The pieces for the magazine, the Financial Times in vanity fair and years as the editor and chairman. That didnt keep him from approaching the subject. It shows much more than the stereotypes for democrats and republicans, so ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming jake. [applause] it did put my best book on the bestseller list. Bradley and eat less i have done a good job with it and its one of the best independent bookstores in the country and you are lucky to have it here and im lucky to be speaking here tonight. The biographies are often a virtue as long as possible. I would take the opposite approach. This is an exercise in trying to figure out what is central in the story and also a longer way to take long the way to take on some of the methods on the left. Reagan was much more of a pragmatist and improviser then i think people if you hear the version of him to hear the president ial debate at least the reality. One of the things i found interesting and one of the things people havent paid quite as much attention to that are interesting and important and the first thing i want to talk about his childhood. The thirdplace he wrote about it is when he wrote an autobiography and 64 which he wrote in his career in hollywood and he wanted to explain why he moved from the left to the right. And in the processes were crippled his life story and he writes about growing up in the small towns in downstate and western illinois and paints a picture he calls it a fox in tom sawyer idol. He didnt necessarily get the darker side that he describes being out in the woods in the beautiful prairie setting in the river that would freeze over and you could put your coat on and it would carry you down the river on ice skates and he describes the community, this neighborly wife and he loved everything about it. We didnt have a lot of money but we had a warm family life. My mother would make this wonderful oatmeal and you would read this and think of what a childhood. Then his brother who is older by a couple of years. He says that was a terrible alcoholic. He lived in ten different houses his dad got arrested for public drunkenness, they had to leave chicago and they were being driven from pillar to post because of his fathers alcoholism. He said i never want to taste it again. Basically oatmeal and meet and maybe put some salt in it. They would say do you have any litter its something that isnt considered a great food to eat if you have any left over and they would take that home so a totally different perspective on how they grew up. So they are told these anecdotes again and again. One of his favorite stories, which im sure that you have heard is about the parents that take their sons to the psychiatrist because the sun is such an optimist and the other is a pessimist and a psychiatrist takes the optimistic side, the pessimistic side to a room filled with toys and the pessimistic son says lets get a break anyway. So they go to a room filled with horse crap and the kid gets out a shovel and starts digging and he says what are you doing . There has to be a pony in here somewhere. The one with the optimist and the other was a pessimist. And at some level you say this is just come genital, this is the view of the world and that is true to some extent. He was an optimist. But he had to figure out how to preserve that optimism. Its tough circumstances where he was growing up. His family left for family leftparen family left for a mistress in another town and they never ended up splitting up, they got back together but this was a tough and poor childhood friend into the depression era when they didnt have enough to keep them together. This explains some of his behavior but to be an optimist having this kind of life and he learned to tune things out. He learned to not see things that were unpleasant to him that made it hard for him to maintain he was having a happy childhood. So we choose not to hear certain things you can didnt have a lot of friends partly because he was being dragged from place to place and he would have to make new friends every year. He made a positive. The thing about not hearing things he didnt want to hear and not seeing things he didnt want to see was also physiological. When he was 13yearsold, he loved sports and playing football. He wanted to play baseball but he couldnt see the ball. He only discovered it when he was 13 and he tried on his mothers glasses and said its all clear now said he was sort of in a visual fault for his will childhood about people who said he is an actor that hates wearing his glasses that he just preferred things a little blurry and likewise with his hearing when he was on some of the first movies he made in hollywood in the late 1930s when the movies he plays this euro but fbi agent that breaks up smuggling rings and counterfeiters and then one of them somebody fired a gun right next to his ear and basically left him deaf in one ear and i dont know if it was good before then. All the problems got worse over time. Through his life when there were things he preferred not to deal with because they were unhappy or unpleasant or involved conflict or in the politics involved contradictions he had this way of tuning it out and letting it be someone elses problem. His daughter had a very difficult relationship with her mother and reagan just didnt want to deal with it. He tuned it out. Its not that different from what happens when David Stockman comes to him and says look, you can have the defense buildup and the tax cuts or you can get rid of the deficit but you cant do all three because the numbers dont add up and he describes this frustration not getting reagan to understand these things are contradictory. I dont think he didnt understand it but he didnt have a solution to it and the path of least resistance was to allow it to grow and not fully engage in the problem so i think that he learned through his life in his political career that tuning out was functional behavior and i think people often when they would see the way that he would distance himself and not engage the would think he is clueless but of course at some point, alzheimers kicks in and theres been an interesting debate for several years since after he wrote this moving letter to the country about when it started to have an effect. They send this book by saying that it was affecting him earlier in his presidency. In fact, i looked at the books and he doesnt say what he accuses her, saying such is the recovery from that had a big physical effect which everybody said it did, that he was just slower and the recognition of words after he was shocked but i think the best evidence suggests that alzheimers really started to affect him in 1986 around the time of the iran contra when he was unable to remember what happened in the people assumed that it was convenient. I think by that point it was actual not remembering. The question of what did he know and when did he know it became a sort of conundrum because he didnt know what he knew at that point and with alzheimers those are still relatively early stages and he had good days and bad days when you could see him and think hes out of it and then he had days when you could see him and think he was the same person he was ten years before and it wasnt affecting him at all, but at some point its always sort of cultivated, and i find out debate could almost a poetry in that that he drifted away into this fogginess that he created himself. Another aspect in the career that i think is under study is a period in the 1950s when he moved from the left to the right they were fdr supporters even after he moved to the right. He voted for truman in 1952 and 1954 she he asked what their views were. Eight years later, he is so conservative that General Electric said we cant have him around. Hes embarrassing us. And he adopted this view is basically liberalism was a shortstop on the way to socialism and there was a continuing between the democratic liberalism and communism and we were sliding down the slope. Part of it influenced him but what happened in the eight years that is a huge gap from truman democrat to goldwater conservative and its almost a plain period in his life as everything before that is a hollywood career which is well documented. Hes covered as a celebrity theres pictures everywhere he went and was writing in celebrity magazines. Once he goes into politics everything is documented. Its like a whole but he did e d during those days as went to work for General Electric he was the host of the theater which was a Weekly Television show where they would have one week of drama and comedy and it was one of the first bit of a famous film actor to appear on television and he hosted it and theres a great one he acts off of james dean. But he also was a traveling spokesman for general electorate which had factories all over the country making different appliances, giant turbines, light bulbs, everything from consumer appliances to huge industrial compliances. He would go around to all these factory facilities and speak to all the workers. He was there partly because he was a celebrity and they didnt want him representing the country but he was also the phase of ge and he was kind of representing the management and the view of the world. And when you start to look at what the view of the world was at that point, it was during that period so very opposed to the government regulation and why are they interfering in the business, very opposed to taxation. What are they doing to support the Business Climate and they start using this term for who was ahead of the Public Affairs and they claim this phrase everybody uses all the time and the view of the world he represented was this 1950s corporate view which was very specifically ge wanting to to propound to put down to its workers and i dont think that he took this on or thought he was being a propagandist. He was a big reader of a lot of it was coming for general electorate and he was reading through the literature and the movement at that time he was a charter subscriber to the National Review and he read Whittaker Chambers which was an influential book on the right. I think having all of this connection really influenced him it took him so hard that at the end of that period he has the view that government can do no good and business can do no well and its a blind spot for the remainder he was incapable of believing that the government could be detected outside of National Defense and a few other functions. Its not really part of this his vocabulary to think that business could be abusive or coercive or monopolistic. He is always defending the prerogative of the big business. Its hard to tap that out. The file has like 30 pages. Theres not a single surviving copy of the speech or recording anybody has found of the hundreds if not thousands of speeches he gave on factory floors at the facility. There was some correspondence into some bits and pieces but its almost like detective work to put together this gap that is central to everything because his view formed the core of the modern conservative movement and defined the era that began in 1980 this question of where it all came from ends up being pretty important. Maybe as a last bit and that last bit and then we can open up for questions to talk about the role at the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism which is contested. The best thing i did after id been there a few days the librarians came over and they dont have that many visitors. They have a butt of staff that are super helpful. She said said they boxed up all the stuff and you do you can request permission to look inside. It turned out it isnt clear which one it was in that it was the stuff that was in his home in the Pacific Palisades he took with him in sacramento and ultimately took the white house and when he left the white house it was put in boxes and it was like the stuff you have that stays in your desk so theres a kind of poignant quality but are these things he held onto and theres a few speeches. Some of them youve heard before but some of them were speeches he kept in his desk. Hed theres one he wrote in 1962 that hasnt been published. He was writing at the time if he wasnt doing the radio commentary yet its one of the surprising things and he wrote not to be read on the page but it was always writing these little essays and this one in 1962 he says its possible that communism will take over and it will end in the conflict but i think that its more likely communism will just collapse. It isnt even a political or Economic System it is a form of insanity. Its a violation of human nature people on the right didnt think about that think that is going to collapse but it was sort of applying the common sense perspective on everything. He said it doesnt made sense for people to live like that. Nobody would tolerate it. They wouldnt stand for it. He had this idea that he held onto and you find it repeated when he starts to do these interesting radio commentaries. Again in the late 1970s and the place that he developed his political ideas between the losing campaign in 1976 when he challenged gerald ford and the Winning Campaign in 1980. That view matched up with some other views he had. You find also in reading the commentaries he hated Nuclear Weapons and hed been a pacifist partly it was the early involvement and he went to see when he was very young that play journeys end which is about the First World War its kind of about the waste of the First World War and the trench warfare another thing that had a huge impact is when he was in the Second World War are making chinese films in hollywood that at the military base they were sent early films of the liberation of auschwitz. He claimed he was one of the people that liberated and he never said anything like that. But he did see in 1945 films that had a huge effect on him. Actually he remembers his father trying to make him watch this years later and you have to remember this was another thing that influenced the idea that he had that nuclear war would be unacceptable and he thought especially after he became president in the attempt that his mission was to reduce the threat of Nuclear Weapons and the conventional conservative view is that it makes the soviet union bankrupt and collapse into surrender. He was desperate for the connection in the library you can find these long handwritten letters he wrote to every soviet leader when he was president starting with bush brescia have and these letters are touching. We have the power to destroy the world but we also have the power to save the world and big piece and we have to be able to communicate and meet and talk to each other. He was reaching out to try to form a connection and he would get back these letters. They were all dying we now know one after another but they were not able unable to make any connection and he was terribly frustrated by that during the first term he is on board for that but also he is really unhappy because he thinks the world is getting more dangerous and when he finds out the soviets think the United States might attack and that we have aggressive designs on them he is shocked. How could they think that . We would ever do that. In the second term they didnt continue the strategy. He turned around completely. Second is more like a repudiation that didnt work. He didnt scare them to the bargaining table. It was radical disarmament than almost anybody on the left supported. Of course this is tied up with something of a fantasy about star wars as he thinks that he can replace a Nuclear Weapon with a nuclear shield. Hes constantly at these meetings to make them more radical proposals and at that point hes at odds with all of the people around him saying its a crazy idea that, they think it doesnt make any sense. One person supported him, the secretary of state said this is what the president wants, i think that hes right and we have to figure out if they can negotiate an agreement like this, which they were close to doing until Ronald Reagan walked out over not being able to accept the research he wanted. If they agreed that we have to do that we have to be prepared to implement it. And i think the picture that emerges in the second term goes back to this whole history that he had of being an opponent of the Nuclear Weapon and its a lot of relationships and the stories weve been told that its not exactly the same story. I think that you see in the second term in very different president and you would in the first term, not because he has gone soft in the head but hes activated it is at odds with what he was known for previously. Bbi. Fullstop there. Thank you. [applause] yes. Come to the microphone if you have any questions. I enjoyed that very much. It was a great balance for the whole life had raised a lot of questions in my mind. But most of those were at least partly answered already. The one that im not clear about is the entrance into politics or his sort of personal interest getting into politics coming from a family of somewhat dysfunctional i guess but also not a great means or anything. His father wasnt involved particularly in politics so when did he get the idea he could take part in that as opposed to having thoughts about the political ideas . I guess i will throw this in because i have the opportunity to do so. You mentioned his General Electric years ended in a situation where he felt he was too far to the right and i always thought of them as having lowered him to the right that he was kind of born of the left and was still on the left when they made an overture to take part and that he was very pleased with that at least thinking along the lines of corporate america. How did he move so quickly that mostly how did he get into politics . I think they didnt want to be perceived as being in political sites publicly so when he got too far out it was a problem. The excerpt in the book that we ran today includes the interesting question of firing him and why they hired him and in this antitrust case brought against the executives at the same time Ronald Reagan was being investigated in an antitrust case around the Screen Actors Guild and he had been called to testify before the grand jury which not many people knew about at the time but it was to risk embarrassment on that issue. Ronald reagan had his own myth about why they fired him but the evidence suggests that wasnt