $11 into $22 million.
That is used strictly for research for Alzheimer's.
There's a new program CRISPR that looks very promising in the future.
We're part of that.
So, you know, people think maybe within five years something if CRISPR does what everybody thinks it might be able to do, it'd be great for that issue.
And part of what you guys are teaching about, I mean, there's incredible stories that would never happen now, I mean, about actors, some like your dad, and athletes that actually put their careers on hold, you know, to fight in World War II, which now, to an athlete or an actor these days would sound, it would sound insane to say.
My dad couldn't go there because he was legally blind, so he did over 300 films, training films, for those who did go there.
But you have so many of these actors who signed up and went.
There was a TV show on Netflix, I think it was, The Five Came Back, the famous directors of the time.
Who came back, but they were sent there.
They're the ones who took the film of all those encampments that we saw of the Jews.
That's how we found out about these things that were going on.
So we'll have special places put out for them, actors, sports people who were involved, who went there and gave up their careers, if you will, to go there, came back and we got the careers going, if you will.
But it's such a great place.
Anybody who goes to Normandy needs to stop at St.
Mary Gleeson.
People don't know that the gravesites that you see at the American Cemetery, all of them were in that area of St.
Mary Gleeson through there.
There were, gosh, 15,000 gravesites that were there.
And the wife of the D-Day mayor of St. Mary Glees, called the "Mother of Normandy,"
was the one who took care of those gravesites all of those years, making contact with the
loved ones that were left home.
And when they made the agreement, the Americans with the French, to have the American cemetery,
they gave the availability to the family members home to have their loved ones sent back home
That's why there's 9,600 at the American cemetery, and there are 15,000 spread throughout
St. Mary Glees.
And to go there and go to the Airborne Museum and see the gliders and see how these guys
came in and what was going on that day at St. Mary Glees.
Mary Glees is absolutely phenomenal.
And to be able to remember them with these bricks.
And what happens, the 250 bucks, okay, what happens to the money?
I'll tell you what happens to the money.
We paid to get the brick, put it in the ground.
The profits that are left over, which are pretty good, are split between the Airborne Museum, for their museum, the upkeep, and the Reagan Legacy Foundation, which does what?
Provide scholarships to men and women aboard USS Ronald Reagan.
So the ideas, the ideas that he believed in, the cornerstone things you've talked about here, about freedom and that he basically saved capitalism and saved the West and all of these things, when you see these days that there's this idea out there that socialism is cool for young people, you hear this now, I mean, I see you on Twitter, you talk about this stuff.
Think about the state of California I'm born and raised in.
People don't know they used to be number one in education.
It's now 46th in education.
I mean, we're not educating our kids.
We've become politically correct in the education system.
I remember when I went to Arizona State, which would disallow me from ever running for Supreme Court justice, because we were on social probation, Arizona State.
Everybody's on social probation.
We earned it the old-fashioned way.
But, you know, when I went to school, you know, we heard from many different philosophers, different beliefs.
You heard them all, and you know, every week you said, that sounds really good, I think I'll be that this week, and the next week you're another.
Nobody's sitting down just, let's have a conversation.
Let's find things that we agree on.
It's always, you go to dinner.
You're afraid if there's somebody sitting next to you, afraid of saying anything for fear these people on this side or that side may get upset with what you're saying and start yelling and screaming at you.
And that's sad.
You have husbands and wives sitting down, won't talk to each other.
And it never used to be like that.
We used to be able to communicate, just sit down and talk.
I remember my dad saying to me one day, his dad told him, he said, you know, when the government starts paying you not to work, why work?
His dad taught him that, my dad taught me that.
You know, you try to teach your kids that.
But now you try to teach them, and everybody's got their handout.
It's really interesting.
We support a little school in the middle of a slum.
Not the Foundation, it's Colleen and I. Middle of a slum in Africa, in Nairobi.
800,000 in the slum.
School in the middle of it.
They wear uniforms.
They teach them English, they sing, and they're smiling.
And they tell you, as you're going through this slum, they say, if you see somebody with their handout, please don't put anything in it.
Why?
Because it will keep them in the slum.
You want to help the people in the slum?
Give them educational material.
Education is the only way out of this slum.
And I'm thinking to myself, why do they get it?
Why do they understand it in a slum of 800,000 in the middle of Nairobi?
You travel around the world, and there's too many people here talking what they think they know, and they don't know anything, because they've never been across their own border, but they know more than you do.
You just didn't see it when you were there, you know.
You didn't understand it.
You go, mm-hmm, okay.
And so you do.
You find yourself, unfortunately, in a world today where people are afraid of dialogue.
They don't want to dialogue and find that commonality.
Like my father and Tip O'Neill had to find a common ground to give you the largest tax break in American history.
They just had to find it.
Whatever it was and there's the people elected Ronald Reagan to talk about the Reagan Democrats didn't necessarily agree with him But they liked it They liked him.
And because they liked him, they supported him and voted for him.
And it's getting to a point, I wanna see us be likable again.
Yeah, all right, so I don't wanna end on that note, so let's end on, if your dad was here, what would he be telling us in this strange, polarizing time that we're talking about right now?
If you could go to reaganlegacyfoundation.org or walkwaytovictory.com and really help remember those who truly did save the world back in the day in France.
And this is a way you can do it.
As I said, if you don't know someone who served Then you can donate to the Foundation.
And we have plenty of people and names that will put a name on a brick and put it out there.
And what we do is we'll send you a video.
We have a 50-minute video that we did, Heroes of World War II, that we give to people who purchase a brick.
And you'll get a photo of the brick in the ground there at St.
Mary Glees, Normandy, France.
And when you visit Normandy, go to St.
Mary Glees.
Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you, and I sense your dad's legacy is in good hands, and I will tell them where to go, but I'm not going to do the impression.