MEMOIR: My Father at 100: A Memoir.By Ron Reagan Viking Penguin, 228pp. $25.95
BEING YOUR FATHER'S SON (or your mother's daughter) can prove a formidable challenge betimes, as most of us can testify. But imagine how high-set the bar must seem when your dad, a reasonably famous movie-star-cum-TV-presenter during your childhood, goes on to become a two-term governor of California, then president of the United States before your 23rd birthday. Small wonder, so, that Ron Reagan, the youngest child of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, has taken pen in hand to give us My Father at 100: A Memoir.A greater wonder, given the ubiquitous glut of celebrity memoirs, is that the story he delivers is so solidly wrought and insightfully nuanced.
Lest the title confuse, the former president, who died of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 93 in 2004, would have turned 100 this year. He was born in the one-horse town of Tampico, Illinois, in 1911, meaning his lifetime spanned the 20th century and the huge cultural and technological changes it encompassed.
Reagan jnr focuses chiefly on his father’s first 21 years, which he frames within the story of his own recent journey through the string of small Illinois towns where the future president and his elder brother, Neil, were reared. Their father, Jack, was a hard-drinking second- generation Irish-American haberdashery and shoe salesman; their devoted mother, Nelle, was an amateur actor and a devout Methodist.
It’s a surreal road-trip tale, to be sure, which opens in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, and travels at one point along the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway, before ending up in Dixon, Illinois, where son Ron encounters a life-size statue of his father in a field across from the rented house that was one of Reagan snr’s several childhood homes. Ron also detours back a century to chart his father’s Irish ancestry, starting with the president’s great-great-grandfather Thomas O’Regan, born somewhere north of Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary, in 1783. Thomas’s son Michael Regan emigrated to the US in 1851, where his grandson and Ronald Reagan’s father, Jack, was born in 1883.
If there's a whiff of Oirishry in the heather-covered landscape in which his forebears cut turf, or in his claims to be related to Brian Boru, Reagan jnr has the wit not to lose himself entirely therein. Moreover, he displays a fair bit of wit throughout the memoir, at one point citing The Boys of Wexford,with its evocation of Vinegar Hill, as an example of how, as "has often been the case in Ireland, tragic defeat was turned into a drinking song".
Both of the future president’s parents, Jack and Nelle, were keen Democrats who eschewed bigotry of any stripe, though Jack’s drinking saw him shuffling through a series of jobs and the family living in five different rented houses during their 15 years in Dixon.
Bright, solitary and extremely short-sighted, the young Ronald Reagan taught himself to read by the age of five, and became an habitue of both the town’s public library and its surrounding fields, woods and creeks, where he loved to roam.
Ron recounts all of this in straightforward yet evocative prose:
As years pass he will, in effect, become his story. But for now, he is just a small boy living in rented rooms above a little shop in one of countless farm towns dotting a landscape he is barely beginning to fathom.
But it was young Reagan’s athleticism, Ron argues, that best defines the grown man, and that provided a bond between himself and his father when Ron was growing up. A starter on both the high-school and Eureka College football teams, Reagan snr was also a hugely gifted swimmer who worked for seven years as a lifeguard on Dixon’s treacherous Rock River, where he was credited with saving no less than 77 lives.
Reagan’s relationship with his father, Jack, was fraught, and Ron speculates about whether Reagan’s keenness to avoid conflict, and his ability to edit anything unpleasant out of his picture of reality, had its roots in Jack’s drinking. But it is the Ronald-Ron father-son relationship, in which the president proved to be both a horseriding playmate and a distant, inattentive parent, that lies at the heart of this remarkable family story. Indeed, Ron Reagan goes so far as to say that his father, at once both warm and remote, affable yet solitary, “was as strange a fellow as any of us had ever met . . . Not darkly strange, mind you”, rather “the inverse of an iceberg”, with most of himself plainly visible as the disarmingly modest public man, while the 10 per cent of his quieter, yet hugely ambitious, self lay hidden beneath the waves.
His son Ron, a self-declared atheist at the age of 12, who was expelled from his prep school and quit Yale after a term to become a ballet dancer, inherited not only his grandparents’ progressive Democrat politics but also their absolute intolerance of bigotry. This was something Jack and Nelle’s own son patently did not, as evidenced by Reagan’s first 1980 presidential campaign speech, championing states’ rights. He chose to give this at a Mississippi county fair only a few kilometres from where three civil-rights campaigners had been lynched in 1964. There was also the coded racism of his oft-repeated story about a Cadillac-driving, food-stamp-abusing “welfare queen” from Chicago’s African-American South Side.
Back in college Reagan had cited a career goal of becoming some kind of salesman, something, it can be argued, that he achieved consummately, selling his dewy-eyed vision of the US as “a shining city on a hill” to the American people. Having done so, he and his right-wing administration set about crippling the unions, rolling back FDR’s social-welfare net, enriching both the Pentagon and corporate interests, selling arms to Israel to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras, and invading Grenada. But “this is not a political biography”, as Ron tells us up front, but a deftly written, honestly ambivalent yet ultimately loving attempt to unpick the puzzle that every father-son relationship embodies, whether your da is a boozing shoe salesman or 40th president of the United States.
Anthony Glavin is a Boston-born novelist and short-story writer who lives in Ireland. He is included in New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O'Connor and recently published by Faber
