Reagan: The Life Read Online Free PDF

partisanship.”
    Reagan loved everything about Eureka except its reason for being: academics. He was a thoroughly indifferent student, unmotivated and insufficiently brilliant to make good grades without effort. He studied economics, the closest thing Eureka offered to a curriculum in business, in hopes it might prove practical after graduation. But he was an optimist at heart, and neither the theory nor the practice of the dismal science engaged him. History was too backward-looking for a young man with an eye on the future. French might be good for the French, but what did an American need with it? Reagan’s attitude toward his studies was purely instrumental: he worked no harder than his extracurriculars required. “My principal academic ambition at Eureka was to maintain the C average I needed to remain eligible,” he confessed afterward.
    English was the rare subject that sometimes inspired him, when he could exercise his storytelling skills. One of his short stories involved what the protagonist called “the A.E.F. suicide club,” for the doomed soldiers ofWorld War I. A doughboy named Edwards reflects on the experience of a younger soldier, Bering. “Edwards was not old himself, but his thirty years had robbed him of some of Bering’s optimism, his idealism and youth. A lump came to his throat as he listened to the boy talk of sacrifice and glory and heroism and he cursed mentally at a world so ordered that once every generation it must be bathed in the blood of youth like this one.” A half century later Reagan would offer public paeans to the sacrifice of men like Bering, but in 1931 he could see little but folly in their efforts. Bering, in Reagan’s story, survives the war yet sustains permanent physical and emotional injuries. He never regains his grounding in life. Reagan’s story ended with Edwards, years later, reading a short piece in the newspaper: “A tramp, David Bering, met his death today beneath the wheels of a Santa Fe freight. Bering, an ex–service man, had been gassed in the war and was bumming his way to the Speedway veterans hospital for treatment. He attempted to board the moving train and lost his footing. He was thrown under the wheels when he fell. Notices have been broadcasted but no relatives or friends have claimed the body. He will be buried in the potters field.”

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    A FTER WE MOVED to Dixon, I fell in love with themovies,” Reagan recalled. “I couldn’t count the number of hours I spent in the darkness of our only moviehouse with William S. Hart and Tom Mix galloping over the prairie or having my eyes turned misty by the cinematic perils that befell Mary Pickford and Pearl White.” His mother’s sister came for a visit, and the whole family went to the theater to watch the weekly silent film. “I don’t remember its name, but it featured the adventures of a freckle-faced young boy and I enjoyed it a lot. Afterward, I overheard my aunt talking to my mother about this young star and saying she thought I had the potential to become a child actor. ‘If he was mine,’ she said, ‘I’d take him toHollywood if I had to walk all the way.’ ”
    Nelle Reagan wasn’t about to walk to Hollywood; she had her hands full holding the family together in Dixon. But her sister’s attitude was widely shared in the years after World War I. Hollywood’s grip on the American imagination was new but more seductive for its novelty. Photographers and inventors had tried to get pictures to move in the late nineteenth century;Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope accomplished the feat, for one viewer at a time, in 1894. By the turn of the century peep shows had become picture shows, and the 1903
Great Train Robbery
, a twelve-minute drama set in the West but shot in New Jersey, promised a heady future for the new medium.
    That future unfolded in California. Early movie cameras required daylight to make their recordings, and Southern California’s glorious weather allowed more days of outdoor