Early Reagan: grist for the amateur analyst

Anne Edwards. Early Reagan: The Rise to Power.
New York: William Morrow & Company, 1987. Pp. 617. $21.95.

This biography of Ronald Reagan is more for aficionados of the silver screen than for political junkies. The author is a former screenwriter, with biographies of Vivien Leigh and Katherine Hepburn to her credit. She takes us from Reagan's boyhood days in Illinois to his 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater, "A Time for Choosing," which provided the final boost into a political career.

Anne Edwards talked with scores of folks, in Dixon, at Eureka College, at WHO Radio in Des Moines, and especially in Hollywood. Yet her questions would appear not to have amounted to much more than, "What kind of fella was he?"

The result is a detailed sketch of Americana, across which Ronald Reagan strides with self-confidence and unrelenting pleasantness. There is nothing of the social scientist or psychobiographer in her approach; such analysis is left wholly to the reader.

The reported recollections tend to confirm the outcome of Reagan's career and to reflect positively upon the president. For example, from his hometown in Dixon comes this description of Reagan, the youth: "He was the perfect specimen of an athlete, tall, willowy, muscular, brown, good-looking."

I've never known a "perfect specimen" — even a near-sighted one like Reagan —who couldn't make the varsity football team of a small high school before his senior year, as Reagan couldn't.

The sketches of college life in the '20s read like captions for Norman Rockwell's magazine covers. For instance, we learn that, after returning from Northwestern with a third place in a national play competition, Reagan and his date enjoyed a "spirited Christmas party at Professor Jones's home," after which they "trailed into Gish's Emporium to warm up on fifteen-cent bowls of hot chili."

Given her background, the author is at her best in describing Hollywood in its heyday, in large part because Ronald Reagan was so central to filmdom's politics, if not its A-grade movies. She takes eight pages to bring us to his one memorable movie line, "Where's the rest of me?" (Kings Row, 1942).

There is even more ample treatment of Reagan's leadership of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), an AFL-affiliate with a board comprised largely of conservative Republicans. He served for six years as president of SAG, where he came across as a strong, skilled negotiator who understood the limits of his organization and its members.

Reagan took the actors out on strike for six months in 1960 in order to win them payments for the reissue of old films to television. He established the principle and won some payments, but less money than many actors felt was commensurate with the length of the bitter strike.

The author also provides a detailed account of the success of "Red baiters" in the entertainment industry after World War II. "Suddenly, artists were being fired and blacklisted, not on the basis of irrefutable evidence, but by innuendo and association. In well-known restaurants, industry figures would turn away from old friends, co-workers and even family members who had any taint at all."

It is chilling to read that Adolphe Menjou could declare before a congressional committee that: "Anyone attending any meeting at which Paul Robeson appears, and [who] applauds, can be considered a Communist.'' And Menjou got away with it unchallenged.

The 1940s and '50s were complicated years for Ronald Reagan. He was simultaneously an FBI informant on Communist infiltration of the movie industry, a union official who sometimes toted a gun and a Roosevelt Democrat whom rich business friends were trying to get to run for public office.

For the amateur analyst who lurks within all of us, there is plenty of grist here from which to draw our own conclusions about this B-grade actor who has become a ?-grade president: the alcoholic, storytelling Irish father; the strong quiet mother, devoted to church and community theater; the student strike at Eureka College that drove the school president from office and for which freshman Reagan gave the stem-winding speech that stirred up passions; Reagan the young announcer of Chicago Cubs ballgames, "live" from his Des Moines studio, where he relished expanding on the spare outline provided via Western Union ticker tape.

Reading Edwards, one can even understand how President Reagan could sit down with leaders of the "evil empire" to sign an arms treaty. Shortly after exhorting film actors not to go over to the enemy — television — Reagan himself turned up as a television star for the General Electric Theatre.

Early Reagan is a highly readable biography that scratches a lot of surface but doesn't try to go much deeper. □

James Nowlan is professor of public policy at Knox College in Galesburg. He was formerly a state legislator whose district included Tampico, Ronald Reagan 's birthplace.

March 1988 | Illinois Issues | 36