Dennis Quaid and The Substance

Bad movies are very common in Dennis Quaid’s filmography, particularly recently, but it is rare for him to actually give a bad performance. When you write a great deal about acting, a question like “Is there a good actor with such a terrible filmography as Dennis Quaid?” is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night. When I’ve posed this question to colleagues over the years, some doubt my assertion that Quaid is a good actor, others that his filmography is uniquely bad, but I think any honest examination of his work will lead to the same conclusion. Let’s start with the filmography. He’s had over 110 film roles with very, very few high points. In stark contrast to other prolific actors like Nicolas Cage, Quaid hasn’t led a classic or important film, and he’s made a lot of terrible ones. Many of his films don’t even have the decency to be worth hate-watching and instead, like The Long Riders and Wyatt Earp, are merely boring. Yet he is almost always good in these films. Often, he’s the best thing about them. 

In The Day After Tomorrow, he undergirds Jack Hall, the sad dad and prophetic scientist, with real vulnerability and need. His performance as the tubercular Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp, which required a punishing physical transformation, is electrifying in its death-soaked charisma. Unfortunately for Quaid, his scene partner for much of the film is Kevin Costner, whose performance seems borderline comatose. Quaid managed to make another epic during this period, 1983’s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman. The film, originally a box-office flop, now a beloved and influential classic, chronicles the true story of the first Americans in space. Quaid is again not the film’s focus; instead, he plays Gordon Cooper, an Air Force test pilot whose nickname (Hot Dog) tells you a lot about him. Hot Dog is filled with the same yearnings, ambitions, and rage as Mike from Breaking Away. 

After The Right Stuff, Quaid began racking up leading roles. He starred in three sci-fi films: Dreamscape, Enemy Mine, and Innerspace. The latter, which co-starred Martin Short and Meg Ryan, remains surprisingly charming. In it, Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton, a down-on-his-luck Air Force test pilot. The Rookie is a sentimental, sun-dappled story of a man who, in early middle age, makes a long-shot attempt to pitch in Major League Baseball. This Disney film would not work were it not for Quaid’s world-weary turn as Jim Morris. He eschews the kind of big, star-centered performance he could have given and instead embodies Jim Morris as a real man with real struggles, working his ass off to make his dream come true. Quaid doesn’t flash that typical smile once in Flesh and Bone. Instead, he plays the damaged Arlis Sweeney, a drifter who stocks vending machines in rural Texas. Arlis is a decaying isotope of a man, the leftovers of a childhood spent with his criminal father Roy (James Caan) and, as a result, being witness to a horrible crime. Instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve, he keeps everything inside. Instead of ambition, he has stasis. 

Quaid was a bigger than life character as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire (1989), whom he impersonated really well. Alongside, Quaid has done stellar work in supporting roles. He’s excellent in Far From Heaven, Postcards From the Edge, and Traffic. In the satirical body-horror film The Substance, he's playing an ogre of a TV executive named, unsubtly, Harvey. Quaid’s performance in The Substance is at once subtle and also so over the top it breaks the surly bonds of earth. But it is, again, exactly the right style of performance for this film. It’s that sense of fitting a genre that makes Quaid such a good actor. Put him in a blockbuster as a cardboard-cutout dad devoted to finding his kids, and he’ll make him believable. Want him to play a psychic who solves people’s issues by going into their dreams? As Dreamscape proved, he can do that too. He can be the divorced dad in a wholesome kids movie like The Parent Trap or the uptight reverend in Footloose. 

Whether playing the GOP president Ronald Reagan or a sleazebag TV mogul in The Substance, he adapts himself to the project, never signaling to the audience that he thinks the work is beneath him. The vast gulf between his dedication and his judgment has resulted in a remarkably varied body of work, one that has very few good movies but even fewer bad performances. Perhaps this is why we like Quaid so much, even if getting to enjoy his acting means watching films that make us want to die: He does the work. That is the job of most actors—to do a good job day in and day out, regardless of the project. That is what it means to be a professional, rather than a star. A professional spends their life working in a largely interpretive art form in an industry that rarely grants them much control over the final product. Few of them win awards. Many of them, like Quaid, wind up in a lot of crap. But there is beauty to be found in the work of artists who always show up, even, or maybe especially, when the project doesn’t deserve it.

We’ve all dreamt, at one time or another, of being better versions of ourselves. But the notion of relentless self-improvement is something filmmaker Coralie Fargeat pushes to the extreme in her new feminist film The Substance. A bone-chilling body horror that’ll make even Cronenberg disciples squirm, it stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque, ex-Hollywood movie star who’s made to believe that she’s aged out of the industry by a slimy executive, pointedly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Shaken by her careless discardment and more self-conscious than ever, Elisabeth is drawn in by a mysterious advert for The Substance, a fluoro-green fluid that, if taken correctly, will produce ​“a better you.” A younger, more beautiful you. 

Enter Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, a younger doppelganger who promptly replaces Elisabeth as the face of the hugely popular televised exercise class she once taught and embodies every facet of her life – with only the halo of youth as her shield. Fargeat makes the horror of insecurity tangible, blowing it up into a living, breathing monster. Because injecting The Substance comes at a cost: Sue and Elisabeth can only swap roles for two weeks at a time. And increasingly, Elisabeth and Sue are at odds, battling for dominance and power. 

Whereas Elisabeth clearly loathed Harvey, shallow Sue seems flattered by his leering attentions and adulation. And although the faceless suits at The Substance HQ repeatedly instruct Elisabeth to work with Sue rather than against her, that’s easier said than done when you’re literally being ripped apart from the inside out. Self-inflicted violence, ultimately, sits at the very heart of The Substance. But Fargeat has brought it to life as a bitingly satirical, absurdly funny, nauseatingly gory (we can’t emphasise that enough) film version. Coralie Fargeat said in the Q&A at Toronto International Film Festival that she was influenced by Requiem for a Dream and Cronenberg's body horror.

"I love genre films that allow you to dive into an alternate reality that’s so far from the real world, where the rules can be whatever you want them to be. There’s also Robocop by Verhoeven or Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. I’m interested in societal violence and how that gives way to horror. I think that’s what generates real horror–society. The fear of invasion. That’s what I relate to most strongly." And her advice to actresses Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley was: "I hope that we can feel at ease in our bodies the way we want. I hope we feel empowered to feel sexy or not to feel sexy, that we don’t feel judged, that we feel free. But In The Substance, when the characters finally like themselves, is when both become a monster. So here's a huge tongue-in-cheek element to their story, and I think that is very key to the point of the film.” Source: slate.com

USA's economy is bigger than ever

America is a big country blessed with vast energy resources. The shale-oil revolution has driven perhaps a tenth of its economic growth since the early 2000s. The enormous size of its consumer and capital markets means that a good idea dreamt up in Michigan can make it big across America’s 49 other states. Yet good policy has been important, too. America has long married light-touch regulation with speedy and generous spending when a crisis hits. Although supersized stimulus during the pandemic fuelled inflation, it has also ensured that America has grown by 10% since 2020, three times the pace of the rest of the G7. By contrast, Germany is mired in recession for a second consecutive year. Just the fact that California alone is the world 5th biggest economy is a good indicator of how far ahead the US is. 

Another factor is USA’s dynamic private sector drawing in immigrants, ideas and investment, begetting more dynamism. It is home not just to the world’s biggest rocket-launch industry, but also its internet giants and best artificial-intelligence startups. Its seven big tech firms are together worth more than the stockmarkets of Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan combined; Amazon alone spends more on research and development than all of British business. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, meanwhile, investors have a keen appetite for American debt. They flock to Treasuries in times of crisis, letting the government dole out vast stimulus packages. So far, USA’s worsening politics have had little visible effect on the economy. Yet the economy is not immune from politics and as a country USA has grown more and more divided in recent times. 

There’s no reason that Europe can’t equal the US in terms of development. All they have to do is CTRL-C and CTRL-V US constitution, laws, and regulations and it could equal out. The problem is that Europe will never want to do this. The culture in Europe is very deeply programmed to support a privileged aristocracy. That’s why a common thread among European cultures is negativity and pessimism. If the future will always be worse, why try to change things? Even ignoring its assets, the United States ranks above its peers. The only country where the median person has more income than in the US, after adjusting for taxes and government transfers like healthcare and pensions, is Luxembourg. Among all the developed economies, the US has some of the highest levels of disposable household income and relatively low costs for necessities. If a citizen movde to Canada to do the same job as in the US, they would earn maybe 70% of what their job would earn them in the US while dealing with substantially higher housing and other costs in both relative and real terms. 

The US is one country with different states. The European Union is a confederation of many countries under a common set of policies. In the US there is one currency, one military, a sense of being an American first and a Texan/Californian second. Nobody questions how much money the feds give to Mississippi (because of the concentration of poor Americans) or Virginia (because of many of the government jobs there). Nobody questions investing tons of money into Military research in Silicon Valley that sparked the tech revolution. But Germans resented transferring wealth to Greece and the so-called PIGS did not like being forced to cut back spending. They used to deal with fiscal issues with things like currency devaluations. Europe gets some of the benefits but not all the benefits the USA gets from the EU and to truly compete, it would need a deeper union. Also, US has way higher inheritance taxes than Europe. 1/3 of European millionaires are self-made while 2/3 of American ones are. Source: www.economist.com

The five best horror films of all time (Variety)

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques) (1955): Only in France would a man’s wife and mistress team up to do him in. But it’s what happens next that makes Henri-Georges Clouzot’s black-and-white shocker most interesting. Véra Clouzot (who was married to the director at the time) and Simone Signoret drown Paul Meurisse’s character in the tub, then dump his corpse in the school pool. Instead of being discovered there, as they’d planned, the body goes missing—and eerie, impossible things start to happen. Seconds after the twist ending plays out, a warning appears: “Don’t be diabolical,” pleads the message, instructing viewers not to spoil the surprise for others. We wouldn’t dare, other than to say what makes the movie so effective even today is that audiences don’t know what they’re watching. Is it a murder mystery? A ghost story? No wonder Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make the movie himself—but Clouzot beat him to it.

 

Rosemary's Baby (1968): By the end of the 1960s, the idea that the devil was at large in the world didn’t seem like a far-fetched notion. Roman Polanski’s brilliantly disturbing thriller is rooted in a fearful vision of pregnancy but it also winks at a society that’s warming up to court the apocalypse. It’s the most intimate movie about Satan ever made. Mia Farrow, in a Vidal Sassoon haircut that becomes a ghoulish form of death-camp chic, gives a memorable performance as Rosemary, the innocent wife of an ambitious stage actor (John Cassavetes) who supposedly makes a deal with the cult of devil worshippers next door. They will summon Satan to make Rosemary pregnant, and he’ll get the career he wants. Ruth Gordon, as the devil’s noodge who assigns herself to look after Rosemary, personifies the banality of evil, and the film generates such supreme paranoia and suspense that it stands as one of the last great pieces of classical movie-making to emerge from the New Hollywood.

 

Psycho (1960): Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film is such a landmark of cinematic horror that it’s almost hard to believe how it was greeted in 1960: as an effective but decidedly low-rent affair, a kind of sordid fun house. Sixty-four years later, there’s a reason that every detail and motif of “Psycho”—birds, drains, eyes, windshield wipers, stairway, swamp, madly shrieking violins, not to mention Mrs. Bates’ Victorian-bunned head—is nothing less than iconic. Hitchcock took his TV crew and made a trapdoor Gothic mystery of primal terror that invites us to watch ourselves watching it. In the film’s most famous scene (78 shots of agonizingly protracted living death), he pulled the plastic shower curtain out from under us so profoundly that it’s as if the movie were killing off not just Marion Crane but God himself: the sense, going forward, that anyone’s goodness would be not enough to protect them. The more you watch “Psycho,” the more you see that Anthony Perkins’ performance channels an instrospective terror for the ages.

The Exorcist (1973): William Friedkin’s film is about a twelve-year-old girl who either is suffering from a severe neurological disorder or perhaps has been possessed by an evil spirit. Friedkin has the answers; the problem is that we doubt he believes them. We don’t necessarily believe them ourselves, but that hardly matters during the film’s two hours. If movies are, among other things, opportunities for escapism, then “The Exorcist” is one of the most powerful ever made. Our objections, our questions, occur in an intellectual context after the movie has ended. “The Exorcist” is one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious artistic efforts in the same direction as Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying. The evil feels extreme to the viewer at times, but also it feels always believable. In this day and age, would you trust the Catholic Church to fix it?

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): Very few horror movies possess the quality of a true nightmare — that transcendently scary bad dream you can’t wake up from, because it feels like it’s really happening. Yet as more and more people have analyzed it, most critics and film buffs agree that “Texas Chain Saw” turned out to be a true masterpiece of terror. Tobe Hooper directed it with a lyrical suspense worthy of an existential grindhouse Hitchcock. He took the story of five post-hippie teenagers driving a van through the Texas wilds and turned it into a plunge into the American abyss. The film’s central image is that of a mentally arrested mute named Leatherface, who wears a mask of human skin and wields a power tool that metes out torture and death. He’s the granddaddy of the slasher genre’s masked killers (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger), but those all operated out of rage. Leatherface was driven by something else—he was a butcher, going on a rampage that seemed to act out something larger than mere homicide. You could call it the slaughter of human empathy. 

And there’s another reason “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” has cast such a shadow over the last half-century of horror films. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” it created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. The film channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what “Chain Saw” revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Heading out West, Ronald Reagan was joining one of the largest population migrations in American history. Between 1935 and 1938, roughly a quarter of a million people fleeing drought and dust would pack up all their belongings and relocate to California. But, unlike the destitute and desperate Okies, Reagan was joining one of the most influential, fabled industries in the entire country—and one of the few to stage an economic rebound by the late 1930s. The movie studios had been battered by the Great Depression but had recovered faster than most other sectors. By 1936, average weekly attendance was up to eighty-eight million people a week, a new high, as moviegoers flocked to these “dream palaces” to escape the misery of their lives. By 1939, the nation had more theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and Hollywood was producing 80 percent of all motion pictures in the world. Louis B. Mayer—head of the most successful studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—was the highest-paid executive in the country, with an annual salary of $1.3 million. This era would later be acclaimed as the Golden Age of Hollywood, with 1939 dubbed the “Greatest Year in Motion Pictures.” Even movies that seemed to have nothing to do with the Depression offered much-needed psychological balm to audiences of the 1930s. As noted by cultural critic Morris Dickstein, The Wizard of Oz included “plaintive longing for something better, that place at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” while Gone with the Wind reminded viewers that, however much adversity they faced, “tomorrow is another day.” Hollywood’s cultural cachet was immense: Tens of millions of Americans learned how they were supposed to look and behave while watching flickering images in the dark. 

Hortense Powdermaker, the first anthropologist to study the industry, wrote in 1950, “The star is not only an actor, but one of the gods or folk heroes in our society.” Yet the stars, while objects of veneration for the moviegoing masses, were, like millions of Americans in other fields, simply salaried employees. The studio bosses, who would do so much to shape American culture, were themselves outsiders who were looked down upon by the Los Angeles business elite. Because so many of them were either Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or just one generation removed from the proverbial shtetl, they were denied entry to L.A.’s country clubs and so created their own in the Hillcrest Country Club. As Neal Gabler wrote in his magisterial history An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the Hollywood Jews would help fabricate on the screen an imagined, idealized country “where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” The Warner brothers were unusual among the Hollywood moguls in backing Franklin D. Roosevelt early on, although they reverted to the Republican fold in 1936 when Alf Landon challenged FDR, and many of their pictures displayed a New Deal sensibility. Warner Brothers would be the first studio to produce an anti-Nazi picture: Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. 

But they also made frothy Busby Berkeley musicals such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, notable for their surrealism and sensuality, and exciting Errol Flynn swashbucklers, such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. In 1940 another demanding star would join the Warner Brothers roster: Bugs Bunny. Overseeing this assembly line of dreams were Harry Warner, the company’s genteel president based in New York, and his younger, more vulgar brother Jack L. Warner, the vice president and production chief in Los Angeles. The two men loathed each other. Harry once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, screaming “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” and Harry’s widow later accused Jack of driving him to an early grave in 1958 by stealing the studio out from under him. They were, in fairness, very different personalities—Harry was kind and honest, a devout Jew, and a devoted family man. He stayed married to the mother of his three children, and there was never a hint of scandal around his life. Jack, by contrast, was irreligious, foul-mouthed, and hedonistic. He wagered large amounts of money in the casinos of the French Riviera and scandalized Harry by divorcing his first wife and marrying his pregnant mistress. Reagan expected a lot of ribbing because he was the new kid on the set, but he was pleasantly surprised to find what he imagined to be a supportive, small-town-like atmosphere. He wrote that “everyone has been helpful and friendly and I have yet to encounter the slightest trace of ill-will or jealousy among my fellow workers.” 

Dick Powell had wished luck to him on his first day on the Warners lot. Reagan was in awe not just of Hollywood but of the whole city of Los Angeles. It was already the nation’s fifth-largest metropolis, with more than 1.5 million residents, and growing fast. The architecture was a dizzying hodgepodge of styles very different from Dixon, Des Moines, or any other city. Middle-class residents lived in modest stucco bungalows or low-rise apartment houses, while movie stars, noted the journalist Margaret Talbot, built “imitation French chateaux, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas, columned replicas of stately plantation homes, Moorish castles with pointed arches.” Added to the air of unreality—many observers remarked that parts of Los Angeles looked like a movie set—some stores and restaurants were built to resemble the products they were selling. The original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, for example, was constructed in the shape of a big brown derby. The soundtrack to the city was provided, Talbot observed, by the nonstop “swish-swish of sprinklers” that kept lawns green in this desert-by-the-sea. William Demarest—a fatherly figure who was known for not putting the make on female clients—was just what Jayne Wyman was looking for in an agent. 

Ronald Reagan was just what she was looking for in a husband: a consummate gentleman who would treat her respectfully. As she later said, he was someone she could truly trust. Demarest said that, from Jane’s perspective, Ronnie was “the knight on the white charger. . . the dream of true, perfect manhood.” That Reagan and Wyman were spending time together was mainly her doing. “She did the chasing, and doesn’t give a hoot who knows it,” Modern Screen magazine reported. “She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start,” Demarest confirmed. Although younger than Reagan, “she was far more worldly and experienced than he was.” They first met when she asked him to sit at her table in the Warner Brothers commissary—reportedly giving him “the full benefit of her big brown eyes.” “I liked Ronnie the first time I ever saw him,” she recalled. “‘He is no fop,’ I thought.” She tried to convince the Warner publicity department to fix them up only to be told that each of them needed to date bigger names. The romance finally blossomed when they were on location in San Diego making their first movie together in July and August 1938. 

The noted film critic Richard Schickel, in an astute appraisal of Reagan’s acting, wrote that he did “his famous line in Kings Row unimprovably—anguish and panic in his voice, in his facial expression, in his thrashing movements under the covers. Hard to ask for anything more from any actor.” Schickel added that Reagan’s shortcomings as an actor were more evident earlier in the movie, before the amputation, when his character was still “a careless womanizer and ne’er-do-well heir to a small fortune.” “At this stage of the movie Drake McHugh is not a nice guy, and Reagan is visibly uncomfortable, straining, in these passages,” Schickel noted. “He does not exhibit the born actor’s relish at playing a heel. Instead, he exhibits the born public figure’s discomfort at being mistaken for one. He has no enough technique to help him get under the character’s skin or to distract us from his own discomfort.” Being a nice guy himself, Reagan was only comfortable playing nice guys on the screen. Reagan’s inability or unwillingness to play parts far removed from his own personality would eventually help bring his Hollywood career to a premature and inglorious end. 

But in 1942 Reagan was still on the ascent in Hollywood. He received the best reviews of his career for Kings Row, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Dark Victory also was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, but, like Kings Row, did not win any. The New Yorker wrote that watching Kings Row “will give you that rare glow that comes from seeing a job done crisply, competently, and with confidence.” Reagan, the magazine added, “capably breezes through the part of the town sport who becomes a victim of Dr. Gordon.” The Des Moines Tribune was even more effusive, pronouncing that “Des Moines’ own Dutch Reagan is swell as the rich kid gone to pot.” Once it was released in 1942, Kings Row catapulted the boy from Dixon onto the Hollywood A list. By the middle of 1941, a Gallup survey ranked Reagan among the top one hundred stars in the movie industry. A 1942 survey found him tied for seventy-fourth place with Laurence Olivier, and he was receiving more fan mail than any Warner Brothers actor except Errol Flynn. Reagan, a Warner executive wrote in an internal evaluation, was “a very talented artist who had started at a meager salary of $200 per week and rapidly developed in artistic ability and box office value until he was assigned to top productions . . . and was undoubtedly a star in his own right.” Those who would in later life denigrate him as merely a B-movie actor—an accusation that would generally be accompanied by a chuckle and a mention of Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)—were not quite being fair. For one brief, shining moment, before America’s entry into the war, Reagan had become an A-list star. Then, on December 7, 1941, came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The world would never be the same again—and neither would Ronald Reagan’s acting career. 

The Reagans had genuine financial concerns, but they were far removed from those of average Americans. They had just built a seven-room, so-called dream house in the Hollywood Hills modeled on one they had seen in This Thing Called Love, a 1940 romantic comedy with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas: truly a case of life imitating art. It had a magnificent view of the city and cost $15,000—not a lot by movie-industry standards but five times more than the median American home at the time. (In 2022, the extensively remodeled house at 9137 Cordell Drive would sell for $70 million.) Wyman, a free spender in her single days, had been deeply in debt. Now Ron, a stickler for paying bills before they were due, insisted on putting them on saving half of what they earned. Taxes took another big chunk of their income: The top marginal tax rate for couples filing jointly in 1941 with an income between $90,000 and $100,000 was 83 percent. So money was not flowing with typical film-colony abandon even before Ron’s military service would cut his monthly pay from $6,660 to $250. Reagan’s answer to the question of whether the Communist party should be legal was painstakingly noncommittal: "As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the Government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter. I detest, I abhor the Communists’ philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it." 

Reagan’s performance earned rave reviews. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,” wrote a liberal columnist, Quentin Reynolds, adding, presciently, that the actor might “have a future beyond show business.” Ron was fascinated by politics, Jane bored by it. A glowing, but unintentionally revealing, profile in December 1946 reported Ron coming to the breakfast table eager to share the news of the world. “I’ve got news for you,” Jane pointedly replied. “I’m not interested.” The actress June Allyson, who was married to Reagan’s friend and fellow actor Dick Powell, later wrote that Jane “seemed upset with her husband’s obsession with politics”—and with his long-windedness. Don Siegel, who directed Reagan in Night unto Night, reported an even more scabrous put-down from Jane. One night, while they were all going to dinner together, Ron “spouted off endlessly” until Jane snapped at him: “Hey, ‘diarrhea-of-the-mouth,’ shut up! Maybe we can get in a word edgewise.” But, Siegel wrote, “Ron continued soliloquizing.” Shortly after the dour dinner with Ron on the Sunset Strip, Jane decided to head off for a vacation in New York—by herself. While there, she was tracked down by a gossip columnist. She told him that she was considering a separation from her husband: “There is no use in lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world.” At around the same time, she told a friend, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.” 

And it was true that Jane Wyman had trouble staying married. Having been married twice before, after divorcing Reagan she twice married and twice divorced the same man: a handsome studio composer and bandleader named Frederick Karger. After her second divorce from Karger in 1965, Wyman stayed single for the final forty-two years of her life. “Some women just aren’t the marrying kind—or anyway, not the permanently marrying kind,” she later said, “and I’m one of them.” “What they do to food is what we did to the American Indian,” Reagan wrote in a jocular letter of complaint to Jack Warner during his stay in London filming The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal. “The average meal should go from ‘kitchen to can’ thus avoiding the use of a middleman.” The actresses he was seen with included Betty Underwood (said by a magazine to have “one of the six best figures in America”), Doris Day, Ann Sothern, Monica Lewis, Adele Jergens, Rhonda Fleming, and Ruth Roman. Edmund Morris later counted “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses” that he dated during this period. One of the few non-actresses he went out with was the witty gossip columnist Doris Lilly, who in 1951 published How to Marry a Millionaire, which became a hit movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and who would be cited as the model for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Many years later Lilly described Reagan as “truly the all-American boy, never a lothario,” and not a “come-on-strong type of man.” “He behaved himself beautifully,” she said. 

Piper Laurie: As filming progressed, Ronnie Reagan took an increasing interest in me. He began calling me into his dressing room when I passed the door. I was quite flattered by his attention. He’d invite me to sit down and ask how I was feeling about everything. Was I comfortable? Could he help me with anything? He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, and sometimes he asked me to just sit there while he did guild work and I studied my script. Occasionally he would step into my dressing room, sit down, and chat. I was very shy at first but gradually our relationship seemed more like one I’d have with someone in my acting class. He was becoming quite a friend and was sympathetic about my frustrations with the script. He drove up the hill on one of the small streets off the Sunset Strip and parked in the carport behind the apartment he’d been living in since his divorce. We went up the back way very discreetly and into his apartment. I made a decision, when I said, “Yes, I’d like that very much,” that this would be my first love affair. When I thought about it later, I knew the reality was, I had picked him. And he gave me a beautiful pearl necklace which looked to have cost a pretty penny. At this moment the fact of my virginity seemed irrelevant, and I didn’t want to be coy. 

I knew I wanted to make love with him. I wanted to be completed by this wonderful man who clearly desired me. He would know what to do. The evening up to that point had been quite romantic. Ronnie was more than competent sexually. He was also a bit of a show-off. He made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been “ardent.” It was forty minutes. And he told me how much the condom pack cost. In all fairness, I suppose that just was to reassure me. The experience was a stunning revelation for me, to be so physically close to someone. So amazing to look up and see the familiar face and that naked expanse of chest above me. But more than a few times during intercourse, he said, “There’s something wrong with you? You should have had many orgasms by now—after all this time. You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality.” He used that word. “Maybe a doctor can find out which is your problem. There’s something wrong with you that you should fix.” I was no stranger to orgasms, having discovered this miracle of our bodies when I was a young girl. But it had been a secret activity, and I know now that the uninitiated need a trusting environment to blossom. I suppose I should have spelled out the mortifying fact of my virginity, but even now I still expect people I admire to know more than they really do. 

Ronnie took my hand as we walked through the beautiful tree-lined side streets of Chicago around the Ambassador East Hotel. Our conversation covered a lot of territory, including what I thought about our age difference. Apparently it troubled him that I was only about nine years older than his daughter Maureen. But he said not a word about the evening we had had together. We stopped under a streetlamp. He looked at me with that nice face and those warm flirty eyes, and I let him kiss me. Then he steered the conversation to the possibility of our being together. I told him I couldn’t possibly because I was dating someone else. I had been going to the Chez Paree where I was serenaded by the handsome, glorious-voiced Vic Damone. It was an awkward moment, he looked so disappointed and hurt. I was embarrassed to be turning him down and wanted to say something kind, so when we started walking again, I said truthfully, “I’m very honored that such a respected and admired person was my first lover.” He stopped quite suddenly when I said that, almost did a double take. There was a quizzical look on his face. Was it possible he still didn’t know? Even with the colorful evidence I had left behind? Perhaps at that moment he got it—perhaps. He was very quiet as we walked back to the hotel. I wondered what he was he thinking. Whatever it was seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t try to break through. He saw me to my door and looked at me so strangely as we said goodnight.

Reagan gave amnesty to over 3 million illegal immigrants. He paid reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly interned by FDR. He pulled the US out of a long recession. He laid the groundwork for strategic missile defense. He assisted in driving the Soviet Union to collapse. He publicly called out Gorbachev leading to civil rights reforms in Russia and the Baltics. He reassured our allies and NATO that the US could and would counter the Soviet Threat. He led the charge for nuclear arms control as part of his “nuclear free world” vision. He worked well with democrats in the Congress with most of his actions receiving bipartisan support. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. So that was out of Reagan's responsability. Another false myth is that some historians have attributed the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by 220,000 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after. In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. But the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period. People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds. Back in 1980 there were only 13 billionaires in the USA. As of 1987, that number was 44. In 2024, it exceeds 700 billionaires. 

Reagan had a keen eye on who our actual enemy was and still is. He is probably spinning in his grave learning about how the GOP has turned into a party of Putin's appeasers. Reagan’s policies were right for the time, the problem was subsequent politicians not adjusting it with the times. No economic policy is meant to be kept in place forever. Monroe had an excellent tariff policy for his time; it was changed a few decades later because what worked in the 1820s didn’t make sense in the 1850s, yet that didn’t make Monroe’s tariff policy bad. When Reagan took office the national GDP was under 1 Trillion dollars. When he left, the national GDP was over 8 Trillion dollars. Democracy and capitalism swept the world. Third-world poverty began to disappear. The poverty that existed world-wide at that time no longer exists. The Soviet Union fell as a direct result of his presidency and the United States emerged soon after his time in office as the sole super-power in the world. 

Reagan rejected the notion that AIDS was a gay disease. “I don’t want Americans to think AIDS simply affects only certain groups. AIDS affects all of us. What our citizens must know is this: America faces a disease that is fatal and spreading. And this calls for urgency, not panic. It calls for compassion, not blame. And it calls for understanding, not ignorance.” He similarly rejected the moralistic finger-pointing that had characterized too much of the discussion of the disease. “Final judgment is up to God; our part is to ease the suffering and to find a cure. This is a battle against disease, not against our fellow Americans. We mustn’t allow those with the AIDS virus to suffer discrimination. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years, and including what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS. So, this is a top priority with us.” Reagan defended his policy and sent his budget to Congress, including AIDS research as a “high priority” program. In the spring of 1987 Reagan announced the creation of a special commission to study AIDS and seek a cure. “AIDS is clearly one of the most serious health problems facing the world community, and our health care establishment is working overtime to find a cure,” he said. “To think we didn’t even know we had a disease until June of 1981, when five cases appeared in California. The AIDS virus itself was discovered in 1984. The blood test became available in 1985. A treatment drug, AZT, has been brought to market in record time, and others are coming. Work on a vaccine is now underway in many laboratories.” He explained that the federal government continued to expand its budget for AIDS research. “Spending on AIDS has been one of the fastest growing parts of the budget, and, ladies and gentlemen, it deserves to be.” Washington was also removing regulatory barriers to bringing new drugs to the market. 

As both California governor and president, Reagan's overall record was not particularly conservative. California’s state budgets grew as much under Gov. Reagan as they had under his Democratic predecessor, while he also liberalized abortion and no-fault divorce, strengthened gun controls, pursued conservationist environmental measures, and increased funding for state universities by 136 percent even while attacking them as hotbeds of radicalism. Federal spending rose nearly as fast during his presidency as it had under his governorship. Boot concludes that Reagan “practiced Keynesian, not supply-side, economics by financing an economic expansion with government borrowing.” Yet right-wingers “sensed that he was on their wavelength, and they took comfort from his words while ignoring many of his deeds.” In point of fact, Reagan was a pragmatist far more than an ideologue. He understood “the difference between campaigning and governing,” as well as the importance of appealing to voters who didn’t share his conservatism. His greatest successes came when he listened to the counsels of moderate advisers, including Nancy who had the insight into people’s characters that her husband lacked. 

Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to his son Michael on the eve of his wedding, saying: “Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till 3 A.M., the wife does know, and with that knowing some of the magic of this relationship disappears. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating... But if you truly love a woman, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary, or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors."

Max Boot: I think he was a better actor than some people give him credit for, and it's kind of interesting because Reagan, in some ways, had very little ego. I mean, you criticize his policies all day long, and he wouldn't really care one way or the other, but if you criticized his acting, then he became sensitive. He was actually very proud of his role as an actor. And the skills that he learned as an actor, he began to translate into politics in the 1950s, working for General Electric. That was really the job that saved his career after his movie days were over. He became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS, and he began touring the country and began speaking to all sorts of audiences. And that's really where he learned to do a stump speech, and he was writing his own speeches. His shooting was probably the most traumatic event of his presidency, but it was also, in some ways, the most uplifting. Reagan was undoubtedly courageous and heroic in the face of this terrible adversity where he almost died, and yet he was telling Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck." And when the public heard about that, that really cemented Reagan's bond with the public, a bond that would never really be broken. Today's Republican Party has moved very far to Reagan's right. Reagan certainly would not recognize Donald Trump, because Trump is, in many ways, the anti-Reagan. So, you can't imagine two presidents more different from each other than Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, even though they were the only two U.S. presidents who ever hosted a national TV show before assuming office.

One of Reagan’s senior aides believed that without Nancy, “Ronald Reagan never would have been elected to anything.” It's necessary to credit Reagan for being unlike most ideologues of the left or right in his readiness to “abandon the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world.” What most Americans remember about Reagan today, however, are his geniality, cheerfulness, optimism, humor and ability to speak to the public’s hopes as well as fears. Perhaps his ongoing high approval ratings among Democrats as well as Republicans also stem from the fact that, “his support for immigration, free trade, and alliances are as much a quaint relic of the past as his gentlemanly demeanor, willingness to compromise, and reluctance to attack opponents by name.” Nostalgia for Reagan underscores his irrelevance to today’s brutal politics. Ronald Reagan was the leader many Americans felt they needed at a time when they were looking for national restoration, and they may seek his like again. —Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legend

Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician―America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography. In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date”. The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, small-town Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Max Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Source: amazon.com

From dusty small-town roots, to the glitter of Hollywood, and then on to commanding the world stage, REAGAN (2024) is a cinematic journey of a great man overcoming the odds. Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent who followed Reagan's ascent, REAGAN captures the indomitable spirit of the American dream. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voight.

Some big names on the entertainment circuit regularly dropped by Nancy Davis’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment. Spencer Tracy, chaperoned by Katharine Hepburn, came to visit “so often,” Nancy recalled, “that he practically became a member of the family”—and often to dry out; Walter Huston and his wife, Nan, moved in while they were starring in Dodsworth; Helen Hayes was a regular, as was Colleen Moore, Mary Martin, and Lillian Gish; Carol Channing brought Eartha Kitt. “Jimmy Cagney was always there,” Nancy recalled. Mary Martin, a longtime patient of Nancy's step-father Dr. Loyal Davis’s, was rehearsing Lute Song, a Broadway musical with Yul Brynner. There was a small part—a Chinese handmaiden—that suited Nancy’s nascent talents. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, the director disagreed. John Houseman found Nancy’s acting skills “awkward and amateurish” for a top-drawer Broadway production. “I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing,” recalled Houseman, who had been hired after Nancy joined the cast. He was told to take it up with Mary Martin. Fire Nancy Davis?—not a chance, Martin argued. Her bad back took precedence, and she wasn’t about to alienate her precious doctor by sacking his step-daughter. 

On January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis got a call from her agent, informing her that “someone from Metro” had seen one of her TV appearances and suggested she fly out to Los Angeles for a screen test. Who that “someone” might be wasn’t a mystery. On and off, she had dated Benny Thau, MGM’s collegial vice president, who was said to have employed the practice of the casting couch. Though he was short, balding, and, at fifty-one, old enough to be her father, Nancy found in Thau an enthusiastic and supportive companion. No doubt his influence in Hollywood lent her countenance an attractive glow. However, despite an embarrassment of riches invested in her test, there was no heat on the screen. George Cukor was one of Hollywood’s A-list directors—MGM’s top director—who drew remarkable performances from his female stars. The scene Cukor chose for Nancy was from East Side, West Side, a high-priority studio project. He recruited hunky Howard Keel to read opposite her. It still didn’t add up to much. Cukor knew what a star looked like when he saw one. After watching a print of the finished test, “he told the studio Nancy had no talent.” In most cases, if a tastemaker of George Cukor’s esteem delivered such a verdict, the star-making machinery would have ground to a halt. But Thau had the power to veto the director’s opinion. 

On March 2, 1949, MGM announced that the studio had given a seven-year contract to Nancy Davis at a starting salary of $300 a week. She was twenty-eight years old (dropped down to a more marketable twenty-six on the official document). One of her professional goals was snagging an eligible bachelor from among Hollywood’s leading men. Six months later, Ronald Reagan separated himself from the pack. During her Hollywood career, Nancy Davis dated many actors, including Clark Gable, Robert Stack, and Peter Lawford; she later called Gable the nicest of the stars she had met after Reagan. Dick Powell had been instrumental in securing Ronald Reagan a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Reagan later wote in his memoirs about Dick Powell, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without either of us seeing the other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick Powell ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

When Nancy Davis met Ronald Reagan on November 15, 1949, he had risen to president of the SAG. She had noticed that her name had appeared on the Hollywood blacklist. Davis sought Reagan's help to maintain her employment in Hollywood and for having her name removed from the list. Reagan informed her that she had been confused with another actress. The two began dating and their relationship was the subject of many gossip columns; one Hollywood press account described their nightclub-free times together as "the romance of a couple who have no vices."

On March 10, 1947, three days before the Academy Awards ceremony, the board of the Screen Actors Guild met in a hastily called session to resolve a thorny jurisdictional problem. Because of a newly enacted resolution that prohibited members with production interests from serving on the board, Robert Montgomery, its president, announced his resignation, along with Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Franchot Tone, and John Garfield. Replacement officers were pressed into immediate service, along with a vote to name Montgomery’s successor. George Murphy and Gene Kelly were nominated from the floor. Gene Kelly rose and placed Ronnie’s name in contention. Ronnie, as it happened, was conspicuously absent. He was attending a gathering of the American Veterans Committee, a group that linked veterans to potential employers, unaware that a consequential summit was taking place. When the vote was tabulated, the outcome was decisive. William Holden called later that night with the results. Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. The news delighted Ronnie. Whatever burden SAG had caused him, whatever turmoil in its ranks, deep down he loved the politics. He was as proud of the role he had played in the guild’s evolution as of any movie he had ever made. 

The presidency of the Screen Actors Guild gave him the soapbox from which to launch an anticommunism campaign, and a faction of his membership was ready to ride sidekick. There had always been a predominantly conservative element at the top of the guild. Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, Ronald Colman, George Murphy and Adolphe Menjou, among others, were determined to oust the leftist influence that they said corrupted Hollywood and was a threat to American ideals. They belonged as well to the Motion Picture Alliance, whose members included Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Charles Coburn, and ZaSu Pitts. The MPA’s charter made no bones about its ultimate goal. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crackpots,” it stated. “We pledge to fight any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.” The MPA set its sights on suspected sympathizers—“subversives,” as it labeled them. The Screen Actors Guild became a hotbed of infighting. On September 12, 1947, at a routine SAG board meeting, a proposal was raised that would require all SAG members to sign a loyalty oath. Ronnie felt it was self-defeating, and instead he proposed making the oath voluntary. It was passed after little debate. About the HUAC hearings, Reagan said: “It’s so simple. All you’ve got to do is just name a couple of names that have already been named.”

His divorce from Jane Wyman took Hollywood by surprise. “Such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me,” Ronnie later admitted. He had a more conventional outlook, the product of Midwestern expectations. In a town where marriage was the shakiest of propositions, the Reagan-Wyman union had seemed like a solid bet. It was almost as though the film community had a stake in its success. Friends like the Powells and the Hustons were disheartened by the news, but no one took it as badly as Ronnie. He was back in Eureka, Illinois, back as Dutch, for the weekend, visiting his old coach Ralph McKinzie and anointing the Pumpkin Festival queen, when the story broke in the local Illinois papers. It hit him, people said, “like a ton of bricks.” When he returned home, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons circled like a pair of vultures. Louella, his longtime advocate, picked at him first. No match for her meddling, Ronnie poured out his heart, unmindful that the seal of the confessional didn’t apply. Indiscreetly, he admitted that Jane had told him she still loved him but was no longer in love with him. That distinction seemed beyond his grasp. Even so, he was willing to give her plenty of space, hoping it would reignite a flame. “Right now, Jane needs very much to have a fling,” he said. “And I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.” Hedda Hopper piled on in a subsequent Modern Screen column that aired all the couple’s private affairs.

As early as 1940, with the world on the brink of war, Dick Powell had tried persuading Ronald Reagan to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The likelihood of that happening, at the time, was low. Reagan's flag was still firmly planted in Democratic soil, and switching parties was unthinkable. It was a nonstarter in 1950 when someone put his name up as a candidate for mayor of Hollywood, an honorary position. That left a cheesy, tinsel aftertaste. Local Democrats had asked him to run for Congress in 1952. Not to be outdone, that same year, Holmes Tuttle, an influential Republican contributor and prominent L.A. businessman, proposed that Reagan seek a Senate seat. Reagan loved Roosevelt’s view that common people can have a vision that included all social classes for the good of the country. Reagan had even supported the election of Harry Truman, whom he admired. But, lately, he’d become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and its penchant toward “encroaching government control.” 

Reagan deplored “the problems of centralizing power in Washington,” which he felt took inalienable rights and freedoms away from citizens. To him, it seemed the party’s liberal faction also went to great lengths to defend the shady Hollywood clique that had romanticized and dabbled in communism. All this served to redirect Reagan’s political antennae. His closest friends—Dick Powell, Bill Holden, Robert Taylor and Bob Cummings—were steadfast Republicans who had tirelessly drawn him to their side. And he’d gone for Ike in 1952, the first time Reagan had ever voted for a Republican candidate. From the 1970s on, the movies had turned away from the old studio era. By the time he took office as President of the USA, the Hollywood dream factory had turned its gaze to stories of anti-heroes, moral ambiguity, cruelty, and violence. Ronald Reagan never liked those movies. The sex scenes embarrassed him, too. On the national stage, he tried to project the old-style moral certainty of the classics he loved. 

The key to Reagan’s success, like that to Roosevelt’s, was his ability to restore Americans’ faith in their country. Reagan was called the “great communicator” with reason. He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt and Kennedy, combining conviction, focus, and humor in a manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked him personally. 

Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular. Like Roosevelt and other successful presidents, he realized that progress comes in pieces. If he got four-fifths of his ask in a negotiation, he took it and ran. He knew he could return for the rest. Reagan’s timing—some called it his luck—was no less essential to his success than his ability. “I know in my heart that man is good,” Reagan had said at the dedication of his library. “That what is right will always eventually triumph.” These lines of the Reagan creed were etched over his grave at the Reagan Library. But the closing words of his poignant farewell to the American people were the ones that were better remembered, that captured the belief that made him irresistible to so many. The shadow of forgetfulness was growing long across his path, yet his optimism and faith in his country remained undiminished as he wrote, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” —Sources: "Reagan: The Life" (2015) by Henry William Brands and "Ronald Reagan: An American Journey" (2018) by Bob Spitz