Edmund Morris: Portrait of the President as a Young Man
TWENTY-FIVE years ago last Thursday, in another era, another century, the president of the United States walked into a salvo of bullets, one of which brought him to the brink of death.
It's possible that as the doctors worked desperately to overtake the flood of blood draining from him, he may have dreamed, as dying people are supposed to do, about his past life. We only know that he survived and cheated death — if not dementia — for another couple of decades.
Without being as speculative a biographer as Lytton Strachey was about Queen Victoria drifting off, I think it more likely that Ronald Reagan's dreams were of days and years to come. (He had had a near-death experience once before, from viral pneumonia in 1947, and wrote a vivid account of it.) Even in youth, and in abundant good health, Dutch Reagan showed a freakish ability to remember, as it were, his own future.
His teenage short stories, which I discovered in a trunk of junk in the basement of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, are so permeated with his later personality that you can practically see the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" walking toward you, unhurried but unstoppable. ...
When he went on to college, his remembrance of things to come extended, more creepily, to a short story that amounted to a virtual synopsis of his starring role in "Knute Rockne, All American" (1940). At the time he wrote it, in 1932, he was nothing more than a bespectacled frat boy whom nobody thought destined for great things.
Except, perhaps, when he seized a broomstick and, pretending it was a sportscaster's mike, improvised imaginary games of football and baseball, complete with redheaded urchins rising in the bleachers for fly balls and "long blue shadows" slowly filling the stadium of his imagination. That power of visualization was so strong that when he became a real sportscaster, in 1933, he broadcast his first game with a pleased sense of déjà vu. ...
The deaths last week of two other Reagan aides, Lyn Nofziger and Caspar Weinberger, bring to mind yet another long-ago image that the future president identified with. It was drawn not by himself but by the artist William Steig, in a book of fantastic portraits titled "The Lonely Ones" (1942). Reagan did not see the book until 1948, shortly after his near-death experience and agonizing divorce from Miss Wyman. A friend invited him to flick the pages, and write a comment beneath whichever character caught his fancy.
Reagan chose the most enigmatic one of all — a simian geometrist in Grecian robes, musing with closed eyes before a wall of theorems.
On the page opposite, Steig had printed a cryptic caption: "Whoever wants the answer must come to me." Reagan scrawled beneath, "It may not be right, but I'll have it!"
This was when his acting career was in decline and his political obsessions were driving him toward public life as a union leader, corporate spokesman, governor and president. Throughout those years Reagan mysteriously managed to convince a growing cadre of supporters that he carried in his bosom — right or wrong! — the Answer to all practical questions of leadership and statesmanship....
Read entire article at NYT
It's possible that as the doctors worked desperately to overtake the flood of blood draining from him, he may have dreamed, as dying people are supposed to do, about his past life. We only know that he survived and cheated death — if not dementia — for another couple of decades.
Without being as speculative a biographer as Lytton Strachey was about Queen Victoria drifting off, I think it more likely that Ronald Reagan's dreams were of days and years to come. (He had had a near-death experience once before, from viral pneumonia in 1947, and wrote a vivid account of it.) Even in youth, and in abundant good health, Dutch Reagan showed a freakish ability to remember, as it were, his own future.
His teenage short stories, which I discovered in a trunk of junk in the basement of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, are so permeated with his later personality that you can practically see the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" walking toward you, unhurried but unstoppable. ...
When he went on to college, his remembrance of things to come extended, more creepily, to a short story that amounted to a virtual synopsis of his starring role in "Knute Rockne, All American" (1940). At the time he wrote it, in 1932, he was nothing more than a bespectacled frat boy whom nobody thought destined for great things.
Except, perhaps, when he seized a broomstick and, pretending it was a sportscaster's mike, improvised imaginary games of football and baseball, complete with redheaded urchins rising in the bleachers for fly balls and "long blue shadows" slowly filling the stadium of his imagination. That power of visualization was so strong that when he became a real sportscaster, in 1933, he broadcast his first game with a pleased sense of déjà vu. ...
The deaths last week of two other Reagan aides, Lyn Nofziger and Caspar Weinberger, bring to mind yet another long-ago image that the future president identified with. It was drawn not by himself but by the artist William Steig, in a book of fantastic portraits titled "The Lonely Ones" (1942). Reagan did not see the book until 1948, shortly after his near-death experience and agonizing divorce from Miss Wyman. A friend invited him to flick the pages, and write a comment beneath whichever character caught his fancy.
Reagan chose the most enigmatic one of all — a simian geometrist in Grecian robes, musing with closed eyes before a wall of theorems.
On the page opposite, Steig had printed a cryptic caption: "Whoever wants the answer must come to me." Reagan scrawled beneath, "It may not be right, but I'll have it!"
This was when his acting career was in decline and his political obsessions were driving him toward public life as a union leader, corporate spokesman, governor and president. Throughout those years Reagan mysteriously managed to convince a growing cadre of supporters that he carried in his bosom — right or wrong! — the Answer to all practical questions of leadership and statesmanship....