Read Online Reagan: The Life by H. W. Brands - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: H. W. Brands
Tags: United States, Historical, nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Retail, Presidents & Heads of State
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person … genuinely and spontaneously
nice
,” she said. He seemed a rock of stability. She couldn’t overstate what his love did for her. “Marrying Ronnie worked a miracle for me.”
As for what Reagan saw in Wyman, it doubtless started with her physical attractiveness. She was young and vulnerable looking, in a way that men, including her two husbands and then Reagan, found irresistible. Her mercurial personality added to the appeal; at one moment she could coo, at the next hiss and spit. Had Wyman not expressed interest in Reagan, he might have paid her little mind. He had formed no serious attachments since parting withMargaret Cleaver. In his own way he was as cautious and distrustful of love as Jane. No more in his background than in hers did childhood afford a model for happy marriage. His parents, unlike hers, had stayed together, but he certainly did not intend to become a husband like his father had been to his mother.
Nor did he possess, or was he possessed by, an ungovernable libido. A Hollywood veteran of that era, a woman, later distinguished Reagan from the lions of the boudoir. “When Clark Gable or Errol”—Flynn—“or Ty Power came into the room, you could just feel the heat waves shimmering,” she told an interviewer. But not Reagan? the interviewer asked. “Oh no,
never
Ronnie.” Why not? the interviewer asked. Wasn’t he as handsome as the others? “Yes,” she responded. “But female desire is attuned to male desire. Clark, Errol, obviously were crazy about women. Ronnie just wasn’t. I don’t think he ever looked atAnn Sheridan”—with whom Reagan starred in
Kings Row
—“and she was
luscious
.”
In any event, Wyman seems to have initiated the romance, and Reagan offered little resistance. She might have been more eager to secure a commitment than he:Hollywood gossip and bits of circumstantial evidence suggest that she staged a suicide attempt to dramatize that she couldn’t live without him. On the other hand, her hospital stay might have been caused by a nasty stomach bug. Yet the story went around that he held her hand at her bedside and said that of course he would marry her.
The wedding took place in a chapel in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, north of Los Angeles, in January 1940. The bride had just turned twenty-three; the groom was almost twenty-nine.
4
W HILE R EAGAN ’ S CAREER and personal life were blossoming, Franklin Roosevelt’s fortunes appeared to be fading. TheNew Deal had stalled in the spring of 1935 when the Supreme Court toppled a central pillar of government planning of the economy, theNational Recovery Administration. Roosevelt riposted with theSocial Security Act, which expanded the welfare state into individual lives as nothing in American history before it had. The federal government assumed responsibility for the well-being of the elderly, for those unable to work, and for their dependents. Social Security meant what the name implied: individuals would be secured from the great vicissitudes of life in an industrial society. Roosevelt originally intended to wrap medical insurance into the package, but he decided not to press his luck and left health care to future generations.
Social Security proved wildly popular at the polls, not least because the greatest cost was pushed to those future generations. Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, and though one out of every seven American workers remained unemployed, he trounced RepublicanAlf Landon by the largest electoral margin in history until then. Roosevelt interpreted the result as an endorsement of the New Deal and a repudiation of the Supreme Court, and in early 1937 he prepared a measure to bend the court to the people’s will. Roosevelt’s plan would add justices to the court, nominally to ease the workload of the most elderly justices but transparently to add liberal voices and votes to its decision-making process.
Roosevelt’s political instincts rarely failed him, but this
nice
,” she said. He seemed a rock of stability. She couldn’t overstate what his love did for her. “Marrying Ronnie worked a miracle for me.”
As for what Reagan saw in Wyman, it doubtless started with her physical attractiveness. She was young and vulnerable looking, in a way that men, including her two husbands and then Reagan, found irresistible. Her mercurial personality added to the appeal; at one moment she could coo, at the next hiss and spit. Had Wyman not expressed interest in Reagan, he might have paid her little mind. He had formed no serious attachments since parting withMargaret Cleaver. In his own way he was as cautious and distrustful of love as Jane. No more in his background than in hers did childhood afford a model for happy marriage. His parents, unlike hers, had stayed together, but he certainly did not intend to become a husband like his father had been to his mother.
Nor did he possess, or was he possessed by, an ungovernable libido. A Hollywood veteran of that era, a woman, later distinguished Reagan from the lions of the boudoir. “When Clark Gable or Errol”—Flynn—“or Ty Power came into the room, you could just feel the heat waves shimmering,” she told an interviewer. But not Reagan? the interviewer asked. “Oh no,
never
Ronnie.” Why not? the interviewer asked. Wasn’t he as handsome as the others? “Yes,” she responded. “But female desire is attuned to male desire. Clark, Errol, obviously were crazy about women. Ronnie just wasn’t. I don’t think he ever looked atAnn Sheridan”—with whom Reagan starred in
Kings Row
—“and she was
luscious
.”
In any event, Wyman seems to have initiated the romance, and Reagan offered little resistance. She might have been more eager to secure a commitment than he:Hollywood gossip and bits of circumstantial evidence suggest that she staged a suicide attempt to dramatize that she couldn’t live without him. On the other hand, her hospital stay might have been caused by a nasty stomach bug. Yet the story went around that he held her hand at her bedside and said that of course he would marry her.
The wedding took place in a chapel in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, north of Los Angeles, in January 1940. The bride had just turned twenty-three; the groom was almost twenty-nine.
4
W HILE R EAGAN ’ S CAREER and personal life were blossoming, Franklin Roosevelt’s fortunes appeared to be fading. TheNew Deal had stalled in the spring of 1935 when the Supreme Court toppled a central pillar of government planning of the economy, theNational Recovery Administration. Roosevelt riposted with theSocial Security Act, which expanded the welfare state into individual lives as nothing in American history before it had. The federal government assumed responsibility for the well-being of the elderly, for those unable to work, and for their dependents. Social Security meant what the name implied: individuals would be secured from the great vicissitudes of life in an industrial society. Roosevelt originally intended to wrap medical insurance into the package, but he decided not to press his luck and left health care to future generations.
Social Security proved wildly popular at the polls, not least because the greatest cost was pushed to those future generations. Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, and though one out of every seven American workers remained unemployed, he trounced RepublicanAlf Landon by the largest electoral margin in history until then. Roosevelt interpreted the result as an endorsement of the New Deal and a repudiation of the Supreme Court, and in early 1937 he prepared a measure to bend the court to the people’s will. Roosevelt’s plan would add justices to the court, nominally to ease the workload of the most elderly justices but transparently to add liberal voices and votes to its decision-making process.
Roosevelt’s political instincts rarely failed him, but this
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