The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

The constant uprooting made for solitary early years. Ronnie was not particularly close to his outgoing older brother, Neil, either by age or temperament. He taught himself to read when he was five. When he was California governor, Ronnie told his chief of staff, Edwin Meese III, “Well, if you have a book, you always have a friend.”

As is not unusual with children of alcoholics, Ronnie preferred to keep the grimmest images from his past at bay. This was a trait that would carry him through the rest of his life, until Alzheimer’s disease wiped out all memory—the good and the bad—entirely. “What Ronald Reagan inherited from his childhood is an astounding ability to turn away from any reality which is too harsh and paint one that is softer, gentler to the eyes,” his daughter Patti wrote in her 1992 memoir. But some truths could not be burnished and blurred in sepia tones. There was the year Jack got fired on Christmas Eve, and the string of other jobs that Ronnie’s father lost because of his drinking. There was at least one arrest for public drunkenness. His sons heard fiery arguments through their parents’ bedroom wall. Sometimes Jack would just disappear for days. At other times, Ronnie’s mother took the children to stay with her sister—for sojourns away from Jack that Ronnie eventually figured out were not, as he put it in his autobiography, “unexpected vacations.”

Ronnie was but eleven years old when he came home and nearly tripped over his father passed out on the porch. Jack’s arms were outstretched as though he had been crucified; his hair was soaked in melting snow. Part of the boy wanted to go into the house and pretend he didn’t know the snoring figure sprawled in front for the whole town to see. “But someplace along the line, to each of us, I suppose, must come that first moment of accepting responsibility. If we don’t accept it (and some don’t), then we must grow older without quite growing up. I felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time I was feeling sorry for myself,” he would later write. “I bent over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey from the speakeasy. I got a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him inside and get him to bed. In a few days, he was the bluff, hearty man I knew and loved and will always remember.”

The stabilizing force in Ronnie’s childhood was his mother, Nelle Wilson Reagan, a tiny, devout woman with a big heart. She was, as White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan would later describe her, “a little tornado of goodness.” Her son once noted that Nelle assumed everyone else loved her for no other reason than that she knew she loved them. However hard things got for the Reagans, Nelle could always find someone worse off who needed her help. She looked for these lost souls in jails and hospitals and mental institutions. “Nelle never saw anything evil in another human being, and Ronnie is the same way,” Nancy once wrote. “Sometimes it infuriates me, but that’s how he is.”

As he would later do with Nancy, Ronnie found sanctuary in Nelle’s adoring gaze. His mother called him Ronald, though nearly everyone else knew him by the nickname “Dutch,” which his father had given him at birth. Jack thought the squalling, ten-pound infant, who had come out feet first on February 6, 1911, looked like “a fat Dutchman.”

“I think he’s perfectly wonderful,” Nelle replied, summoning what strength she could after twenty-four hours of labor. “Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

A seamstress by trade, Nelle found her calling when she was baptized by immersion into the Disciples of Christ church on Easter Sunday 1910, a little less than a year before Ronnie was born. The denomination has loose doctrinal boundaries. Its members live, as they put it, “by no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.” They identify themselves only as Christians. Nelle tried to plant that religious outlook in both her sons. It took root in the younger, quieter one. (Jack was a Catholic, in various stages of lapse. Neil followed his father in faith, as in other practices.)

Ronnie’s mother also introduced young Ronald to performing and the exhilarating sound of applause. At first, he resented being conscripted to join her as she entertained in productions that were staged at the local theater, at her church, and at the state hospital. But her enthusiasm for make-believe was contagious. “Nelle was the dean of dramatic recitals for the countryside. It was her sole relaxation from her family and charitable duties; she executed it with the zest of a frustrated actress,” Ronnie remembered. “She recited classic speeches in tragic tones, wept as she flung herself into the more poignant, if less talented, passages of such melodramas as East Lynne”—coincidentally, the same play in which Edith Luckett had made her first appearance onstage as a child in Washington, DC—“and poured out poetry by the yard.” Nine-year-old Ronnie made his own debut as a solo performer in early May 1920. He recited a piece called “On Mother.”

Ronnie’s greatest dream, which was hampered by his small size, was to be a football star, as his brother was. He excelled as a powerful swimmer. Dutch spent seven summers as a lifeguard at Lowell Park beach on the Rock River; over those years, his proudest achievement was rescuing seventy-seven people from drowning. He kept track of the number by putting notches on a log.

Where Ronnie felt most at home was in his own company, exploring an inner life nurtured and protected by his mother. Nelle understood that the geniality her son showed the world was an opaque curtain behind which lived a solitary nature. “In some ways, I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely. I’ve never