The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

In Galesburg, Ronnie would sit for hours in the attic of the Reagans’ rented house, gazing at a previous tenant’s long-forgotten collection of bird’s eggs and butterflies. In Tampico, his refuge was the home of a childless elderly couple next door who had taken a liking to the boy. He planted himself every afternoon in a giant rocking chair in their living room, snacking by himself on chocolate and cookies. He wrote later: “The best part was that I was allowed to dream.”

Ronnie pored over his mother’s leather-bound volume of poems by Robert Service, known as the Bard of the Yukon. Even as president, he could—and often did—recite from memory Service’s most famous ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Nelle also put into his eleven-year-old hands That Printer of Udell’s: A Story of the Middle West. The melodramatic 1903 novel by Harold Bell Wright tells the story of itinerant printer Dick Falkner, a poor young man with an alcoholic father. In the story, Dick’s destiny is transformed by two things: becoming a Christian and his devotion to a woman.

“That book—That Printer of Udell’s—had an impact I shall always remember,” Ronnie wrote the author’s daughter-in-law from the White House in 1984. “After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. We attended the Christian Church in Dixon, and I was baptized several days after finishing the book.

“The term ‘role model’ was not a familiar term in that time and place, but looking back, I know I had found a role model in that traveling printer Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.”

In the pages of Wright’s book, Ronnie would find his ideal of the perfect helpmeet. She was Dick’s love interest, Amy Goodrich, a virtuous dark-haired girl with sweet brown eyes. Amy comes from a privileged background, but, through a series of plot twists, she falls into a brothel from which Dick rescues her. Driven by his desire to impress her, he also discovers his gift as a great communicator. At the end of the book, Dick and Amy are married and heading to Washington, DC, “to enter a field of wider usefulness. For the people have declared, at the last election, that their choice for representative was ‘That Printer of Udell’s.’ ”

The initial incarnation of Amy Goodrich to enter Ronnie’s life was Margaret Cleaver, the whip-smart but humorless daughter of his pastor at First Christian Church. She was the first girl he kissed. Ronnie saw in her similarities to his mother: they were both short, auburn haired, and bright. Margaret’s eyes were big, and widely spaced, the same feature that had caught his attention the moment he saw Nancy. From the time they were sophomores at Dixon’s North Side High School, he was devoted to the girl people called “Mugs.” Both were active in dramatics and appeared opposite each other their senior year in a play titled You and I. He followed her to Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ liberal arts school 110 miles southeast of Dixon. Ronnie gave Mugs his Tau Kappa Epsilon pin and then an engagement ring.

“For almost six years of my life, I was sure she was going to be my wife. I was very much in love,” he wrote. Mugs was not so sentimental or dreamy about him, it appears. Nearly a half century later, she would say of her former sweetheart: “He had an inability to distinguish between fact and fancy.” Hollywood was not a world she would have ever wanted to be part of. Nor did Margaret approve of Ronnie’s infrequent church attendance while he was president. “Even Nixon held services in the White House,” she said.

As different as they were, their personalities interlocked. His affability complemented her drive. “Mugs was generally considered the stronger of the two, ‘young Miss Brains’ to his ‘Mr. Congeniality.’ He smoothed her bristling desire to control people, teasing her when necessary, but paying attention to everything she said,” Edmund Morris wrote. She was president of their sophomore class in college, and spent her junior year at the University of Illinois, because she did not consider Eureka academically challenging enough. Ronnie was more focused on his social life. He was president of the Eureka’s booster club three years running and of the student body when they were seniors.

After graduation, the two set out on different paths. Ronnie began his career as a radio sportscaster in Iowa, and Mugs taught school in Illinois. She and her sister Helen also spent time in France, where she met and fell in love with a foreign service officer named James Waddell Gordon Jr. Mugs broke the news to Ronnie in a letter in which she enclosed his ring and fraternity pin. (That was his version; Mugs, in 1988, insisted to biographer Morris that she returned the ring personally.) She married Gordon in the summer of 1935 and moved to Scotland. “Margaret’s decision shattered me, not so much, I think, because she no longer loved me, but because I no longer had anyone to love,” Ronnie recalled.

His life would soon find a new direction. In March 1937 Ronnie went to California to cover the Chicago Cubs’ spring training on Catalina Island. While he was there, a friend arranged for him to take a screen test with Warner Brothers Pictures. Ronnie returned to Iowa and soon received a wire offering him a $200-a-week, seven-year contract with the studio, which was MGM’s main competitor.

On May 26 Nelle wrote the family of her old pastor—Margaret’s father—assuring them that her boy would not stray from his spiritual path in the worldly glitter of America’s Gomorrah. The eight-page letter, handwritten on yellowed stationery monogrammed with