The stranger side of Ronald Reagan

(Part 3 of my version of the Reagan Legacy project) 

“He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless”
- Patti Davis, talking about her father, The Way I See It

“Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.”
- Margaret Thatcher on Reagan

“Facts are stupid things”
- Ronald Reagan, bungling John Adams (“Facts are stubborn things.”)

I’ll dive into the weeds of policy and process soon, I swear, but there’s still so much to say about how the Reagan image industry has sanded every rough edge off of a very textured and complex personality. Yesterday, I looked at how Ronald Reagan wasn’t always the happy-go-lucky Pollyanna he’s made out to be these days. Today, I’d like to look at how much we’ve forgotten the former president’s profound weirdness, in word and deed. I don’t mean gaffes. All politicians have those. I mean the bizarre beliefs, odd statements, and disturbing memory lapses that pop way too often to be dismissed as mere eccentricities.

OK, first off, we have to deal with the astrology thing. On one level, maybe it’s not such a big deal that Ronnie and Nancy went to weekly astrology classes and ‘zodiac parties’ in the fifties and sixties. Or that Reagan signed legislation as governor declassifying ‘licensed’ astrologers as fortune-tellers, thus allowing them to receive compensation for their, uh, ‘craft’. But sweat beads start to form when you read former advisor Donald Regan reveal that Reagan’s entire schedule was based around White House astrologer Joan Quigley’s advice about planetary alignment. This caused embarrassment for the staff more than once, when they would have to explain arbitrary changes in the itinerary without giving away the game. And there’s evidence we can thank astrology for the picking of George H.W. Bush as VP as well. Joyce Jillson says she was paid $1200 to pick the vice president from a list of seven names. The elder Bush’s response to this:

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “But I will tell you one thing: There are two edges to this sword. There are a helluva lot of people across this country that read these columns. Otherwise they would not be in the papers.”

Not sure what makes that a double-edged sword, but I’m glad he wasn’t overly bothered by the fact that he was picked for the position of second-most powerful person on the planet essentially at random. Putting aside the unnerving knowledge that the president who relied on such gobbledygook was the same man with his finger on the button, there is the high comedy of the Christian Right embracing an avid astrology buff. The same folks that love to reinvent Barack Obama as a radical Muslim utterly ignored Reagan’s enthusiastic adoption of a practice they consider demonic idolatry. Ah, well.

Less central to his life, but no less weird, was Reagan’s obsession with UFOs, another humiliating hobbyhorse that the staff had to work overtime to tamp down. Colin Powell, then Reagan’s National Security Advisor, “would struggle diligently to keep interplanetary references out of Reagan’s speeches”, according to biographer Lou Cannon. “Here come the little green men again”, Powell would sigh, when the topic inevitably came up. The president was consumed with the idea that an alien invasion would unite the world, and even tried to broach the subject with Mikhail Gorbachev during one summit. Perplexed, the Russian leader quickly changed the subject. You can even see Reagan’s notes below, trying to shoehorn the subject into a speech:

“And towards the end perhaps I still would like my “fantasy” – how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if creatures from another planet should threaten this world.”

Then there’s the little matter of the memory – or lack thereof. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘lack’. Ronald Reagan had a vivid memory. It just wasn’t always his own life and experiences he was recalling on the stump. He had a vast array of anecdotes so poignant and dramatic you’d think they came right out of a Hollywood screenwriter’s imagination rather than reality. And you’d often be right.

The tale of the courageous pilot who went down with his gunner, who was stuck in his turret when the plane started going down.

– from the 1944 film, Wing and a Prayer.

The story of how one black sailor’s bravery at Pearl Harbor helped end segregation in the Armed Forces.

– from the John Garfield movie Air Force

“I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself.”
– Reagan, in an interview with foreign journalists, April 19, 1985. (Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood)

“I was there”
- Reagan on the liberation of the Nazi death camps, but again, he was probably remembering a movie, not his actual experiences.

These are the untidy facts left out of the official version of Saint Ronnie’s tenure. While I don’t think Reagan was an “amiable dunce”, in Clark Clifford’s famous phrasing, I do believe he was a deeply incurious man with a troubling memory problem and some extremely kooky beliefs – beliefs that would’ve hurt him greatly had they been made public sooner. At the end of the day, though, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were, like a lot of their friends in Hollywood, just too easily taken in by New Age chicanery and faddish superstitious hokum. I’ll leave it up to you to connect the dots on how those traits relate to his unquestioning acceptance of the fairy tales of supply-side economics and missile-defense shields.