Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Ronald Reagan 2016

Shows there was much more to reagan than the usual stereotypes are loaded by both democrats and republicans. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming jacob weisberg. [applause] thank you, bradley, for that kind introduction. I just want to say i love the bookstore, not just because i do think it helped of my last book on the bestseller list, but bradley and lisa have done an amazing job. Its one of the best independent bookstores in the country. You are lucky to have it here in washington and im lucky to be speaking here tonight. This book, it is a short book. I consider that a virtue although some biographies are often considered a virtue to be as long as possible. I had to take the opposite approach. This is really an exercise in distillation, internet figure what is essential in the Ronald Reagan story but also along the way try to take on some of these myths. The armistice on the left about reagan that i think its a myth he was a dunderhead. To our myths on the right about reagan. I think elizabeth he was always a man of principle and didnt end and didnt negotiate. Reagan was much more of a pragmatist and improviser that i think people if you were to the version of him represented in, say, a republican president ial debate. The reality is very different. I thought id talk a little bit about some of the things that i found really interesting that i learned doing this book, and parts of the story that maybe people havent paid quite as much attention to that i think a really interesting and important. The first thing i wanted to talk about his reagans childhood. Reagan wrote about his childhood, the first place he wrote about it in any detail is when he wrote an autobiography in 1964, a book called wheres the rest of the, which he wrote when he was moving from his career in hollywood to running for governor in california and he wanted to explain why he moved from the left to the right. In the process he told his life story. He writes about growing up in the small towns in downstate in western illinois and iowa, and paints this idyllic picture. He calls it a huck finn, tom sawyer idol. He didnt necessarily get the kind of darker side of huck finn. He describes sort of thing out in the woods in the beautiful prairie setting an ice skates on the river, it would freeze over in the winter and you could hold your code up and the wind would carry you down the river on ice skates. He describes the small town community, this neighborly life, 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 delicious thing called oatmeal made which is basically oatmeal and meet. You think what a happy childhood. Then you hear about his brother recounting the same events. It is brothers olduvai couple of years and neil says dad was a terrible alcoholic. We went from town to town. By the time reagan was 10 he had lived in 10 different houses. They went to chicago at one point what his dad got a job. His dad got arrested for public drunkenness. They had to lay chicago. They were kind of being driven from pillar to post because of his fathers alcoholism. Oatmeal needed was a thing, trying once said i never want to taste that they can. It was like something you need if you cant afford anything else. Basically oatmeal and meet and maybe put some salt into. Teacher barely alive. They would go to the butcher and sake do you have any oliver . Liver wasnt considered a great food to eat event. Do you have any live or left over for the cat . They would make dinner out of it. A totally different perspective on how they grew up. Reagan told these anecdotes again and again, his favorite, one of his favorite stories which im sure youve all heard is about the parents who take their two sons to the psychiatrist because the one son is such an optimist and the other some such a pessimist but the psychiatrist takes the pessimistic side into a room filled with toys, and the pessimistic census, theyre just going to break anyway. And he takes the optimistic side into a room filled with horse crap, and the kid gets out of shovel and started taking. The psychiatrist is what are you doing . The kids is with all this horse crap in your theres got to be a pony somewhere. Its reagan and his brother. One was the optimist and the other was a pessimist. At some level you say this is just congenital. This is his view of the world. Thats true to some extent. Reagan was by nature an optimist, but they had to figure out how to preserve that optimism in these really tough circumstances where he was going out. At one point his father left the family for a mistress in another town. That parents never ended up splitting a. They got back together but this was a tough top, pour childhood that went into a depression era, we just didnt have enough to keep body and soul together. What i think reagan did, and this is a bit of a psychological theory that explains some of his behavior, but to be an optimist, having this kind of life, he learned to tune things out. He learned to not see things that were unpleasant to him that made it hard to maintain that he was not having a happy childhood. He would choose not to do certain things. He was a very isolated kid. He didnt have a lot of friends partly because he is being dragged from place to place them would have to make new friends everyday. He loved being by himself. He loved being alone. But this thing about not hearing things he didnt want to hear and not seeing things he did want to see was also physiological. When he was 13, he loved sports, he loved playing football your he wanted to play baseball but he couldnt play baseball because he couldnt see the ball. He only discovered this when it was 13 and he was driving somewhere and he tried on his mothers classes and he said, its all clear now. He was sort of in this visual blog forceful childhood. Then theres these interesting things he writes in that first book. He hated wearing his glasses. Arpeople always say hes a vain hollywood actor. No, he just kind of prefer things a little blurry. And likewise with his hearing, when he was on some of the first movies he made in hollywood when he got there in the late 1930 1930s, the movies to which place this heroic fbi agent, he breaks the smuggling rings and counterfeiters. In one of them someone fired up like a gun right next to his ear, basically left him deaf in one you. I dont know if his hearing was that good before the. All of the physiological problems got worse over time. His hearing got worse. His eyesight got worse but also think this was really, really functional behavior because through his life when there were things that he preferred not to deal with, because they were unhappy or unpleasant or involve conflict or in politics in bald contradictions that he did want to deal with, he had this way of tuning out and letting it be someone elses problem. Letting it be someone elses issue. You see this in his family life. His daughter patti theyr theiry difficult relationship with nancy, her mother, and claimed nancy deter. Reagan just did what to do with it. He just tuned it out and its not that different from what happens in 1981 when David Stockman comes to him and says, look, you can have the defense build up, you can have the tax cuts or you can get rid of the deficit but you can do all three because the numbers dont add up. And stockman described his frustration in not getting reagan to be able to understand that these things are were contradictory. I dont think reagan didnt understand it that he didnt have a solution to it, and the path of least resistance was to allow the deficit to grow at a not fully engage in the problem and leave it to aides. So i think he learned through life and to his political career that tuning out was functional behavior, and an effective political technique for him. I think people often, when they would see the way he would distance himself and not engage and tune out, they would think hes clueless, hes out of the. The great poignancy of this is at some point alzheimers kicks in, and theres been an interesting debate, first acknowledged he had alzheimers several years after leaving the white house when he wrote this moving letter to the country in 1994 about when alzheimers started to have an effect. Is actually had delicious fight going on between bill oreilly and george will about it. George will says well oreilly says he has libeled reagan i think alzheimers was affecting him earlier in his presidency. In fact, i look at the oreilly book. He doesnt say what george will accuses him of saying which was about the assassination attempt and recover from that sort of kick started his alzheimers. He said it had a big physical effect on in which everyone around Ronald Reagan did, to reagan was slower, his hearing was worse, his recognition of people was worse after he was shot. I think the best evidence suggests that alzheimers will start to affect him in 1986 around the time of irancontra, around the time he was most embarrassingly unable to remember what had happened. People assumed it was convenient not remembering. I think by that point its actual not remembering. I think when the question of what did he know and when did he know it became a sort of conundrum because he didnt know what he did at that point. With alzheimers thousands to offer relatively earlier stages and it could days and bad days and he had days when you could see him and think that guy is out of it, and he had days when you could save and think he was at the same person he was 10 years before and it wasnt affecting about all. But at some point as far which is always in a certain sense cultivated became a real fog. I find almost poetry in that, that he sort of drifted away into this fogginess he created himself. Under the aspect of reagans earlier career that i think is really, really understudied is this period in the 1950s when he moved from the left to the right. Household reagan grew up was new household. He was a liberal democrat. He was an anticommunist, a liberal anticommunist by the campaign for truman, and he voted for truman in 1952. In 1954 he was still, if you asked him what his views were, they would say a liberal democrat. 1962, eight years later, he is so conservative that your electric which had been employed him as a spokesman said we cant have this guy a round. Hes embarrassing us. The adopted this view that basically liberalism was just a shortstop on the way to socialism, that there was a continuum between democratic liberalism and communism and we were sliding down the slippery slope. Part of it came out of the height book served in which he read a which influenced him. What happened in those eight years . Thats a huge gap from truman democrat to goldwater conservative. Its almost a blank period in reagans life because everything before that is his hollywood crew which is incredibly well documented, document the way a Hollywood Star fly this document. There are pictures of authority went. Everything he wrote was writing in celebrity magazine at the time, things written about him. Once you into politics everything is documented dispute when he moved from left to right is like a hole. What he did during those years as he went to work for General Electric. He was the host of ge theater which was this Weekly Television show where they would do a plans would have one week of drama, one week of comity, different actors. Were the First Television shows that got film was same actress to appear on television. He hosted and introduced a. Some weeks he would act in a. There was a great one when he acts opposite james dean. Man, hes going to be a big star. He also was kind of traveling spokesman for General Electric General Electric a huge company had factories all over the country making different kinds of appliances, giant turbines, like bolts come everything from consumer appliances to huge industrial appliances. Reagan would go around to these factories and facilities and he would speak to all the workers. He was department because he was a celebrity and they wanted him representing the company but is also supposed to be the face of ge and he was representing ge management and ges view of the world. When you start to look at what they ge view of the world was at that point, its an amazing match for what reagan ended up thinking by the latter part of that period. So very opposed to government regulation, why is government interfering in our business, very opposed to taxation and higher taxes, these taxes are killing us. What is government doing to support the Business Climate the reagan started using discovery talked about the Business Climate which is a ge for it. The guy who was ahead of Public Affairs coined this phrase which people use all the time. The view of the world he really represented was this 1950s corporate but which was very specifically ges view and the view that ge water to propound to its workers. I dont think reagan took this on cynically or thought he was being a propagandist for ge. He was a big reader but i think a lot of the reading was coming through General Electric. He was reading a lot of the literature from the early conservative movement at that time. He was a charter subscriber to william f. Buckleys national review. He read Whittaker Chambers witness which was an incredibly influential book on the right. He almost memorized that book. He read hayek and i think these books, having all of his connection to ge corporate world really influenced him. And took them so far that by the end of that period he sort of has the view that government can do no good, and business can do no ill. It was really a blind spot i think you could say for the remainder of his career. He was sort of incapable of believing that government can be effective outside of National Defense and maybe a few other functions. He never thinks business does anything wrong. He sort of doesnt, thats not part of his vocabulary to think that this is could be abusive or coercive or monopolistic. Hes always defending the prerogatives of big business. Its really hard to doubt that a. I went to the Reagan Library and a file on the ge years has like 30 pages into. Theres not a single surviving copy of the speech a recording that anybody has found that any of these hundreds if not thousands of speeches he gave on factory floors in the ge facility. The are some speeches he gave at the period, some correspondence, some bits and pieces but its almost like detective work to try to put together this gap in his crib with us or think is central to everything because its not only were his views emerge but his views formed the core of the modern conservative movement and defied the conservative era that began with his election in 1980, this collection of where it all came from in something pretty important. May be just as a last bit and then we can open it up for questions, but just to talk about reagans role at the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism which is also very contested and very interesting ground. What i went out to the Reagan Library the best thing i did was they said after id been there a few days, they said, the librarian was very nice, and have that many visitors and the president ial lifers and have a lot of staff who are super helpful, would you like to see the stuff in reagans desk . I said sure. Whats that . She said his desk, a boxed up all the stuff and you can request permission to look inside the box of what he had in his desk. It turned out its not exactly clear which desk at which time it was all in but im pretty sure it was the stuff that was in his desk in his home in Pacific Palisades that he took with him to the governors mentioned in sacramento, and then ultimately to the white house and had in his desk in the white house. When he left the white house do was put in boxes like old desk diaries like this stuff you have that stays in your desk. So theres a kind of poignant, iconic quality. What are these things he held onto . There are a few speeches and some are speeches he heard before but some of these were speeches he kept in his desk. Theres one thing he had written in 1962 which have never been published. It was a kind of essay hed written. He was writing at the time essays. He wasnt doing his radio commentaries yet but he wrote about. He probably wrote every day of his life and he was a good writer. He wrote for the human voice. He wrote as someone who develop his the early career on radio. He was always writing this will essays and commentaries. And this one in 1962 he says, you know, its possible that communism will take over and it will end in nuclear war and conflict. But i think its more likely that communism, soviet union will just collapse. Because, he said, communism isnt even a political system our economic system. Its just a form of insanity. He said its a violation of human nature that doesnt make any sense. Nobody would want to live like that. Its been this essay. Its an interesting view. People on the right didnt think that been. They didnt think communism was going to collapse but it was sort of reagan appointed commonsense perspective on anything, on everything that communism. He says it doesnt make sense for people to live like that. No one would tolerate it. If they knew how we lived they wouldnt stand for it. He had this colonel of an idea that he held onto and defied repeated in various forms when you start to do these really interesting radio commentaries in the late 1970s which was a place he really developed his political ideas between his losing campaign for president in 1976 when he challenged gerald ford and his Winning Campaign in 1980. That eccentric if you matched up with some other eccentric views he had. You find also reading these commentaries rating hated Nuclear Weapons. He had been a pacifist. He called himself a pacifist in the 1930s. Partly his early involvement in the theater. He went to see when he was very young like 19 years old this point journeys and which is the point about the First World War british play thats kind of a pacifist play, about the waste of the First World War and the trench warfare and these young men dying pointlessly. Had huge impact on. The other thing that had huge impact on him was when he was in the Second World War making training films in hollywood, but at a military base. The base was sent these early films of the liberation the liberation of auschwitz. He claimed he was one of the people who liberated auschwitz. He never said anything like that. That kind of