This Day in Presidential History (Ronald Reagan Born)

Feb. 6, 1911—Ronald Wilson Reagan, America’s 40th President, was brought into the world as a 10-pound baby, with the services of a midwife rather than a doctor that his family couldn’t afford, in a three-bedroom, walk-up apartment in Tampico, Ill.

It was the kind of Middle American community to which the future actor and politician long paid tribute and that biographers Lou Cannon and Anne Edwards claim profoundly influenced him. Nevertheless, Reagan's parents left Tampico within a few years after his birth, and he resisted revisiting it for much of his life. The one indelible memory from his very early years in this village that he didn’t mind relating: the image of a white house with high ceilings, a place he felt comfortable.

On the centennial of his birth, even Reagan’s admirers and loved ones have grappled with the duality of a man who, for all his geniality, remained utterly remote. His daughter Patti, locked in a love-hate relationship with him for much of her life, observed that his “presence felt like absence.”

That same absent quality comes through in today’s New York Times op-ed contribution by biographer Edmund Morris, a vivid piece about an episode late in the President’s life: his sudden desire, three years out of the Presidency, to revisit his birthplace.

Morris poignantly evokes “an old man in retreat — withdrawn, halting and perplexed,” already emitting the first signs of the Alzheimer’s that would finally claim him. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer never really offers a glimpse into the politician who long shied away from looking back at his origins.

If you want to understand Reagan’s reluctance to go home—as well as the values of the place that bred him—I think you can’t simply read the facts of his life. You have to supplement it by listening to what is, for me, the high point of the careers of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel following their breakup: their brief reunion in 1975, in the form of one of their greatest songs, “My Little Town.”

The dual nature of this tune is not unlike the dual nature of Reagan himself. Its dominant initial impression is Garfunkel’s majestic voice, soaring as it sings of seemingly halcyon childhood days of believing in a god who “keeps his eye on us all” and pledging allegiance.

Before long, though, that voice, still golden, is creating images that increasingly call into question what the narrator learned in “my little town”: clothes hanging “in the dirty breeze,” a rainbow with only black colors because “it’s just imagination they lack.”

Before long, it’s painfully clear that this factory town is a place to be escaped from: one where the narrator is “just my father’s son,” where he is desperate to leave: “saving my money,/Dreaming of glory.” The listener can’t believe what he has just heard Simon and Garfunkel sing: “Nothing but the dead and dying/Back in my little town.”

And so, I think, it must have been for Ronald Reagan. The one time he returned to Tampico before his late-life visit, during his 1976 Presidential campaign, paralleled his race that year: a triumph that went oddly sour. The Hennepin Canal, being built at the time of his birth, no longer generated employment or was even open to boat traffic, and the The Hooppole, Yorktown and Tampico (HY&T) Railroad had stopped running a generation before.

According to Morris, Tampico was now no more than “a depressed village on the Illinois corn flats” that turned worse when its “least desirable citizen” somehow managed to make it to the front of the line and plant a big wet kiss on Nancy Reagan’s face. Moreover, according to a Fred Barnes article in The Weekly Standard, Reagan didn't even get to see the bedroom where he was born on that visit: The apartment was then rented and locked. (It's now open to the public.)

If anything, Ronald Reagan wanted to be more than “just my father’s son” that the narrator of the Simon and Garfunkel song lamented being. And now, we come to a curious disagreement about what else was in the building where Reagan was born. Morris and Barnes note that the Reagan apartment was over a bank; another article I came across, by Steve Martens of the Herald-Review (Decatur, Ill.), claims it was over a bakery. But yet another, by architect and city planner Richard Thornton, offers more details. A bank occupied the ground floor of the "Graham Building" from 1919 to 1931 and a bakery from 1915 to 1931, but a saloon was on the first floor from 1896 to 1915--including the birth date of Reagan.

The saloon downstairs would not have been present by the time of his 1976 disastrous return, but even the wisp of its memory would have been enough to revive an image he had spent much of his life overlooking or expunging from his mind: Jack Reagan, tolerant, kind-hearted shoe salesman, sprawled out a few years later on the porch of their Dixon home, drunk, as he was all too often because of the disease of alcoholism.

Again, like the Simon and Garfunkel character, Ronald Reagan dreamed of glory in Tampico and the other Illinois communities where his father’s varying fortunes took the family—Galesburg, Monmouth and Dixon. The man who showed him the way out was the hero of his young manhood: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

At first glance, it would seem well-nigh impossible that the product of a Midwestern down-on-their-luck family who went on to question the foundation of the modern American welfare state and to undermine the American conservation movement could have any affinity for the Northeastern patrician who was the architect of the American safety net and the second-most-influential President concerning the environment (taking a back seat only to distant cousin Theodore). But in a professional and personal sense, the two Presidents had elements in common.

Reagan’s first major job out of college was as a radio announcer. FDR’s live “fireside chats” impressed him with more than simply its sense of timing and dramatic enunciation, as Reagan explained during his own Presidency a half-century later: “His strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem. I will never forget him for that.”

Forty years after first absorbing those seminal lessons in communication, in the interval between governing California and winning the Presidency, Reagan returned to radio with weekly commentaries that kept him present in the public eye. Some of the same FDR hallmarks—humor and well-turned metaphors and similes—allowed him to communicate, simply and directly, with his target audience.

Reagan’s life resembled that of the hero of his youth in another, less flattering way: While impressing their children with warmth, the two aspiring politicians were never around long enough to serve as stabilizing influences. They were so busy saving the world that they often didn’t see that their own progeny were drowning.

As they entered adolescence, the children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became painfully aware of the divisions between their parents resulting from FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer and the stress involved with his adjustment to life after polio. The five children who survived to adulthood struggled for professional footholds or, simply, marital stability (19 marriages and 15 divorces).

The record with the Reagan children wasn’t this catastrophic, but it featured episodes of sharp, often public pain. Maureen and Michael, the two older children from Ronald’s marriage to actress Jane Wyman, felt shunted aside when their father remarried and started a new family. The title of Michael’s autobiography speaks volumes: On the Outside Looking In. On Michael's wedding day, Ron and Nancy chose to go to another wedding on the same day: that of Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia, at the White House.

Growing up, Maureen was annoyed to find that her father had not yet told her half-sister Patti about her existence yet (they hadn’t gotten that far yet, Ronald said—as if that explained everything). During Maureen's campaign in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in 1982, her father—by then President—perpetually had a pained expression on his face when asked about it, as if he wished it could all go away.

Until the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s, Patti seemed to act out in public at every turn, with one embarrassing tell-all screed and episode (e.g., posing nude in Playboy) after another.

Even Ron Jr.—the youngest in the family and the one with the least ambivalent relationship with his parents—seems to have produced his new memoir, My Father at 100, in an attempt to pierce the veil his father kept over his own life. Much of it is simply goes back to the places where his father grew up: “to arrive where we started,” in the words of T.S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets, “And know the place for the first time.”

Back to FDR. Like Reagan, the President who guided America through the Depression and World War II possessed charisma to spare while leaving most visitors unsure if they had really penetrated that genial surface. But FDR's remoteness, we know now, was a mask, a device that allowed him to discern visitors' intentions and vulnerability without revealing his own (especially the frailty left by polio). Reagan's sense of inner withdrawal can only be ascribed to Alzheimer's rather late in his adult life. More telling might have been his admission that, after coming to Dixon at age nine, he'd been slow to make friends. "In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely," he wrote in a rare introspective moment. "I've been inclined to hold back a little bit of myself, reserving it for myself." He might have imbibed certain values in his Midwestern small towns while growing up--belief in the American dream, the bright line between good and evil--but also a sense of isolation, even embarrassment, about his origins.