At the end of 1947, Jane Wyman told her husband that she wanted a divorce. For a long time, they had been too busy to spend much time together. Still, Ronald Reagan was taken by surprise. He took his daughter Maureen for a ride in the car and tried to explain to her why the family was breaking up. She didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t quite understand, either. He thought other people got divorced. He never imagined it would happen to him.
This was the beginning of a bad time. At a charity baseball game, he got tagged out and took an awkward fall. Somehow, his right thigh bone broke into six pieces. He spent months in the hospital. And when he got out, he walked with a cane for a long time.
The injury didn’t help his career. In 1951 he made a movie called Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan played a college professor who adopts a chimpanzee. As an experiment, he tries to teach it right from wrong. Reagan got good reviews as the frustrated “dad” of a misbehaving chimp. But the movie didn’t lead to more comedy roles.
More and more Americans were now watching television. The movie studios were losing money. Theaters were a lot less packed than they used to be. Some people predicted that the movies would die out altogether. Why would anyone pay to go to a movie theater when TV was free?
Of course, the movies didn’t go away. But there were a lot of changes in Hollywood. For one thing, producers were looking for new faces that could lure younger people into theaters. Many of the older stars found themselves out of work.
Although his career wasn’t thriving, Reagan suddenly found a chance to be happy again.
A director friend introduced him to a young actress named Nancy Davis. On their first date, they stayed out until three in the morning!
Reagan later said, “Sometimes, I think my life really began when I met Nancy.”
After they were married, in 1952, they had a daughter, Patti. A son, Ron, came along six years later. Reagan’s lonely days were over. He had a family again. Maureen and Michael were living with their mother, but they came to visit on weekends. The children played in the backyard pool. Sometimes they went horseback riding.
It took money to support a family. So Reagan started to look for work outside the movies. He became an emcee at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, telling jokes and introducing the main act. But he missed California and left after two weeks.
In 1954 Reagan became the host of a television show called the General Electric Theater. The show featured a different play every week. Often, movie stars were in leading roles. Besides appearing on television, Reagan was GE’s spokesman. He spent months every year traveling around the country by train, giving speeches. General Electric had 139 factories, and he visited them all.
Like his father, Ronald Reagan had always idolized Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR became president during the Great Depression. He believed in using the power of government to solve people’s problems, to make their lives better. Reagan had thought that was great at the time. But he’d recently started to think that the government had gotten too big. The government in Washington, D.C., kept starting new programs. But, Reagan complained, few of them were ended even after they had served their purpose. Reagan came to believe that, in the long run, government created as many problems as it solved.
Reagan was surprised to find that many of the GE workers agreed with him. They complained about high taxes and too many government regulations. Little by little, he started to talk about these things in his speeches.
In 1962 Reagan’s job as GE’s spokesman ended. He hosted another TV show for a while. But mostly he traveled around California giving speeches. One day, a group of Republicans came to his house. Would he run for governor—the highest job in the state?
Reagan was reluctant. For one thing, he was a Democrat, not a Republican. But little by little, he started to think about getting into politics.
Then in 1962 he joined the Republicans. Two years later, Reagan was asked to appear on national television. He was to speak about the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Reagan talked about how too much government could threaten individual freedom. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, but many TV viewers loved Reagan.
In 1966 Reagan agreed to run against Governor Pat Brown. An experienced politician, Brown could hardly imagine that people would vote for a Hollywood actor. “Remember, an actor shot Lincoln,” he said.
As it turned out, voters liked the idea of a candidate who was new to politics. They thought he might bring new ideas and change for the better.
Voters in California were worried about high taxes and the rising crime rate.
The Berkeley campus of the University of California was all but shut down by student demonstrations. Reagan remembered his own days as the leader of a student strike. But he thought it was wrong for a small group to keep students from going to class. He ended many speeches by saying, “Ya basta”—Spanish for “Enough, already.”
When the votes were counted, Reagan had won the election. His daughter Patti heard the news and burst into tears. Reagan’s new career meant that he would have much less time for his children. At one time or another, all four children felt that they didn’t get enough of their father’s love and attention. Patti and Ron took the change harder than Maureen and Michael. Most of their friends were Democrats. They often didn’t agree with what their dad was trying to accomplish.
Now that he was actually in office, Reagan had to learn fast. Some people thought that he was against the poor and minorities. But Reagan just had different ideas about how to help. Soon after taking office, he changed certain civil service rules so that more African Americans could qualify for jobs. He also allowed parent volunteers into school classrooms. Most of all, he wanted to lower taxes. That way working people could keep more of their own money.
By 1968 the state had saved enough to give some back to the voters. Reagan said, “History is clear. Lower tax rates mean greater freedom. And whenever we lower the tax rates, our entire nation is better off.”
In 1980 Reagan became the Republican candidate for president. George Herbert Walker Bush was his choice for vice president. The country had a lot of problems that year. Unemployment was high. Inflation had been high for a long time. That meant that a dollar was worth less year after year. Prices kept rising. It was hard to borrow money to buy a house.
Experts were warning that young people shouldn’t expect to live as well as their parents had. Things weren’t going well for Americans around the world, either. Fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran.
President Jimmy Carter had been elected in 1976. He said that the country was suffering from “malaise”—a national bad mood. Ronald Reagan was more optimistic. He said that America’s greatest days were still ahead. He even believed that the Cold War would not go on forever. People around the world would choose democracy if they had the chance.
Reagan believed that the tide would turn against Communism. Very few people agreed with him about this. It seemed that Communists were taking over more countries, little by little. Afghanistan and Nicaragua would be the next on the list.
When Election Day arrived, the Republicans carried the day. Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981. His running mate, George H. W. Bush, became vice president. |