Reagan: The Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

character’s effect on him. “War-weary, young but bitterly old Captain Stanhope carried me into a new world.For two and a half hours I was in that dugout on the Western front—but in some strange way, I was also on stage. More than anything in life I wanted to speak his lines to the young replacement officer who misunderstands and sees callousness in his effort to hide grief. That deep silence, the slow coming to his feet, then the almost whispered, ‘My God, so that’s it! You think I don’t care! You bloody little swine, you think I don’t care—the only one who knew—who really understood.’ ”
    Yet Reagan’s most memorable performance at Eureka came not onstage, and certainly not on the football field, but in student politics. The college was chronically strapped for money, and in his freshman year its president proposed to balance the books by eliminating various courses and laying off the faculty who taught them. The trustees supported the president. The faculty resisted the reductions, but it was the student response that had the larger effect. Seniors and juniors discovered that courses they required for graduation were suddenly unavailable; they complained that the college was reneging on its commitment to them. The students formed a committee to weigh their options; Reagan served as a representative of the freshman class.
    Members of the committee suggested a strike, a student boycott of classes. The idea caught on, but the committee leaders judged that it would carry the greatest weight if put forward by a freshman, a member of the class with the least immediate self-interest in the matter. Someone knew Reagan and suggested him. He accepted the assignment.
    “I’d been told that I should sell the idea so there’d be no doubt of the outcome,” he remembered. He took the advice and prepared an elaborate brief on behalf of the students and against the president and trustees. “I reviewed the history of our patient negotiations with due emphasis on the devious manner in which the trustees had sought to take advantage of us.” Reagan was thrilled by the response. “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine.” Thirty years later he could still taste the victory. “Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet,” he said, riffing on Longfellow’s rendering of Paul Revere’s ride.
    The strike prompted the trustees to reconsider and the president to resign. It made Reagan a presence on campus. He never became a footballhero, though he eventually earned more playing time. He was a first-rate swimmer, from his years as a lifeguard, and he represented the college in meets. But swimming was a minor sport and didn’t have the cachet of football. He was active in student government, working his way to election as student body president.
    He joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he enjoyed a fraternal comeuppance. Manual labor had lost its charm for Neil, and he decided to give college a try. He came to Eureka and pledged Reagan’s fraternity, a year behind his younger brother, who was expected to haze him along with the rest of the pledges. Reagan later claimed to have faked the whacks, delivered to the buttocks with a wooden paddle drilled with holes to raise blisters. Neil remembered things differently. “I became the younger brother,” he said. And he was treated like a younger brother, only more harshly. “Anytime I heard the shout ‘Assume the position, Reagan’ and grabbed my ankles, I knew the whack I got from him was going to be worse than the others because he felt he had to; otherwise they’d accuse him of showing