EARLY REAGAN
Anne Edwards
New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987
572 pp., $21.95
Despite having been in the public eye as an actor and politician for almost fifty years, Ronald Reagan is still not clearly understood by many Americans. Much of the misunderstanding is due to the partisan rhetoric of political opponents who have promoted the false image of Reagan as a second-rate cowboy actor too dumb and too conservative to be governor of California or president of the United States. This myth persists in more liberal parts of the United States and in much of Western Europe, which does not know, for example, that just before Pearl Harbor, Reagan was a rising Hollywood star, or that as six-time president of the Screen Actors Guild, he guided his union through some of the most complex and controversial labor-management bargaining in the post-World War II years.
I well remember my first meeting with Reagan in 1965, when he was contemplating running for the Republican nomination for governor of California. For two days, I accompanied the unannounced candidate around Los Angeles as he addressed a variety of civic and political meetings. Tall, tanned, and blue-eyed, Reagan held every audience in the palm of his hand. There was a palpable star presence about him that made the eyes of his listeners, especially the women, shine. I was impressed by his charisma, but still wanted to know what lay beneath that very charming exterior.
Toward the end of the second day, we drove up to his hilltop home in the Pacific Palisades, where Nancy Reagan made iced tea. It was there I discovered his library and realized that Ronald Reagan was far more than handsome actor with a marvelously resonant voice. He had hundreds of books about politics, economics, and history, many of them dogeared and well-worn. I later learned from Earl Dunkel, who accompanied Reagan for several years when he was speaking for General Electric all over the country, that the actor was a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines who wrote his own speeches, for which he received two Freedom Foundation awards.
But opposition politicians like Gov. Pat Brown of California persisted in their characterization of Reagan as "the crown prince of the extreme right" and, like Barry Goldwater, a "spokesman for a harsh philosophy of doom and darkness." Brown made these comments in June 1966, after he narrowly won the Democratic primary and Reagan scored a smashing victory over former Mayor George Christopher of San Francisco in the Republican primary. Casting about for reasons to explain his poor showing and Reagan's sweeping win, Brown asserted that there was a white backlash in California. Exhibiting a quick wit well known to his Hollywood friends, Reagan declared that he would not want to be the beneficiary of such a vote and riposted; "I think what took place yesterday was a Brown backlash."
Politicians and other citizens no longer have any excuse to misunderstand or mislabel Ronald Reagan with the publication of Anne Edwards' exhaustively researched biography of the president's first fifty-five years, Early Reagan. A longtime inhabitant of Hollywood, former president of the Screen Writers Guild, and biographer of such stars as Vivian Leigh and Katharine Hepburn, as well as Queen Mary of Great Britain, Edwards points
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