The Rest Is History - 310: Ronald Reagan and the American Dream

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Ronald "Dutch" Reagan was born in 1911 to a humble family of Illinois, his father an FDR-loving democrat, his mother a notable member of the local Christian community. A high school football star, "Dutch" would grow up to become one of America's favourite sports broadcasters, a Hollywood actor and a union leader, before finally entering American political life in 1964. The first episode of our three-part series on Ronald Reagan sees Tom and Dominic look at his childhood, his early career, his romantic life pre-Nancy, and the beginning of his journey towards Republican politics. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I've got to go, Rock. It's all right. I'm not afraid. Sometime, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they've got

and win just one for the gipper i don't know where i'll be then but i'll know about it and i'll be happy that dominic sandbrook was the death of george gip who originally was a very successful basketball player, then became a football player after his team coach saw him kick football an absolute mile. He was a great football star. And then very sadly, he got a throat infection and died of it at the age of 25. But the twist in this story, and people may be wondering why we're talking about this rather obscure football player, the twist, as I'm sure all our american listeners will certainly know is that actually that wasn't george gip that was ronald reagan playing george gip right and that was original footage was it

tom that was the uh yes it was that was from the film knut rockne all american 1940 that absolutely wasn't you no it wasn't me well you could probably tell it was me because obviously it was Reagan. I mean, it's a brilliant impression, but it was Reagan as he sounded in the 1980s. The problem is whenever I think of Reagan, I think of Reagan as president because he was the first American president that I became familiar with. And we punctuate, not just Americans, all of us punctuate our lives with the American presidents who were in the background on the news in the newspapers and reagan was the first for me the gipper yeah gipper yeah people called him the gipper i mean people called him throughout his his political career people called him the gipper

because because before he became president long long before he became president he was a a movie star yes and before he became a movie star he played a And before he became a movie star, he played a lot of sports. Yeah, he did. Well, he didn't just... And he was a kind of TV commentator. He was a radio commentator. He was a radio commentator. Yeah.

Yes, and an extremely successful one. Yes, hello, everybody. Welcome to The Rest Is History. We are embarking on an epic journey through the life of Ronald Reagan. So our last epic journey, Tom, was through the career of Christopher Columbus. So now another great American. Another great American, exactly. So Reagan has a really extraordinary life, doesn't he?

I mean, it allows us to talk about so many different things. So growing up in the Midwest, the world of the early days of radio, Hollywood, the Red Scares of the late 1940s, and then obviously going into politics in California, the big governor of California, and then the tumult of the 70s, the rise of kind of populist conservatism. And then those sort of two terms. And Reagan, I suppose i suppose has i mean even i know you're not a specialist in american history tom but um reagan feels like a really consequential world figure doesn't he in a way that most american presidents arguably don't well he's got an airport named after him hasn't he yeah reagan national in washington uh and that's absolutely a measure

i get or no i suppose it isn't because for Ford's got one and all kinds of people have. But it's a big one. It's a big one, yeah. It's not the Jimmy Carter peanut facility, is it? I mean, no, and it's not just that. I mean, that sounds a bit like we're sort of being completely frivolous about it. But Reagan is also an ideological lodestar. So he's one of those figures that Republicans always invoke. I mean, rather like how British conservatives always lay claim to the mantle of Winston Churchill or

Margaret Thatcher. Reagan fulfills that role in a way that, you know, among modern presidents, I suppose only Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, they do for the Democrats. But Reagan stands alone really for the Republicans, Maybe Abraham Lincoln, I suppose. My sense growing up in a Europe that was haunted by the shadow of nuclear war, my sense of Reagan growing up was a very negative one, that he was a warmonger, that he was a dangerous cowboy. You remember Spitting Image, which was a satirical British TV show involving latex puppets. And there was a kind of running gag about Reagan that he would, you know, he'd be looking for the button to press. Oh dear, I've pressed the wrong one.

There goes Moscow. Yeah. And that was a kind of running gag that he just had to press the wrong button and third world war would break out. And then suddenly he was kind of meeting up with Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik and kind of even going to Moscow.achev in Geneva and Reykjavik and kind of even going to Moscow. And the Cold War seemed to be over.

So there was that kind of tension, I think, in the memory that he was a cowboy who was out to shoot the bad guys and precipitate the Third World War. He was a man of peace who wanted to get rid of all nuclear weapons. So there's that ambivalence, I think, which is probably the overriding sense of ambivalence for people outside America. My sense of Reagan as a president within America is that he was a kind of a pretty terrible president in terms of his policy, but that in his role as a kind of constitutional monarch, which is also a very important part of the president's role. He was superb. And even people who were very ideologically opposed to him, who hated a lot of what his

policies embodied, they liked him. He was a genial man. He was at moments of extreme stress in American life. Think particularly of the loss of the space shuttle when it blew up. The Challenger. The Challenger. He was superb at channeling American grief and pride and all the complexities of it. But maybe I'm being a kind of, that's my kind of sneery European perspective. That does absolutely capture how a lot of Europeans think about Reagan. I think the difference, interesting for me as somebody who writes a lot about Britain in the same period, the interesting contrast, obviously, is with Margaret Thatcher,

supposedly his great partner and soulmate, because they're very different, I would say, in temperament, in style, in tone. I mean, Mrs. Thatcher's so abrasive and so confrontational. Nobody loved Mrs. Thatcher.

I mean, a few did, perhaps. If you were a very hardcore Tory, you would love Mrs. Thatcher. But she was uncompromising in her zeal for conflict and confrontation. I mean, she loved it. One of the things that emerges when you sort of study Reagan, the people around him say, the one thing about Ronald Reagan is he hated confrontation. Unless it was with the Soviets.

Yeah, and did all that he could. Well, even with the Soviets, you see, the interesting thing is that Reagan is writing in his diary how he'd love to get in a room together with the general secretary and convince him that we mean them no harm and all this kind of thing. I mean, there is this sort of, that emollience is not just a performance. I mean, well, this is a thing we'll discuss. With Reagan, it is, of course, always a performance. He is the politician as performer par excellence. But the key to Reagan, it seems to me, is that he absolutely believes in his own performance. And to some degree,

I mean, one of the interesting things about him when he's a film star is people always say, he's at his best when he's playing himself i mean this the sort of mirrors within mirrors you know he has this fantasy image of what a president should be or what an american should be and he's absolutely determined to play it but he's he's never really aware that it's a performance is he he never lets you in on the it's not like boris johnson who's always winking and joking and drawing attention to the artifice. Reagan does an absolute sincerity to his portrayal of himself as the president. embodies so much that defined America in the 20th century to a startling degree. So in his memoirs, he talks about growing up with white picket fences, even though as we'll find out, his upbringing was much more darker than that, really. He plays sports at high school. He does the high school romance. He goes to college. He is a lifeguard. He becomes a

Hollywood actor. It's astonishing the degree to which he has within himself all these kind of ideals, these visions, these fantasies, these dreams that Americans have always had about themselves and the way that that has served to define America in the eyes of the world. And he draws on all of that as a politician, superbly. But the question then is, which we've already fencing around, to what extent is it performative and to what extent is he what he seems to be? Well, it's a fascinating question, isn't it? With politicians, you could argue that everything is always performative, but that's the point. That's not inauthentic. Henry Kissinger in 1971, pretty shallow. And then that's the charge throughout his presidency, is that basically he's a kind of a mannequin or he's an actor speaking lines

and that people have to give him the scripts. And the question as to whether there is actually any depth beneath that seeming shallowness is kind of interesting. That's a fascinating one. And just as a spoiler, I don't think he is shallow. I think, I mean, the interesting thing about Reagan,, the thing about the scripts, he writes those scripts. He absolutely believes, and as we'll come to in this episode, in Hollywood, he was notorious for being, you wouldn't want to sit next to him at lunch because he would just bore you about world affairs and politics but which he probably picked up from reader's digest well that's true he picks up the reader's digest yeah you're absolutely right anyway so let's talk a little bit about uh about reagan's background because this actually is a really interesting story isn't it tom

that's fascinating so he's born in 1911 um tampico illinois uh which one of his biographers i think it's bob spitz describes tampico as says it's basically like the set of a low budget Western. So he's in the Midwest. Right. And the whole way through his life, both the settings and the people around him are like people from films. Yeah, they are.

Even his parents are actually to some degree, aren't they? They are rather stereotypical. Jack, Jack Reagan and Nellie Wilson. Well, or even before that, I mean, so they come from Irelandireland yeah via london by peckham interestingly um and they they go they you know they become prospectors so it's a little house on the prairie all that kind of stuff um his great uncles go

gold prospecting um and two of them end up being eaten because they get stuck in a snowstorm. Who eats them? The other prospectors. That's bad form, isn't it? I'd hope for better from my prospecting comrades. But the idea of Reagan as a cowboy, I mean, his great uncles died in the Wild West at its wildest. Yeah. So that is all part of the background. The funny thing is, even though he sort of dressed up as a cowboy on his ranch, he was always very cross when people called him a cowboy.

And he said, I didn't do many Westerns. He did about seven Westerns or something. But that's a sign of that American iconography, how quickly people associated the two. And he himself, there are loads of photos of him in a denim shirt, kind of on his ranch with a horse. So he grows up in the Midwest. Don't you think that a huge part of his appeal is that he embodies an ideal of America that is associated with the Midwest? Yeah.

It's kind of, it's virtues, it's hardiness, it's provincialism. Absolutely. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. I think he has a fantasy of America himself. He has, at the core of Reagan is an idea of America, I think, that he completely and utterly believes in. And it's a very Midwestern idea. It's not the world of the coasts. It's not urban or metropolitan. It's not especially diverse or multicultural. Well, not at all, is it? I guess we'll talk about Reagan and race a little bit later, but there are not many African-Americans in Reagan's early years. It's a world of small towns. If you've ever been, for our British listeners, if you've ever been to some of these places, to Illinois, to Iowa, to Minnesota, I mean, I lived for a year in Minnesota, you are a long way, you're an awful long way from anywhere. And there are these small towns with an enormous sense of civic pride, the kind of thing actually that in Britain we don't have at all and we automatically scoff at, where people make their own,

they don't just make their own entertainment, but they make their own civic culture. Yeah, so Reagan's mother, for example, Nellie, we'll talk a bit more about her in a second, but she is absolutely one of these people who throws herself into the local community in a completely unironic way. You know, I'm going to join the church. I'm going to join the amateur dramatic society. I'm going to do loads of charitable things. And that sort of small town world where everybody knows everybody else, you know, that fantasy, if you like, Reagan as a little boy completely imbibes that. And it would never occur to him to question it or to mock it

or to do all these things, which as Europeans, we automatically do. And in his memories of it, it's the embodiment of all these tales of, I suppose, kind of Mark Twain going back to all that, the idea of, so he writes about there were woods and mysteries, life and death among small creatures, hunting and fishing, that kind of idea that this is a paradise for a child. And that idea that a paradise has been lost is often there in conservatives. I mean, it's kind of a wellspring for conservatism in adult life. But the thing that's fascinating about Reagan is that it's not just white picket fences, because there is also quite a lot of darkness.

Yeah. So his father, Jack, he's from Fulton, Illinois. As you said, sort of irish background uh he's a shoe salesman which sounds kind of banal but actually at the time in the sort of 1910s 1920s the department store was king and to be a salesman in the department store was was a kind of i mean i don't want to oversell it's not a massive deal massive deal, but it's not nothing. Bob Spitz in his biography of Reagan has the great phrase, he developed a flair for fitting the female foot. What a thing to have as your avatar.

He's tall, he's charming, he's gregarious. He's very political, actually. So the idea that Reagan, I mean, this obviously hangs over Reagan all his career, the idea that he's merely a puppet or a front man. He comes from quite a political family. And the politics is Democrat. Yeah. Politics is Democrat.

Very interested in social causes, social issues, minimum wage, welfare, all that sort of stuff. I mean, as an Irishman, he's almost automatically going to be a Democrat anyway, because politics in the late 19th, early 20th century is very sort of sectarian but um yeah he's he talks about this at the dinner table the cloud of course is is drink so so jack is yeah there's some questions about whether he's an alcoholic or a binge drinker i mean as if you can sort of separate the two he's definitely i mean he's definitely a binge drinker and he drinks a lot. And this, I mean, this is clearly an issue

for the family and for, and for young, well, Dutch, as he's called. He's not called Ronald, is he?

Nobody calls him Ronald at this point. Everyone calls him Dutch. Dutch after his hairstyle, a Dutch Bob. A Dutch Bob. Yeah. But the,

I mean, the salient fact about Jack Reagan and, and his drinking is that it affects his ability to work. And so they keep having to move town and their lodgings become kind of poorer and poorer and poorer. So there's a sense of a downward spiral, even as Dutch is loving life. He's clearly a person with a great appetite for life. But Jack never loses his principles. And Reagan remembers, he refuses to let his... Ronald Reagan has an elder brother who goes by the nickname of Moon. What's he called? Neil, I think.

Neil. I'd choose Moon over Neil, frankly. I mean, no offense to any Neil listeners um and but moon listeners will be delighted by that remark um so moon and Dutch are not allowed to watch um birth of a nation the very racist film when it comes out and Reagan owns there was no more greed of a sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance Tom your role Reagan is very very good. You were reluctant to do it before we started recording, and I really had to twist your arm and sort of shout at you to get you to do it.

But I'm glad Ronald Reagan is joining us for this podcast. So that I found really interesting reading up about Reagan's childhood, was the omnipresent sense that Jack Reagan embodies a very kind of principled devotion to FDR, New Deal, all that kind of stuff, that he's very opposed to anything that smacks of racial prejudice, religious prejudice. And on that topic, of course, it's interesting that he has actually married, he's a Catholic, he's married a Protestant. And that's very unusual, isn't it? It is unusual. And Nellie is not, I mean, she's not just somebody from a Protestant background. So Jack is kind of, you know, the big man, kind of tall and gregarious and stuff. And Nellie is more innocent, I suppose, and deeply, deeply religious. I mean,

so she joins a group called the Disciples of, a church called the Disciples of Christ, 1910. By the standards of sort of evangelicalist churches, they are quite, they're very kind of moderate, aren't they? I mean, they're just- But passionately committed. Yeah. To good works. They sound very attractive as sort of brands go, Christian brands go.

They're a very appealing one, aren't they? They're devoted to the social gospel. The aim is that you do a charitable deed every day which she does yeah um she and she really throws herself into a part of the because jack is off boozing and and fitting shoes to the female the female foot so she is and she goes on the road for the disciples of christ And she does recitals and she does talks and she reads Christian poetry and all of that, undoubtedly. I had not appreciated until really digging into Reagan's background. I always thought his talk of God was skin deep and it's patently obvious that it isn't. And he feels it very young because it's a church where you have full immersive baptism, but you have to choose to be baptised.

And both Dutch and Moon want to have it done very young. They do. And she agrees. And he always holds to it. Well, he reads a book, which is a sort of Disciples of Christ fictional bestseller called That Printer of Oudels by Harold Bell Wright. And the hero of that is called Dick Faulkner. And at one point, he comes across his own father, who's an alcoholic, passed out, drunk. And this obviously made a big impression on Reagan because he has a story.

It's always hard to tell with Reagan, of course, where his own recollections begin and fiction ends. But he has a story about doing that with his own father. And clearly this book, that printer, had a massive effect on him because when he was 11, he went to his mother and said, please have me baptized in the disciples of Christ. And again, as Europeans, I think in the 1980s, we sort of thought, oh, ha ha, this is all just completely fake and inauthentic and sort of pandering to his constituency. Not a bit of it. He genuinely,

all his life, he takes this stuff enormously seriously, that faith element. So the combination of kind of Jack, charming, real hit with the ladies, a man's man, I suppose you would say, a man who will have a glass of whiskey with you and tell you a kind of funny story. And then Nellie, really interested in sort of, you know, she's a performer, but she loves taking the stage and talking to people about good and evil,

right and wrong, you know, the path of Christ. I mean, you can see them in Ronald, can't you? And that, again, is the stereotype of Reagan in 80s Europe, is that he's a person who sees the world in Manichaean terms, who sees it in terms of good and evil. And this is something that I think isn't entirely wrong. I think Reagan is very, very prone to seeing the world in terms of of good and evil yeah and one of the obviously the um his his mother's church is a huge example influence on that but another one is his early love of movies and this is a period where you can tell who the goody is because he's wearing a white hat yeah and you can tell who the baddies

are because they're wearing black hats and am I unfair in saying that that essentially establishes his understanding of how the world is? I don't think you are unfair. I think he definitely has a strong sense that the world is a, you know, his antipathy to communism later in his life, you know, that is shot through with a very clear sense of there is good and evil. When he talks about the evil empire, the Soviet Union is the focus for evil in the modern world, as he does in 1983, that's not just a speechwriter talking, that's reflecting his deep sense, which actually he definitely shares with Margaret Thatcher, who also comes from, by British standards, an unusually God-fearing, low church, Methodist background. They bond over that because when they're meeting with other kind of world-weary, you know, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, these kinds of people, they probably don't go,

Mitterrand, they probably don't go in for this kind of stuff. Their moralism marks them out. And I think a lot of people actually, for both, it's true, both Reagan and Thatcher, but even more so for Reagan, I think his moralism and his Manichaeanism in the 1970s, a very confused sort of post-Vietnam period, a lot of people found that actually really invigorating to have somebody who stands up and says there's good and evil. But I think also what people responded to later in Reagan's later career is the sense that he had really walked the American walk. Yeah.

That he has the high school sweetheart, who's a girl called Margaret Cleaver. Mugs. Mugs. What a great name. He plays sport. The basketball team he plays for is brilliantly called the Whiffle Puffs. Yeah. Are they basketball or baseball?

Basketball. Basketball. So he's playing basketball. He plays baseball. But football is his passion. Football is the sport he reallyica which he will then go on to play the gipper yeah of course and he makes he makes his money by being a serving as a lifeguard a lifeguard yeah and that sense of kind of strapping health high school all that you know everything that but not just americans think about when they think of small-town America. Reagan is living that life.

And ironically, in a kind of, you know, he loves it. Yeah. So people say about him when he's a teenager, people admire him, people like him. Nobody really knows him, even then. I mean, all through his career, people say, you don't know Ronald Reagan. He doesn't share his feelings. He doesn't have, for example, close male friends. Everybody likes him, but he doesn't have a soulmate.

I mean, obviously, there's mugs. He loves acting, even as a teenager. He's into the church. I mean, his mother, it's interesting. His parents are kind of, it's later said of him that he makes guest appearances with his own family and his own children because he's always off doing something else. And that's true of his parents too, isn't it? Because by the time he's a teenager, his mother is at church, his father is in the pub or something.

And yet, a bit like when we did our podcast about the young Churchill, it's an interesting lesson in the power of temperament because Reagan could so easily have been bitter, that his parents were never there they were never there his father was drinking that their circumstances were so straightened but he has this incredible optimism sunniness sun so his high school yearbook you write your own motto in your high school yearbook and his motto is life is one sweet song so start the music and for it is inconceivable that a british teenager would ever listen to the smiths yeah would ever write those words i mean it's just at no stage i

think in britain's history would anybody have have said that that sentence without laughing but reagan you know it's one of the attractive things about him it's one of the reasons that actually is a pleasure to read about yeah because it's so unusual to have somebody so sunny and optimistic. Yeah. And he goes to, he ends up going to a college, doesn't he? Eureka.

Yeah. Which is a great name for a college. Eureka College. Which again has a kind of sunniness shot through it. It's very, very by the, I mean, it's very progressive.

Yes. Founded by abolitionists, disciples christ yeah and when reagan goes there's um the orientation day the guest of honor is um a civil war veteran who'd known lincoln okay yeah that sense of um that he's obviously got from his dad and that he gets from from mugs who's gone there and reagan has to get a scholarship i mean he can't afford to go. Basically, they kind of chuck out scholarships to everyone because they're that kind of institution. Yeah, and he's good at sports. Well, he's quite good at sports.

He works really hard and throws himself into it. He's not very good at his academic work, is he? He sort of coasts, gets Cs and Ds or something. But he's acting. He's doing his acting. Even when he's on the football team, he will impersonate sportscasters. Right.

And he also apparently has a very good impersonation of FDR. Well, he loves FDR, of course. So FDR is about to, FDR is not quite yet president, but FDR is the kind of coming man who's governor of New York. And the Reagan family adore FDR. And Reagan all his life thought FDR was the absolute model of a president. I'll tell you one thing, that an affectation he developed at Eureka College

that I'm sorry he abandoned is smoking a pipe. Well, and also the other thing that he, of course, abandons is wearing glasses because he's incredibly short-sighted. Yeah. And I'd never realised that. You never see him with glasses, do you? No, never. You would never appear in public as president.

I mean, just like he wouldn't appear in public as president without a shirt and tie and a full suit and boots, in case he doesn't want to look like Jimmy Carter. But that's why he could never be a truly elite sportsman. Right. You know, a bit like me. But, Tommy, you wear glasses. We have the natural ability.

Yeah, because I just think that with my looks, I can get away with them. So, actually, their parallels are quite uncanny. Yeah, you wear glasses. We have the natural ability. Yeah, because I just think that with my looks, I can get away with them. So, actually, their parallels are quite uncanny. Yeah, in many ways. Because you're also, as people will have gauged from that George Gipp business, you're also a brilliant, quite brilliant actor, aren't you? Yes, yes, yes.

Well, it's not for me to say, but very possibly. Well, I read the feedback on your impersonations on Twitter from our listeners. For example, what did you do recently? You did The Sopranos. Yeah. And extraordinary feedback, I think it's fair to say. So I could have gone to Hollywood, as Reagan ends up doing, doesn't he? Because he doesn't play sport, so he decides to commentate on it.

Well, we should take a break, Tom, before we get into his sportscasting career, because that is a remarkable story. Okay. So we'll see you after the break for some sportscasting. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking about Ronald Reagan. And Tom, it's 1932.

The United States is in the depths of the Great Depression one in four people are out of work but not Ronald Wilson Reagan because he he is determined to mugs his girlfriend has a dream they'll both be teachers but he's not really interested in being a teacher he likes he's already interested in the kind of showbiz world, but the world of sport. So he goes off to sports. Yes, I'm so sorry. You take the S from maths and put it onto sports, and that's how you speak American. He goes off to Chicago, tries to get his foot in the door, but doesn't manage it. But he ends up through various contacts in Davenport, Iowa, for the brilliant radio station World of Chiropractic. Aha!

WOC. So the guy who owns it, who's BJ Palmer, his father, invented chiropractice, apparently. And they basically give Reagan a trial, sort of off the cuff. He improvises commentary on a game that

Eureka had played against western state and they say brilliant you know they give him the job and then he goes off to des moines iowa for their sister station who and he rises to be their chief sportscaster doesn't he and he's he's he's actually brilliant and the amazing thing is he never does any of the games well he can't see any of the games. He can't see it. Well, there's a famous anecdote that he tells later about, you know, the details are coming through and then it cuts out. Yeah, for six minutes.

And so for six minutes, he just completely makes it up. Yeah. And then when they come back on, so he's been delaying for six minutes and inventing fouls and stuff and describing the background. And then it comes back on to discover that the batter was out within seconds of the wire going down. So this is often taken by Reagan's more hostile biographers as sort of evidence of his addiction to fantasy

and his sort of dishonesty and artifice. But almost all commentary like this was done this way. So basically you would get the wire telegraph wire western union and it would tell you what had happened you had the crowd noise on a on a record next to you and you described what happened and and of course the brilliant thing was it had that classic sort of as a british observer that american thing of that love of inflating things so you would just make the play as exciting and as dramatic as possible. I mean,

the key to that, that anecdote was that he didn't want to break the spell. Yeah. He didn't want to let light in, you know, and, and that I think is, I don't think it's unfair to say that that is pretty key to his character.

Yeah. I mean, if, if there's a kind of a heartwarming fantasy, he doesn't want it punctured and indeed he goes on to kind of live it. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. So if you think um you know boris johnson doing that i mean he would be quite good at it at first but he would be constantly winking at you and letting you know

that it's all hearing yeah that it's all that it's all a great joke and he actually has never seen any of the games because reagan lives it i mean and that's why he it why it's not so much a lie as a kind of exaggerated truth, perhaps one might say. Reagan is a great man for a parable, isn't he? For metaphorical truth, I suppose. He really believes in that. So anyway, the baseball is great work. It's great training. He does it six days a week.

He'll do 160 games in a given summer. And he's talking, isn't he, to listeners? I mean, that's the other thing. He can talk to people as though it's a one-on-one chat to a friend. Yeah. At a time when Roosevelt is doing his fireside chats to sell the New Deal to people. So radio is the medium through which you communicate. And Reagan, he's a local celebrity in Des Moines.

So he's the kind of person who is a well enough known radio personality that they'll have his his picture behind the bar in the local bar people say oh dutch reagan comes here um and meanwhile mugs mugs has gone off to france hasn't she she has she's um she's vanished yeah she's off the scene left she's off the scene readers of the sporting news voted him the fourth best sports announcer in the united states so he's this is often told as like a two-bit story he's in the middle of nowhere but he has millions and millions of listeners across the midwest so i think um the des moines dispatch said to millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight midwestern states the voice of dutch reagan is a daily source of baseball dope that's like how people talk about you tom history dope yeah that's good isn't it yeah history dope that's what we should have called the podcast yeah we should

but so he could easily have done that he could easily have done that all his life and and gone down as a much like you know retired in the 1970s or 80s as a much-loved local. Would have been played by Kevin Costner in a mid-90s film. Maybe he would. Yeah, Dutch Reagan, the greatest sportscaster. But that's not enough for him. He goes off with the Cubs in 1936 when they're spring training in California. And then a year later, he goes again. And he has a friend that he's met through WHO.

He's called Joy Hodges, who's an actress and singer. And they have dinner. And he says, he just comes straight out with it and says i would love to be in hollywood you know he's in his mid-20s of course he would you know i'd love to of course he would and and she calls her agent who's got who's called bill michael john and her agent meets him and says yeah he could do it he's tall he's handsome says, I mean, Reagan does have a magnificent voice. He has the most wonderful, sonorous, warm voice. And he's also, all his lifeguarding, he's a very good swimmer. Yeah.

So he's got the physique. Yeah. And he's a very good looking man. He is. He's got everything. I mean, this agent, Bill Michaeljohn, he basically takes one look at him and he rings Warner Brothers and says, I have another Robert Taylor for you. And they do a screen test and they offer him a seven year deal. Warner's office contract, seven years, stop one year option, stop starting two hundred dollars a week.

Stop. Yeah. And Reagan says famously bite the hand off before they change their mind. That's sort of nice little bit of self-deprecation kind of that he's very good at. That's quite that's a lot of money. I the conversion that's 10 in today's money that's about ten thousand um dollars a week it's not bad so that's not bad at all he's a big enough fellow in the midwest that um who throw him a farewell party and the mayor of des moines goes the state treasurer of iowa yeah so he's not a nobody at all no and then he goes off to hollywood and by hollywood standards he's not he's never a really big star so he's got a contract. If you had a contract with Warner Brothers, you're one of about 100 people of whom maybe 20 to 30 are the big stars and the 70 others who are the kind of contract players. So he's always B-movie basically.

Yeah. And he's always the best friend. He is always the best friend. So the Gipper, I mean, the Gipper isn't the lead in the film, is it? No, he's not. It's a sad moment when the Gipper dies, but the film is about Knut Rockne. It's about the coach. So, yeah, he works six days a week, five in the morning till six o'clock in the evening.

But he's lucky because he has a friend, because the big gossip columnist of the day, Luella Parsons, who writes for the Los Angeles Examiner, one of the Hearst stable of papers, she is from Dixon, Illinois. So she takes a real shine to Reagan and boosts him up. It's the Midwest Mafia. Exactly. Yeah, the Dixon Mafia. People never talk about them controlling Hollywood, do they?

So, yeah, he's doing all these sort of B-movies. So they're about one hour long i mean unbelievably he plays custer does he play custer he does uh opposite errol flynn who's playing jeb stewart and errol flynn will then go on to play custer two years later and they died with their boots on and errol flynn looks much more like custer reagan's the last person he doesn't have a beard he doesn't have a moustache he doesn't have the beard. He doesn't have a moustache. He doesn't have the long golden curls. I mean, he looks nothing like Custer. And his personality is always the sort of sturdy, reliable, loyal, decent, the soul of the American Midwest. That's what he plays.

And Custer doesn't really fit that description. No, not at all. So that's miscasting. And then he plays a guy who loses his legs, doesn't he? In King's Row. That's his most... Where's the rest of me? Yeah.

So actually, his two most famous moments both involve him lying down. They're lying. Yeah. Kind of throat infections, lost limbs. Gorbachev had watched King's Row. Had he? Yeah. And so when they met in Geneva and Reagan was saying to Gorbachev, actually, you know,

everyone says that I was just a kind of not a very important actor, but I was quite famous. And Gorbachev said, yes, I saw you played someone who didn't have any legs. What a bizarre. Brilliant, isn't it? I mean, he was. So the thing with Reagan and acting, I mean, it's so many people have poured over this. He was he was never a kind of a-list big name he was always a supporting actor people would sort of say especially in the 80s when

people were his critics would say he was a terrible actor b-movie actor i mean he wasn't terrible otherwise he wouldn't have wouldn't have got the contract he wouldn't have got the contract but also he he raises his profile in two ways doesn't he so he the first is um and this is where the gossip column comes in that he he marries jane wyman yeah the time they start going out together their careers are about on a par but in due course she i mean she'll win an oscar she'll become which is nominated for an oscar yeah i think she wins an oscar in due course after the war oh you're absolutely right you're right and i stand she doesn't just get an oscar she's got two golden glows and two Remy's.

Yeah, so she ends up a massive star. And I think that becomes part of the problem because, of course, spoiler alert, Reagan and Jane Wyman end up divorcing.

And it's Jane Wyman who wants to do it. And I think that the kind of disequilibrium between the parabola of their respective careers is part of that. But Jane Wyman

has a very kind of Marilyn Monroe-esque confusion of names, kind of broken upbringing. And she and Reagan, that's a kind of great partnership because the gossip columnists can write about it and all that kind of thing. But they're very ill-suited though, aren't they, Tom? Incredibly ill-suited. I'm so bored with him, I'll either kill him or kill myself, she says at one point.

And she's always complaining about his um his verbal diarrhea she just says what did she say to him at one point when they when they um break up it's actually uh i'm just going to try and find the quotation i came here hoping you'd changed but you haven't you're still the same loud mouth you were because because by this point reagan has discovered reed's digest yeah and he just motors his way through it and he will just repeat it. And so he's endlessly going on to Jane Wyman about dams in Africa and ocelots and all kinds of stuff. Is he talking about ocelots? I don't, surely not. That's the kind of thing you get in Reader's Digest.

He's full of facts. Everybody always says, and they say this right through to 1980 january 1989 when he leaves the white house they say the trouble with reagan is if you write something down and hand it to him he will believe it i mean all his aides say it drives them mad that he reads stuff in magazines and is so there's one famous example where he says that trees cause more pollution than yes people do and he's read it somewhere and It's in the Reader's Digest. And he cannot be persuaded that it's not true. But the thing that's interesting about Jane Wyman

is that she was always a Republican. So Reagan was the liberal and she was the conservative. And so actually, long after they've divorced, she votes for him in both elections. And Dominic, here's a link um to the cathars episode perhaps unexpected okay this is unexpected so when she died she was buried in the uh the white robes of a dominican nun so she was a dominican buried at redler chateau no she wasn't that would be a heck of a twist who knows what truth maybe she was a a grand mistress of the priory of zion but she's completely wrong

she's very fiery she's um she's sort of quite a turbulent character yes she's typecast as a kind of you know she's in screwball comedies she's a kind of wisecracking dame that kind of stuff she's a floozy she's a floozy is what she is and and she wants to get out of that and play more complicated more yeah subtle characterization and she succeeds in doing that reagan never does that and i think part of it is that maybe he's a more limited actor but i think also it's because actually he can't play more complex characters because he's not a particularly complicated character do you think yeah is that harsh i don't think no i think that's right i think lots of people say about him he only basically plays himself hal wallace of runs the warner slate so he's in charge of managing the sort of the warner team he says he's not an actor of depth or intensity yeah and

lots of people basically say ronald reagan will play the best friend but anything more demanding anything more subtle so actually in king's row where he loses his legs he had hoped that would be the springboard to playing more you know more uh demanding parts but that's 1941 the war intervenes and there's a bit of a hiatus in his career because he goes off to join the air corps that's when he does a lot of his readers digest reading because he's he's sort of working as a backroom boy he's too old really to fight. He has a dependence by that point. So Jane and they've started a family. So Maureen, and then they end up adopting Michael.

But again, the weird thing, so there's this brilliant comment by Stephen Vaughan on Reagan, that no 20th century president, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been seen in uniform by more people. Because he's appearing in all these propaganda films. Because he's appearing in propaganda films yeah so he's he's kind of playing a simulacrum of an american officer in the war yes he is he does it so brilliantly

that it comes to seem indistinguishable from from the reality well i mean it's reagan who institutes for example saluting uh when he's president always saluting um the marine guards and all these kinds of things he's brilliant saturn he looks very military but he's president, always saluting the Marine Guards and all these kinds of things. He's brilliant, and he looks very military. But he's always quite conscious, I think, that he didn't see action in the Second World War, that actually he spent it behind a desk through no fault of his own. I mean, among other things, his short-sightedness means that he would probably have found it very hard to get a sort of front line. Well, I think when we come to the account of his,

the assassination attempt on him, it will be very clear that Reagan was certainly not a coward. No, no, no, not at all. I mean, he was a very brave man. But again, it's this bleeding of reality into fantasy and back again and role-playing. So that it kind of becomes indistinguishable. But one thing, so I talked about the two

things that raise Reagan's profile, despite the fact that his acting career isn't entirely stellar. So one is his marriage to Jane Wyman. The other is that he starts to get into Hollywood politics, doesn't he? And specifically union politics. And again, so Reagan is the only, I think, the only US president to have been a union leader. I think that's absolutely right. Yes. He comes out of the war and the demand for his kind of parts is drying up actually. Because in the late 1940s, people want more conflicted, grittier films. And he's just not right for that. He's from the late 30s, melodramas. He doesn't fit. And he throws himself into the Screen Actors Guild. He's always been... I mean, this is, again, this is something that reflects his deepest impulses.

Going back to his mother when he's growing up and the Disciples of Christ, you always join in. So he'd always been the union rep, the union monitor from about 1938 onwards on most of the films he had done. He was a union man. And does it well and is very popular. Yeah, he's very popular. But Hollywood union politics is very, very conflicted in the late 1940s. So there are a whole series of strikes.

The studio bosses are swinging to the right. So people like Walt Disney, for example, are really, really banging the drum of anti-communism. And in part because they're very cross about the strikes and they basically want to present the strikes as communist inspired. There is a key moment from 1946. It's not the actors themselves. It is the people who build the sets

and do all the sort of- Yeah, do all the hard graft. So they've been represented by something called the international alliance of theatrical and stage employees but there's a breakaway union called the conference of studio unions um that the sort of the left the more left-leaning actors are keen to back uh this dispute gets really quite vicious. So September 1946, more than 1,000 of the sort of painters and decorators and builders and things are fired. And the question is, who are the actors going to back,

the studio bosses or the craftsmen? And Reagan delivers a big set piece speech in a 6,000-seater stadium to all the Hollywood actors, basically, in October 1946, in which he persuades them that the strike is being led by communists and they shouldn't get involved. He gets police protection after that, doesn't he? Because it's a threat that acid will be thrown in his face. Exactly.

It's a very conflicted time of dirty politics. The House Committee on Un-American Activities are looking into Hollywood, putting pressure on Hollywood, saying, you've made far too many pro-Soviet films in World War II. There are far too many communist writers. There's this suspicion of a communist cell within Hollywood and so on and so forth. And Reagan becomes the president of the Screen Actors Guild in March 1947, at the point at which all this is really, really hotting up. And he has no doubt whatsoever about his role. His role, as he sees it, is to stand up for the American way, to cooperate with HUAC, cooperate with the FBI. But, I mean, so he's becoming, becoming i mean very openly anti-communist but at the same time he is very effective at representing the interests of his fellow actors against the studio bosses right i mean he's to that extent he's still very recognizably the the disciple of f, the admirer, his father's son.

Yeah, he's still voting Democrat. So he's still voting for FDR. He's, I guess, must vote for Truman in 1948. He's not confrontational with the studio bosses. So he would always cut deals with them. But he's popular with- Yeah, with the other actors. With the other actors who vote because they see him as effective.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. They definitely don't regard him as the studio boss's puppet. I think there are definitely questions later on about whether he's a little bit too close to his own agency, MCA. It's a really powerful Hollywood agency. But you're absolutely right. He would not have been propelled into that position as the head of the Screen Actors Guild had he not been regarded as a guy who will fight for a better deal for the actors. The question mark that hangs over him is he goes and testifies to HUAC and so on and so forth in late 1947.

What he does is it's classic Reagan. He's brilliant at pleasing everybody giving everybody so he goes in front of the committee and he says well there are some communists in hollywood but he doesn't name any names he says there are communists um but we've got them under control you know we'll root them out because he's sort of trying to protect his simultaneously giving the committee what it wants while also protecting the screen actors guild Guild and protecting the great majority of actors. So this is the point at which you have the blacklist of the Hollywood 10. Those people who won't cooperate with the inquiry, they are put on a blacklist and they can only work under false names and stuff.

Reagan has no interest in standing up for them, which some people do. He's absolutely not going to go out on a limb to do that. But he's sort of charted, it's not quite a middle course because his anti-communism is becoming increasingly sort of marked. But I think it would be unfair to say he's just a sort of rabid red bait or something, as later critics sometimes did. But over the course of the 50s, he is definitely drifting to the right. So anti-communism is combined with a resentment of the tax burden as he sees it. Because isn't there

something to do with he'd expected a tax amnesty after the war, which he didn't get? That's right. People had had them in World War I. Veterans had been able to defray their taxes to the end of the war. Either he's read in the Reader's Digest or he's got a very bad accountant who says they'll probably do the same again. So he doesn't pay his taxes. And then basically that forces him into the highest possible tax bracket at the end of World War II. And he's outraged. He's also, Jane Wyman has asked him for a divorce. So he's paying alimony to her because she gets the kids. And his career is starting to go down. Exactly.

Exactly. His career is starting to go down. Plus, he's sort of hanging around with a lot of actors who are very right wing. So Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, they're kind of actors of a certain age. They're maybe a couple of years older than Reagan. They kind of look like Reagan. They sort of sit around.

Cracky. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of a lot of broil cream. They sit around drinking scotch and sort of moaning about paying too much tax and the swimming pool. Do you think in Reagan's case, as his career seems to be going down, that for the first time is his politics being bred of resentment, do you think? He can never understand why his film career doesn't work out. I think he always thinks he was a better actor and he never really got a... That's why he's very prickly later on when people mock his acting. He doesn't mind doing it himself,

but he doesn't like other people doing it. Fair enough. I can relate to that. Oh, you're like that about, you know, a lot a lot of things yeah no i i certain fellow feeling yeah no i think i think you're right i think there's a sense in which life at this point is the first point in his in his life where he's not getting everything you know ambition and hard work and not taking him to the places yeah that he thought they would and just to reiterate i mean they have taken him a very long way. Oh, yeah.

He's from a very poverty-stricken background, and he kind of has been living the American dream, but the American dream now is slightly curdling. Yes. And so his film career is coming to an end, and so therefore the question is, what is he going to do? Well, when we come back next time, we'll talk about the one person who he hasn't yet met,

who definitely is going to confirm his move to the right, who is not from a poverty-stricken background by any means, and that is, of course, Nancy, Nancy Davis, who becomes his great sort of soulmate and his partner. But just before we bow out, Tom, I mean, the lowest point in Reagan's life, he goes to London in early 1940. It's the first foreign country he's ever been to, isn't it? And he thinks it's terrible.

It confirms all his darker suspicions of socialism. He's shocked by the socialism of Clement Attlee's Britain. Do you know what he described London as? A dismal wilderness, Tom. That's how I feel about London. So, you know, he had some stakes flown over to the Savoy because he thought the British food was so bad. To be fair

to us though that's because we've been bombed and uh what he says to richard todd his co-star at one point what is rationing he kind of can't get his head around it he has these steaks flown over but the fridges in the savoy apparently didn't work properly so the steaks all went bad anyway yeah that's um that confirms all his darkest fears about European style socialism and social. It's lucky his great, great grandparents didn't stay in Peckham then, isn't it? Yeah. Well, gosh, yes. A bullet dodged. That is a bullet dodged.

Right. We will come back and we will be talking a bit more about Nancy. We will talk about Reagan's move to work for General Electric, his involvement with the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, becoming governor of California, and then his rise to the presidency. And then after that, we will get on to the presidency, to Gorbachev, to Iran-Contra, all these things. So we're looking at three episodes, aren't we? Oh, definitely, Tom.

Yeah. At least. So if you want to listen to them right now, the great news is that actually you can. It's a great offer. You should be selling this in your Ronald Reagan voice. Do you want to sell it? Where can they listen to them, Tom? On which platform?

My fellow Americans, they can listen to it on every platform. It's a great offer. So what you want to do is you want to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or RestIsHistoryPod.com. ApplePodcasts or RestIsHistorypod.com Apple Podcasts or restishistorypod.com And if you don't do that, you'll just have to wait along with the European style socialists. Yeah.

That's the Democrat option. Yeah. You'll just have to wait. If you're a bunch of loser commies, you'll just have to wait. Don't pay us money. I see myself very much as the... Who am I in this analogy um who are you you're what you're nancy i'm not nancy i was just about to say i'm not nancy i'm i'm somebody like lemuel bull wear

of general electric so you definitely want to go and sign up because honestly the list of characters with ludicrous and improbable names coming up is not to be missed so basically pile in pile in so next time the life and career of lemuel bulware on the rest and also a bit of ronald reagan goodbye goodbye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

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