|
|
 |
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (19811989) and the 33rd Governor of California (19671975). Reagan was also a broadcaster, actor, and head of the Screen Actor's Guild before entering politics.
Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, the second of two sons to John "Jack" Reagan and Nelle Wilson. One of his four great-grandfathers had immigrated to the United States from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, Ireland in the 1860s. Prior to his grandfather's emigration, the family name had been spelled Regan.
In 1920, after years of moving from town to town, the family settled in Dixon, Illinois. In 1921, at the age of 10, Reagan was baptized in his mother's Disciples of Christ church in Dixon (although his brother, Neil, became a Roman Catholic, like their father, Jack), and in 1924 Ronald Reagan began attending Dixon's Northside High School. Reagan always considered Dixon to be his hometown.
Ronald and his older brother Neil, with parents Jack and Nelle Reagan. (ca. 1916-1917)In 1927, at age 16, Reagan took a summer job as a lifeguard in Lowell Park, two miles away from Dixon on the nearby Rock River. He continued to work as a lifeguard for the next seven years, reportedly saving 77 people from drowning. Reagan would later joke that none of them ever thanked him.
In 1928, Reagan entered Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, majoring in economics and sociology and graduating in 1932. In 1929 Reagan joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity which he later recalled during numerous interviews and conversations as one of the greatest experiences he had during his college years. Though earning mediocre grades, he made many lasting friendships. Reagan developed an early gift for storytelling and acting. He was a radio announcer as an affiliate of the Chicago Cubs baseball games, getting only the bare outlines of the game from a ticker and relying on his imagination and storytelling gifts to flesh out the game. Once in 1934, during the ninth inning of a Cubs-St. Louis Cardinals game, the wire went dead. Reagan smoothly improvised a fictional play-by-play (in which hitters on both teams fouled off pitches) until the wire was restored.
In 1937, while in California to cover the spring training session of the Chicago Cubs as a radio announcer, Reagan took a screen test that led to a seven-year contract with the Warner Brothers studio. Reagan's clear voice and athletic physique made him popular with some audiences; the majority of his screen roles were as the leading man in B movies. His first screen credit was the starring role in the 1937 movie Love Is On the Air. By the end of 1939, he had appeared in 19 films. In 1940 he played the role of George "The Gipper" Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All American, from which he acquired the nickname the Gipper, which he retained the rest of his life. Reagan himself considered his best acting work to have been in Kings Row (1942). He played the part of a young man whose legs were amputated. He used a line he spoke in this film, "Where's the rest of me?" as the title for his autobiography. Other notable Reagan films include Hellcats of the Navy, This Is the Army, and Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan was kidded widely about the last named film because his co-star was a chimpanzee. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6374 Hollywood Blvd.
Nancy and Ronald Reagan married in 1952. Nancy Reagan became a powerful background figure in Ronald Reagan's rise and roles as governor and president.Reagan was commissioned as a reserve cavalry officer in the U.S. Army in 1935. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he was activated and assigned, partially due to his poor eyesight, to the First Motion Picture Unit in the United States Army Air Force, which made training and education films. He remained in Hollywood for the duration of the war, and he attained the rank of captain. Reagan tried repeatedly to go overseas for combat duty, but was turned down because of his astigmatism.
Reagan married actress Jane Wyman in 1940. They had a daughter, Maureen in 1941 and adopted a son, Michael in 1945. Their second daughter, Christine, was born four months prematurely in 1947 and lived only one day. They divorced in 1948. Reagan remarried in 1952 to actress Nancy Davis. Their daughter Patti was born on October 21 of the same year. In 1958 they had a second child, Ron. In his second marriage, Reagan was known as a loving and devoted husband.
As Reagan's film roles became fewer in the late 1950s, he moved into television as a host and frequent performer for General Electric Theater. In the GE effort, for the first time, he encountered the working class and labor union population that he had previously not understood. Reagan now identified with them, which may be the original nexus between the conservative movement, and the understanding of the labor unions, which resulted in the "Reagan-Democrat" 1984, movement. Reagan appeared in many live television plays and often co-starred with Nancy. Reagan became head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and served in this position from 1947 until 1952, and then again from 1959 to 1960. In 1952, a Hollywood scandal raged over his granting of a SAG blanket waiver to MCA, which allowed it to both represent and employ talent for its burgeoning TV franchises. He went from host and program supervisor of General Electric Theater to actually producing and claiming an equity stake in the TV show itself. At one point in the late 1950s, Reagan was earning approximately $125,000 per year. His final regular acting job was as host and performer on Death Valley Days. Reagan's final big-screen appearance came in the 1964 film The Killers, in which, uncharacteristically, he played a mob chieftain. This film was a remake of an earlier version, based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Reagan's co-stars were John Cassavetes and Lee Marvin.
Reagan began his political life as a Democrat, supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. He gradually became a staunch social and fiscal conservative. He embarked upon the path that led him to a career in politics during his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild. In this position, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on alleged Communist influence in Hollywood. He also kept tabs on actors he considered disloyal and informed on them to the FBI under the code name "Agent T-10," but he would not denounce them publicly. He supported the practice of blacklisting in Hollywood. Concluding that the Republican Party was better able to combat communism, Reagan gradually abandoned his left-of-center political views, supporting the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1960all while Reagan was still a Democrat.
His employment by the General Electric company further enhanced his political image; he travelled widely as a GE spokesman, and was noted for his anti-Communist speeches. By the 1964 election, Reagan was an outspoken supporter of conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. His nationally televised speech "A Time for Choosing" electrified conservatives; soon after, several top Republican contributors visited Reagan at his home in Pacific Palisades, California, urging him to seek the governorship in 1966. Though these requests were initially "laughed off" by Reagan, he says in his autobiography, he eventually gave in, after countless sleepless nights.
In 1966, he was elected the 33rd Governor of California, defeating two-term incumbent Pat Brown; he was re-elected in 1970, defeating Jesse Unruh, but chose not to seek a third term. During the People's Park protests, he sent 2,200 National Guard troops onto the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Reagan made it clear that the policies of his administration would not be influenced by student agitation, saying "if it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with, no more appeasement." When left-wing SLA terrorists kidnapped Patty Hearst in Berkeley and gave a list of demands that included free distribution of food to the poor, Reagan facetiously suggested that it would be a good time for an outbreak of botulism. After the media caught wind of the comment, he apologized.
In his first term, he froze government hiring, but also approved tax hikes to balance the budget. He worked with Democrat Assembly Speaker, Bob Moretti, to create welfare reform in 1971. Reagan also opposed the construction of a large federal dam, the Dos Rios, which would have flooded a valley of Indian ranches. Later, Reagan and his family took a summer pack trip into the high Sierra to a place where a proposed trans-Sierra highway would be built. Once there, he declared it would not be built. One of Reagan's greatest frustrations in office concerned capital punishment. He had campaigned as a strong supporter; however, his efforts to enforce the state's laws in this area were thwarted when the Supreme Court of California issued its People v. Anderson decision, which invalidated all death sentences passed in California prior to 1972. Although the decision was quickly overturned by a constitutional amendment, there would not be another execution in California until 1992.
During his governorship, Reagan promoted the dismantling of the public psychiatric hospital system, opposing involuntary hospitalization as a civil liberties issue, and instead proposing that community-based housing and treatment system replace it. According to some Reagan critics, the first objective was effectively accomplished, but the community replacement facilities were never adequately funded, either by Reagan or by his successors.
Reagan's first attempt to gain the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 was unsuccessful. He tried again in 1976 against the incumbent Gerald Ford, but was narrowly defeated at the Republican Convention. He finally succeeded in gaining the Republican nomination in 1980. The campaign, led by William J. Casey, was conducted in the shadow of the Iran hostage crisis; some analysts believe President Jimmy Carter's inability to solve the hostage crisis played a large role in Reagan's victory against him in the 1980 election. Other issues in the campaign included inflation, lackluster economic growth, instability in the petroleum market leading to a return of gas lines, and the perceived weakness of the U.S. national defense.
Reagan's showing in the televised debates boosted his campaign. He seemed more at ease, mocking President Carter's criticisms with remarks like "There you go again." Perhaps his most influential remark was a closing question to the audience, during a time of skyrocketing global oil prices and highly unpopular Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
Carter's eventual ouster was accompanied by a 12-seat change in the Senate from Democratic to Republican hands, giving the Republicans a majority in the Senate for the first time in 28 years. Upon his election, Reagan became the oldest president to enter office, at the age of 69.
In the 1984 presidential election, he was re-elected in a landslide over Carter's Vice President Walter Mondale, winning 49 of 50 states and receiving nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. At the Democratic National Convention, Mondale accepted the party nomination with a speech that is believed to have constituted a self-inflicted mortal wound. In it he remarked "Reagan will raise taxes, I will raise taxes. Reagan won't tell you this, I just did."[1] Reagan accepted the Republican nomination in Dallas, Texas, on a wave of good feeling bolstered by the recovering economy and the dominating performance by the U.S. athletes at the Los Angeles Olympics that summer. Despite a weak performance in the first debate, Reagan recovered in the second and was considerably ahead of Mondale in polls taken throughout much of the race. Reagan's landslide win in the 1984 presidential election is often attributed by political commentators to be a result of his conversion of the "Reagan Democrats," the traditionally Democratic voters who voted for Reagan in that election.
Ronald Reagan Filmography
Actor
In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War (2005)
Great Actors of the 20th Century - V. 3 (1993)
Stand Up Reagan (1989)
Ronnie Dearest - The Lost Episodes (1988)
Spies Like Us (1985)
The Killers (1964)
Hellcats of the Navy (1957)
Tennessee's Partner (1955)
Cattle Queen of Montana (1954)
The Jungle Trap (1954)
I'm a Fool (1953)
Law and Order (1953)
The Winning Team (1953)
Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)
Cavalry Charge (1951)
John Loves Mary (1949)
The Stillwell Road (1947)
This is the Army (1943)
Desperate Journey (1942)
Kings Row (1942)
Knute Rockne - All American (1940)
Santa Fe Trail (1940)
Dark Victory (1939)
Boy Meets Girl (1938)
Brother Rat (1938)
December 7th/Target Tokyo
Gable, Stewart and Reagan
The Swingin' Singin' Years
Narrator
The President Fights the Japs... and Dirt
|
