CHAPTER 17

“Why Not the Best?”—Carters and Reagans

Lilly and James Earl Carter Sr.

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan asked of the TV audience, just before his sole debate with President Jimmy Carter concluded. With only a week remaining in the 1980 election, which was the incumbent, which the challenger? Sincere Jimmy Carter seemed almost frenetic, switching swiftly from one subject to another, as if seeking something that might actually stick. Relaxed Ronald Reagan, so recently portrayed as dangerously trigger-happy, was the picture of calm confidence, adroitly escaping every rhetorical trap, seeming the more presidential of the two.

A supposedly close race turned into a landslide. In launching what would become known as the “Reagan Revolution,” the majority of those previously uncertain voters had finally decided more in terms of demeanor than ideology. After so sustained a national “malaise,” with pessimism presented as realism, why not give this refreshingly upbeat optimist and his stirring patriotic message a chance? Specifics could come later.

Reagan, of course, was already established as “the great communicator,” his conversational style, honed in Hollywood, ideal for television. Yet, Carter, in his own way, was also uncommonly adroit at communicating—only through the written more than the spoken word. He actually wrote his own books, most compellingly during his remarkable post-presidential career. His 1976 effort, introducing this Georgia “peanut farmer” to the greater American electorate, bore the unlikely title Why Not the Best? This from an ostensibly common-sense candidate with deep rural and religious roots, from below the “gnatline” of red-clay Georgia. Forty years later he would write about life at ninety. His distinctively informal campaign style could seem almost humble. He was eternally smiling and thrusting out his hand, “Hi. I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president.” Yet his autobiography told a fuller story, its details augmented by subsequent books such as An Hour before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood in 2001. As a result, we know a great deal more about Jimmy Carter and his family than of many earlier presidents. Equally compelling are accounts of the peripatetic childhood and youth of Ronald Reagan as well as those trying to penetrate his elusive persona. Moreover, the mismatched parents of each man tell us a good deal.

In Carter’s case, his political career was ultimately launched by his reaction to the death of his father, resulting in an agonizing decision that almost threatened his marriage. In 1953, having run for the Georgia State Legislature, James Earl Carter Sr. was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer and was transported back from Atlanta to his home just outside of Plains. As soon as they heard the news, twenty-nine-year-old Naval Lieutenant James Earl Carter Jr. and his wife Rosalynn rushed from Schenectady, New York, where he was stationed, to his father’s bedside. Sitting there by the hour, Jimmy Carter was struck by how small his father was, even shorter than himself. He had seemed a giant when he dominated the lives of his children and just about everything else in Plains.

For perhaps the first time, as father and son talked together, Jimmy discovered that the compassionate side of the man he thought he knew so well extended far beyond his own immediate family. It became clear from the endless stream of people––black as well as white—who called to pay their respects to the elder Carter, as staunch a segregationist as any other prominent Georgian in the 1950s. Yet, apparently, he was not only admired, he was loved. James Earl Carter Sr. died at home, on June 23, 1953, shortly before his fifty-ninth birthday, in the arms of a devoted black former employee named Annie Mae Hollis, who had returned from California to help the family cope. As Peter Bourne describes the funeral, Jimmy “was astonished at the hundreds of people, of both races, who came to express their concerns with an unanticipated degree of warmth and sincerity.” Douglas Brinkley adds, “All of Sumter County was there.”

Carter left an estate of over a quarter million dollars, a major business and agricultural enterprise, and a great many people reliant on its retention for their livelihoods. Who was to take it over now? Jimmy Carter’s mother was in a state of such inconsolable depression that she had to be medicated. His siblings were hardly up to the task. What was Jimmy to do? Hadn’t his father always had this older son—bright, knowledgeable, and responsible—in mind as his eventual heir, even as he had given his consent to a naval career? That career was flourishing; Jimmy had become an aide to brilliant, controversial Admiral Hyman Rickover, the nuclear submarine pioneer. Rickover became almost a surrogate, even more demanding, father figure. And lively Rosalynn, despite her husband’s frequently late hours, loved their more cosmopolitan life. The last thing she desired was to return to the flat, bleak environs of Plains. As Rosalynn Smith she had grown up next door to the Carters, was the best friend of Jimmy’s sister Ruth, and was the first young woman Jimmy had ever seriously dated. They were married in 1946 after his graduation, high in his class, from Annapolis. He was twenty-one, she only eighteen.

During the long drive back to Schenectady, Carter kept trying to compare his career, now “at the pinnacle of success for a young officer of my rank,” with whether he must follow in his father’s footsteps and become responsible for the security of all those families back home. When, days later, Jimmy finally reached his difficult decision and told his wife, Rosalynn was shocked. Later she reflected, “He did not think he could do anything in his life to have an impact on people … like his father’s life made.”

Perhaps there was also the inducement of being his own boss. Finally deciding to go back to Plains to take over the family business, a nervous Jimmy Carter was heartened that his wife, with great reluctance, had decided to accompany him. As Senator William Fulbright would reiterate, “Carter had deep roots.” Going back to them may have also led to a rediscovery of himself. When he would question in 1976, Why Not the Best?, didn’t he really mean values more than personalities? In any case, business led to community involvement, then to politics, and by 1962 to public office. Twenty-three years after deciding to pursue this new path by returning to the past, James Earl Carter Jr. would be elected president of the United States.

The Carters had lived in southwestern Georgia, the most benighted region of a relatively benighted state, for over 150 years. However, the Carter family tree had hundreds of branches throughout the American South, from aristocratic plantation owners in Virginia to dirt-poor farmers in Appalachia. The Carters of Georgia were somewhere in between, moderately to substantially middle class.

Under the auspices of an uncle, both Earl, as he preferred to be called, and his older brother Alton, called “Buddy,” attended school regularly. Buddy went on to run the town’s profitable general store, the Plains Mercantile Company. Earl had bigger plans. Plains, which at its peak had only about seven hundred inhabitants, was like dozens of other dusty southern Georgia towns, but it already boasted a narrow-gauge railroad that served the surrounding farmers as well as passengers. In 1921 Plains achieved another distinction. For some reason, three prominent physicians––brothers Thaddeus, Bowman, and Samuel Wise, the “Three Wise Men”––decided this would be an ideal location to establish their regional hospital, the Wise Sanitarium. It included a nurses’ training center, at which one of its earliest students was a slender, earnest young woman from Richland named Bessie Lillian Gordy. “Lilly” Gordy had dreamed of becoming a country doctor, but for a young woman at that time and place, it was simply an impossibility. Nursing would have to do, at least officially.

By his mid-twenties, energetic Earl was starting businesses that just about filled in all the commercial gaps in Plains. He opened an ice house, a dry-cleaning operation, and a grocery store down Main Street that didn’t compete with Buddy’s Plains Mercantile. But the key to a man’s stature was still land. For the first and only time in his life, Earl borrowed money—to buy more and more farmland surrounding the town. Despite his natural shyness, which he covered with a genial demeanor, Earl Carter was clearly a young man with a future. Years later Uncle Buddy would tell Jimmy Carter about his father in those days: “Well, I worked just as hard as he did, but every time I made a dollar, Earl could make three.”

The Gordys of Richland, a bit to the hilly southwest, had antecedents similar to the Carters of Plains. Emigrating from Scotland and England in the seventeenth century, the Gordys settled originally in Maryland. Taking advantage of lotteries, as the Carters did, they obtained land in Georgia and moved there in the early 1800s. Successful farmers, they held such posts as tax collectors and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. In the wake of defeat and reconstruction, they moved in a different direction than the Carters.

Lilly’s father, handsome, mustached James Jackson Gordy, known to all as “Jim Jack,” believed in education and activism more than business and also possessed a highly independent streak. Jim Jack and Mary Ida Nicholson Gordy had eight children. Lively Bessie Lillian, whom everyone called “Lilly,” born in 1898, was in the middle. “I was Poppa’s favorite,” she recalled, “and he was my favorite.” With widows and orphans from other branches of the family often in residence, there could be thirteen at the dinner table at any given time. Lilly would recall these mealtimes as part of a “nice, happy, very close family … with a great deal of conversation going back through the chaos.” Instead of prospering through business and farming, the Gordys pursued the professions. Not only were two of Jim Jack’s brothers physicians, one became a state legislator. Always intensely interested in politics, his own path led to appointive office, resulting more in a level of respectability than consistent financial security. Serving in such posts as postmaster, revenue officer, deputy marshal, and finally the ceremonial position of doorkeeper at the Georgia State Capitol, Jim Jack had to be circumspect. He cared far more about principles than parties. The values imparted to her oldest son by the woman who would one day be known to the entire nation as “Miss Lillian” came directly from her father.

Living in the midst of a thoroughly segregated society, Jim Jack believed firmly in racial justice and equality of opportunity. He felt that government on all levels should be a positive force for improving the lives of all its citizens. He affirmed the Christianity of moral example, not merely formal worship, flouting tradition by welcoming the distinguished bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church through his front door. Later still, Miss Lillian and her son Jimmy would be the only members of the Plains Baptist Church to stand in support of its racial integration.

The only respectable occupations for young white women to pursue in the South were teaching, with its implications of spinsterhood, and nursing, favored by Lilly Gordy. Although the Wise Sanitarium was rapidly expanding, from twelve to ninety beds, and openings for nurses training were highly coveted, Sam Wise was a good friend of Jim Jack Gordy, and after all, the two towns were close to each other. Lilly found nurses’ training to be very rigorous, but her new independence also presented an opportunity to cut loose a bit. The work hard/play hard regimen of the entire Wise medical staff and their friends was the closest Plains came to the Roaring Twenties. Whether potential nurses were indeed “fast” or not, Lilly discovered that she enjoyed drinking, smoking, dancing, and partying in general. So did Earl Carter, who sought some relief from his rigorous business.

Earl stood about five-foot-eight, an inch or two taller than Lilly, and weighed a stocky 175 pounds. He had reddish hair and a face sunburned in all seasons from his work outdoors, although he would almost always wear a hat. Despite needing to wear spectacles, he loved sports of all kinds, as spectator or participant, and games, everything from baseball to poker. Earl was already well known to Lilly’s classmates and was well liked as a good dancer, a fun date, and possessor of a sporty, open-topped Model T. With her long, lean face, Lilly was by no means a classical beauty. However, Jimmy would remember her when she was still relatively young as “very slender, almost gaunt … but pretty in her own way, with her dark hair parted in the middle, and eyes that almost seemed to sparkle.” Most of all it was her free-spirited vivaciousness that made her popular.

She first met Earl on a double date, and their initial encounter was anything but promising. She found him tiresome and a show-off. By then Dr. Sam Wise, who had taken Lilly under his wing, urged her to take a second look, suggesting that, “He’s a boy that has a lot more ambition than anyone in this town, and he’s going to be worth a lot someday.” To her surprise, her parents also liked what they’d heard about Earl. Apparently, his reaction to Lilly had been far more favorable. He asked her out, and soon they were dating steadily. In 1923, they became engaged. Lilly still had to complete her training to become a registered nurse and was obliged to go to a hospital in Atlanta for another six months. Thoroughly enamored, Earl called her every Sunday and drove up to see her twice. Finally, on September 26, 1923, the two were married by the pastor of the Plains Baptist Church in a modest ceremony in Earl’s home. He was twenty-seven, she twenty-five.

Something in Earl beyond ambition had won Lilly over, at least for a time. The boisterous social life at the clinic carried over into the early years of their marriage. He also took her to plays in Americus. It turned out that they were both almost fanatical baseball fans. They weren’t entirely mismatched. Their first child was born precisely nine months after their first New Year’s together, at 7 a.m. on October 1, 1924, with Dr. Sam in attendance. When Lilly went into labor, Earl rushed back from one of his farms in time to get her to the Wise Sanitarium. James Earl Carter Jr., described by his mother as “a bright, happy baby who needed no special care,” would be the first president of the United States to be born in a hospital. Two years later a daughter, Gloria, was born to the Carters. Two years after that it would be a second daughter they named Ruth. It would be another thirteen years until the birth of their final child, William Alton, nicknamed “Billy.” Earl joked that this baby couldn’t possibly be his, which Lilly didn’t find particularly funny. It is difficult to discern precisely when the magic went out of the Carters’ union. Lillian must have realized that, beyond their social life, she really shared few interests with her husband. They both were keenly interested in politics, but Lillian viewed Earl’s concerns as limited to the local and provincial. And Earl still wanted to go out every Saturday night, long after she’d tired of it.

In the early years, although Earl was the unquestioned head of the household, Lillian’s strong will exercised a great deal of influence. She supervised how the children were fed, clothed, and educated. “I think my children are individuals,” she would insist. As Jimmy would later remark, “She grew in spirit and influence all her life.” She had already won the coveted position of surgical nurse at the clinic, and between pregnancies she worked in the operating room or on private duty. Of course, she loved her children, but she also relished this increased opportunity to be of service and to sustain a degree of independence.

Spending more time out of the home each year, Lillian eventually limited her serious cooking to one day a week, generally a chicken dinner on Sunday. Her “quality time” had diminished to leaving separate notes on a table for each child, often about such areas as recommended reading. She started bringing her own books to the table to read while she ate and encouraged her growing children to do the same, while Earl simmered and ate in silence. Young Jimmy, who remembered taking refuge in his tree house because of the noise of his parents’ parties, found the sounds of their silence even more disconcerting.

As the years went by, it was his father, despite his rigorous schedule, who took the children to school, church, and their social and athletic events and even helped them with their homework. There were rarely the warm family reunions so common to Southern families. Both parents could be soft as well as demanding, but it is easy to see why at that stage Jimmy still called his father “Daddy” but Lillian “Mother.” Because Jimmy was the only boy in the household for the first thirteen years of his life, with his mother increasingly distant, he felt most fully his father’s expectations and his influence. He called Earl Sr. “the center of my life and the focus of my admiration when I was a child. My daddy was the dominant personality in our family.”

As Earl’s land holdings increased to over 5,000 acres, worked by as many as two hundred families of black sharecroppers, Lillian finally became, in essence, the country doctor she had dreamed of being. “Miz Lillian” not only birthed their babies but also tended to all their medical concerns as well, to the neglect of her own children. After all, where was the need more urgent?

Mr. Earl early involved Jimmy in learning the rudiments of the family business and could see his potential. He called Jimmy “Hot” for “Hot Shot” when he was pleased, “Jimmy” when he was not, but he smiled a lot more than Admiral Rickover would. To Earl’s credit, as Peter Bourne points out, he was not so immersed in the future of his business that he failed to remind all of his children that “there was a world to be conquered outside of Plains.” However, personally he was satisfied to be the first citizen of his own community. When he moved his home, it was only three miles west to tiny Archery, to bring his farms’ produce to a Seaboard Railroad Lines flag stop and be even closer to his tenants. The business headquarters remained in Plains. The only other white family in Archery was headed by a railroad foreman. In addition to peanuts, which largely replaced cotton as his staple crop in the 1920s, Carter’s diversified farms now raised everything from pecans to peaches, pork to potatoes, and livestock of every kind.

Jimmy Carter’s childhood and youth reflected the contrasting realities of rural Southern life in the 1920s and 1930s: idyllic yet rigorous. “My childhood world was really shaped by black women,” he would recall, and virtually all his childhood companions were black, raised by the surrogates who filled in for his missing mother, their well-loved and caring Miz Lillian. Still, for Jimmy it was his daddy, the visible presence running everything who also was his “best friend.” For a young boy it seemed a “Huckleberry Finn” kind of life. Jimmy even looked like Huck Finn, barefoot and shirtless, red-haired and freckle-faced, fishing for eels and catfish, swimming in the creeks, climbing trees, hunting quail, and aimlessly exploring to his heart’s content a carefree, country life any boy who loved the outdoors might wish would go on forever. But it wasn’t all play. As he got older, Jimmy plowed and hoed with his playmates and their parents, more each year, his tasks equal to his father’s tenants but the expectations greater. Eventually, Earl gave him his own acre to be responsible for, to cultivate and make productive. He even sent the apprehensive youth into Plains, which now must have seemed like a metropolis, to sell boiled peanuts.

As Jimmy grew, however, a longer-term goal was emerging. Inspired by the colorful postcards he received from his globe-girdling uncle, navy radioman Tom Watson Gordy, in land-locked southern Georgia Jimmy began to dream about somehow attending the Naval Academy, and going on to an exciting career actually seeing the world as a naval officer. Hadn’t his father talked of opportunities beyond the insular world of Plains?

Unlike less farsighted farmers, Earl had the means not only to diversify but to mechanize. He helped finance an agricultural station at the University of Georgia, and the library at Georgia Southern University is named for him. Everything was bought with cash. Hardheaded but astute, he had a Midas touch that was already the stuff of local legend. Even the Depression hardly touched Earl Carter, beyond enabling him to buy products cheaper. It had, of course, a devastating effect on many millions of others. The Carters never turned anyone away who came to the back door asking for food, often offering to work in return. What remained unpublicized was Mr. Earl’s generosity to those in dire need within his own sphere, including giving medicine and supplies to his wife as she made her daily rounds. Indeed, he may have come to view her commitment with quiet pride. Hardly a New Dealer, he never forgave President Roosevelt for agricultural policies that actually involved plowing crops under, but Carter was politically moderate for his time and place, favoring rural electrification and investing to improve the standards of the separate black schools.

Earl also built Lillian her own secluded pond house by a fishing lake, where she could spend scarce leisure time playing cards with a few friends or reading and reflecting on her own. The relationship between Lillian and Earl seemed to be entering a sort of third stage. First, there was togetherness, followed by separation, and now finally a sort of mutually understood acceptance. Sometimes they still did things together, vacationing to Chicago or New York, involving the interests of both. Sharing their love of baseball, they happened to be in Brooklyn when Jackie Robinson made his major league debut. Lillian stood and cheered. Earl did not.

Jimmy had started school in Plains in 1930 at the age of six. This entrance into an all-white world represented a confusing separation from his childhood companions. He was undersized, insecure, and wanting to be liked. One can imagine him sticking out his hand to announce to his new classmates, “Hi. I’m Jimmy Carter….” He did well throughout school, his imagination enhanced by learning more about those faraway places he longed to see one day. Carter was a favorite of his teachers. In the eighth grade he encountered one, Julia Coleman, who made such an impression that he mentioned her in his inaugural address as president. He spoke at graduation on “The Building of a Community,” a combination of what he had learned from “Miss Julia” and his mother, who had left him all those notes on the table with recommendations for reading and reflection. His parents attended the graduation ceremonies together, after which they hosted a party for the entire class.

Carter also became more involved in the Plains Baptist Church, where he had been baptized, and began to share his mother’s emphasis on the church’s moral message over the rigidity of its forms. Many years later, after the galling disappointment of losing a race for governor to a crude bigot, Carter was deeply influenced by a long talk with his deeply religious sister, Ruth. It led to a transcendent experience of his own and to being “born again,” the first president who would make such an affirmation.

Despite Jimmy’s becoming qualified by his teens to succeed his father, Mr. Earl reluctantly agreed with his son’s preference to pursue a naval career. Given his scholastic record and his father’s influence, including befriending the local congressman, an appointment to the Naval Academy seemed a viable possibility. But first, the diminutive, slender Jimmy Carter had to build himself up physically, followed by two years of academic preparation at a local college and Georgia Tech. Finally admitted to Annapolis, with the acceleration of wartime demands, he graduated in three years. His mother and his new fiancée jointly pinned on his insignia. Why had Miss Lillian cried at Jimmy’s departure for Annapolis, his first trip outside of Georgia? Perhaps there was some regret at not having spent more time with him at home. After twenty years of marriage and four children, Lillian and Earl drove home silently and then reflected separately—she in her small pond cottage, he fishing and drinking at a friend’s house by a different pond.

Between 1947 and 1967, Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter had four children—three boys (the second, “Chip,” named James Earl Carter III) and finally a welcome girl, Amy Lynn. Miss Lillian was prescient in at least one respect. All four of her own children had certainly turned out to be individuals. Gloria Carter Spann, perhaps the brightest of all, became a cross-country motorcyclist; Ruth Carter Stapleton became an evangelist; and Billy Carter, in fact quite bright and perceptive, became the prototypical presidential problem brother, trying to cash in by promoting such products as “Billy Beer” and the historical significance of Plains itself (although he was defeated for mayor). Still, when Miss Lillian was asked, “Aren’t you proud of your son?” she responded, as had the mother of Dwight Eisenhower, “Which one?”

Like her son, Lillian Carter would be more appreciated later in her life. Miss Lillian seemed in her seventies to be the nation’s good, gray grandmother, a bit eccentric and outspoken, but an irrepressible inspiration to everyone who affirmed civil and human rights. She had been so devastated by the premature death of Earl, a man whose ideas she may not have shared but whom she had once loved, that even her attentive children couldn’t bring her out of a deep depression. She dwelled, not without cause, on how her husband “had been more an affectionate father than I was a mother.” As her grandchildren grew, she took more of an appreciative interest in them than her own four children had experienced. Still, she needed more than to be a doting grandmother or babysitter. At sixty-eight, still healthy and bolstered by her experience as a nurse, she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to India, where the main thrust of her assignment was to promote family planning. Returning after two exhausting but exhilarating years, she found that she had become something of national celebrity.

Asked about her and about his own activities, Billy was more than happy to comment, “I’ve got a mama who joined the Peace Corps when she was sixty-eight. I got a sister who’s a Holy Roller preacher, another wears a helmet and rides a motorcycle, and my brother thinks he’s going to be president. So that makes me the only sane one in the family.” When Jimmy, already governor of Georgia, told his mother he was planning to run, she asked quite innocently, “For what?” Still, she played a prominent role in his “Peanut Brigade” campaign in 1976.

Speaking with candor, assurance, and humor, in old age she finally became the woman she always knew she could be. The latent charm of the increasingly visible Miss Lillian—even her bluntness—prompted the press to view her as a more authentic personality than her less spontaneous son. As Carl Anthony writes, “Instantly recognizable in her snow white pixie haircut, Miss Lillian was an eager celebrity of the late 1970s—whether cheering heartily at the World Series, playing poker on the way back from the pope’s funeral, or sounding off on everything.” She no longer merely watched Johnny Carson, she appeared as a favorite guest. After the election, she even represented President Carter overseas. As for the Equal Rights Amendment, Miss Lillian proclaimed, “I’ve been liberated all my life.”

Her son also seemed to loosen up a bit, sometimes going beyond the limits of necessity, as in his famous 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. Relating religion to promiscuity, he declared, “Christ said, ‘I’ll tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.’ I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Well, we’ve experienced a lot worse.

Carter may have learned the lessons of business success—ambition, hard work, discipline, shrewdness, even charity—from his father. But from his mother came his political credo—the positive, universal message of literal Christianity, affirmed in his uncompromising espousal of civil rights. For Jimmy Carter, as for his mother, a fuller appreciation came late. Through the Carter Center he has been able to merge faith with practicality beyond our borders, promoting conflict resolution as well as programs to combat poverty, hunger, ignorance, and intolerance.

Bessie Lillian Gordy Carter died on October 30, 1983, in her eighty-fifth year, outliving her daughter Ruth by a month. Billy also died in his fifties, in 1988, and Gloria in 1990. All died of pancreatic cancer. Jimmy was the only one of her children who did not smoke. At least his mother was spared the desolation of witnessing so much personal tragedy. She left a belated legacy transcending her earlier inability to comfort her children and ease their isolation: the enduring moral message of her first son.

Nelle and Jack Reagan

The defining moment for Ronald Reagan was not a death but a discovery. When he was eleven he came back to his modest home from the local YMCA on a blustery winter’s night with snow on the ground. His mother had gone on one of her sewing jobs, and he had expected the house to be empty. Instead, as he ran up the front steps he nearly fell over a lump near the front door. It was his father, Jack, sprawled in the snow, flat on his back, his arms outstretched, snoring so loudly the neighbors must have heard him. He was dead drunk, the smell of bootleg whisky on his breath. It was still Prohibition, and unpredictable Jack Reagan was just as likely to go to a speakeasy and fall off the wagon during those rare occasions when things might actually be improving as to go on a bender when nothing seemed to be going right.

Should Ron wait for his mother to return home and take charge, as she generally did? No, he decided, not this time. He somehow laboriously dragged his father by his overcoat inside the house and into bed. He didn’t tell his mother about it, but then he hardly had to. She had already explained to Ron and his older brother Neil about their father’s “sickness,” the addiction he struggled with but couldn’t always control. “We shouldn’t love him any less,” Nelle would say, even when he might embarrass them. “We should remember how kind and loving he was when he wasn’t addicted to drink.” Indeed, it was more a sickness than a sin, and ceaselessly supportive, devout Nelle Reagan never stopped praying for his recovery.

To Lou Cannon, Ronald Reagan’s action that evening, confronted by the raw reality of his father’s addiction, represented the first moment of accepting responsibility. To Edmund Morris, it was the pivotal episode in his life. Through it all, Ron’s regard for his mother, the constant inspiration of his life, only increased. She would teach him the value of prayer, he recalled, “how to have dreams and make them come true.” It is little wonder that she had been attracted to handsome Jack Reagan and believed from the start that the constancy of her love in itself could counteract his drinking problem, which would only grow more serious with the years.

John Edward Reagan, the natural salesman whom everybody called “Jack,” was bigger than his ambitions. He dreamed of having the largest shoe store in Illinois outside of Chicago. In pursuit of this goal, he took his family all over the state—from Fulton to Tampico, to Chicago itself, then to Galena and Monmouth, back to Tampico, and finally to Dixon. His pervasive humor, his salesman’s patter, had always been tinged with a degree of cynicism. It is little wonder. The origins of Ronald Reagan’s parents were equally humble but otherwise quite dissimilar. Nelle grew up surrounded by a large, close-knit, warm family. Jack’s childhood seemed like something more out of Dickens. The O’Reagans had lived in County Tipperary, Ireland, for generations. Most often, they had worked as tenant farmers, living in abject poverty and buried in paupers’ graves. In 1852, Michael O’Reagan decided he’d had enough and moved to London, married, and changed his name to simply Reagan. In 1856 the family emigrated to America, homesteading on land in Illinois. Their son, also named Michael, settled nearby, and in 1883 had a son named John Edward, who would be Ronald Reagan’s father. Venturing out on his own, he worked his way up to being the star salesman at a dry-goods store in Fulton, Illinois.

Eventually, Ronald traced his father’s family back to the tiny Irish town of Ballyporeen. During his European tour in 1984, Reagan made a stop in there. Reflecting on the poverty of his forebears, he hit just the right note: “Perhaps this is God’s way of reminding us that we must always treat every individual with dignity and respect.” Who can tell whose child or grandchild will someday rise to eminence? For such informal grace he had to thank the influence of his mother, who was neither Irish nor Catholic.

Nelle Clyde Wilson’s family emigrated from England to Canada and then to the heartland of Illinois. Nelle was born in 1883, the same year as Jack Reagan, and near the same essentially rural community of Fulton. She had five brothers and sisters in her close-knit circle. She also only had an elementary school education. She and Jack met when working in the same retail establishment. She had learned the skills to become an accomplished seamstress; at twenty-three, Jack was already an experienced salesman, anxious to improve his circumstances.

He and Nelle were drawn to each other. A husky “black” Irishman, tall and handsome, he was a bard of the prairies, his gift for storytelling celebrated far beyond Fulton. He also possessed, as Morris writes, a sort of virile elegance. “One would never guess from Jack’s urban manners and sartorial grace, that he came from a family of rural Irish immigrants. He was that rare type, the instinctive gentleman.” Nelle, despite her sharp features, a too-strong chin, and thin lips, was striking, with beautiful auburn hair and blue eyes, a figure slender but shapely, with a natural intelligence that matched Jack’s.

They were married in Fulton’s Catholic Church in 1904, in deference to his heritage—although he had lapsed—and she was already inclined to a different faith. In 1906 they moved to Tampico, Illinois, where Jack had obtained what looked to be a better opportunity at the Pitney General Store. There their two sons were born—John Neil in 1908 and Ronald Wilson on February 6, 1911. Neil was nicknamed “Moon,” from the early comic-strip character Moon Mullins. For Ronald, “Dutch” was the instant appellation. When he saw and heard his ten-pound son, after Nellie had endured a full day’s labor, Jack could only exclaim, “Why, he looks like a fat Dutchman!” Both nicknames stuck.

For a time there was seeming stability. His Pitney store was doing well, and outgoing Jack Reagan was already something of a local leader. He served as a town councilman, assistant fire chief, member of service clubs, and finance chairman of the Catholic church he now infrequently attended. With only silent movies for competition, local amateur theatrical and musical groups flourished in small communities like Tampico. Sometimes they performed classic works, sometimes original productions or recitations. It was something that Nelle and Jack were quite good at, a precursor of their family’s future. However, the store’s success wouldn’t last.

Meanwhile, Nelle had found increasing solace in religion. In 1910, on Easter Sunday, Nelle Wilson Reagan was baptized into the Disciples of Christ. By then, Neil believed himself to be more the son of his father, while Dutch was “always Nellie’s boy.” Finally, the family moved to Dixon, John’s final opportunity at retailing. Like many boys who became president, Ronald Reagan insisted he was never really aware of his family’s relative poverty. In part because of the length of time he spent there, he recalled his youth in Dixon, Illinois, as “sweet and idyllic as it could be.” Indeed, it was a picturesque town, ten times bigger than Tampico, situated by the Rock River between wooded hills and limestone cliffs.

Ron’s view of everything changed about the time he entered high school, a second life-altering experience. On a Sunday drive with his parents, sitting in the rear of the car with his brother, he happened to pick up and put on his mother’s glasses, and made a startling discovery. Suddenly, he could see everything with a clarity he had never experienced before. He had never known he was nearsighted. It changed more than his vision.

In high school, coinciding with a major growth spurt, Reagan emerged seemingly overnight into a confident personality. A solid if not outstanding student, now he played football confidently and excelled at swimming. And to his mother’s delight, under a particularly inspirational teacher, he eagerly participated in every dramatic production. He was elected senior class president and voted “Mr. Congeniality,” while his steady girlfriend, one of the daughters of the new minister at his mother’s church, was voted “Miss Brains”—a most attractive couple.

Nelle never quite gave up on Jack, but in their succession of towns, it is natural that her sons gradually supplanted him at the center of her activities. Unfortunately, the Depression arrived even sooner in towns like Dixon than on Wall Street itself. The last thing local cement plant workers and farmers needed now was a costly pair of shoes. By 1930, Jack’s “grandest dream” was only a bitter memory. He needed to take to the road to seek work. Nelle stayed in Dixon, finding employment as a seamstress-clerk at a dress shop and taking in boarders. William Pemberton writes, “Nelle held the family together…. She stretched her limited budget to keep them fed and well clothed, drilled into her sons the value of an education, read to them at night, and took them to church several times a week.”

Somehow both Neil and Ron managed to enroll at nearby Eureka College. Obtaining a “Needy Student Scholarship,” Ron washed dishes and waited tables at his fraternity house. He was now over six feet tall, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, playing football more prominently but particularly enjoying dramatics, and both starring on and coaching the swimming team. Ron had worked since he was fourteen to help out at home, but by far his most cherished job was as a lifeguard for seven summers at Lowell Park, overseeing a particularly turbulent part of the river. The memory of the seventy-seven people he saved from drowning, encapsulated later by a photograph of himself as a young Adonis, would stay vivid in his mind long after much else had vanished.

At Eureka he had a third significant experience. Although only a freshman, he had been chosen by the more reluctant upperclassmen to lead a protest against the college president’s plans to make drastic cuts. The heady experience, as Pemberton puts it, “was a defining moment for Reagan. He experienced for the first time the thrill of moving an audience.” It was his own triumph, to be sure, but he understood how well his mother had prepared him for it.

Even in the 1920s and 1930s, both parents viewed people as individuals. Ron’s two black football teammates from Eureka enjoyed a warm welcome and a good meal at the Reagan household even if no hotel in town would admit them. At his lowest ebb, after the Depression had hit home, Jack finally found work in a dingy store two hundred miles away, outside of Springfield. On a trip there he stayed in his car overnight in the middle of a blizzard, nearly catching pneumonia, because the proprietor of the only hotel in town had told him he’d be happy there—“We don’t have any Jews.” Reagan would say of his father, “He was the best storyteller I’ve ever heard and the strongest man of principle I’ve ever known. He believed in honesty and hard work. He was filled with a love of justice and a hatred of bigotry.”

Returning to Dixon, Jack finally got a break of his own. One of the few Democrats in the area, committed to the New Deal, he landed a job setting up federal relief programs and later worked for the Works Progress Administration. It did a good deal for his self-esteem. The whole family supported Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Ronald Reagan cast his first presidential vote. He would always admire FDR, even after becoming an icon of Republican conservatism.

Graduating in 1932 with a degree in economics, Ron needed to find his own job. By then he really wanted to be an actor; but with jobs so scarce, he felt he might more readily find something in radio. Encouraged by his father, he borrowed his ancient car and took off in all directions. By tenacity and luck he finally found a job spinning records and announcing sports at a radio station in Davenport, Iowa. It led to a bigger job at sister station WHO in Des Moines, enabling him to proudly send a portion of each weekly paycheck home to help out his family. Ron also enlisted in the Army Reserve, and with the Fort Des Moines Cavalry Regiment he realized another long-held ambition, learning to ride as his heroes did in Saturday matinees.

To cover the Chicago baseball teams in 1935, Ron was assigned to tour spring training sites in Southern California. Somehow, through a convoluted series of events, the handsome young sportscaster managed to take a screen test. Warner Brothers offered him a contract at $100 a week for seven years, with the studio’s option to either renew or pull out. In the studio system of the time, he went on to make thirteen “B” pictures during the first year. In all, he would eventually appear in a total of fifty-three, with several years of army service in between during World War II. Eventually, many were first-run features, and some were memorable––none more so that his portrayal of tragic football star George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American, introducing that most memorable line, “Win one for the Gipper.”

After Warner Brothers picked up his option, Ron felt secure enough to bring his parents out to California and finally buy them a house in their name, the only one they would ever own. “Nothing,” he reflected, “has ever given me so much satisfaction.” Ron asked his father to take on the job of handling his increasing fan mail. Invited to the premiere of the Rockne film on the Notre Dame campus itself, Jack said with some satisfaction, “I was there when my son became a star.”

John Edward Reagan died in Hollywood of coronary thrombosis at the age of fifty-seven on May 18, 1941. Perhaps the only surprise is that his heart didn’t give out sooner, after so many years of heavy drinking, chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and experiencing such continual frustration. Ron could only reflect that, although Jack never entirely overcame the curse of alcohol, “he and my mother had many years of great love together.” Certainly, Nelle’s satisfaction was the equal of her husband’s, but hadn’t she always expected it in some form? She viewed most of Ron’s screen roles as “just the way he is at home.” From Illinois to California, Nelle Reagan sought to be of service, taking food to the local prison and the underprivileged. Some people may have found her opinions to be as sharp as her features as she grew older, but she always looked for the best in others. Nelle Clyde Wilson Reagan died at the age of seventy-nine on June 25, 1962, the same year Ron finally became a Republican. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, hastened by years of what is now called Alzheimer’s disease.

In 1940, Ron had married Jane Wyman, an established Hollywood star. It was the second of her four marriages. They had three children—Maureen, Christine (who was born prematurely and died the same day), and an adopted son, Michael. By 1949 they were divorced. After Reagan died, she issued a statement, “America has lost a great president and a great, kind, and gentle man.” In the 748 pages of his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Reagan devotes all of one paragraph to Jane Wyman. However, he included torrents of emotional accolades to his second wife, former actress Nancy Davis, who gave up her own career to devote herself almost excessively to Ronald Reagan’s welfare after their marriage in 1952. They would have two rather independent-minded children—Patty Davis and Ron Reagan. That Reagan would become our first divorced president was no longer the impediment it had once been in American politics.

As his movie career waned, Reagan worked in television, particularly as a host for the General Electric Theatre and as a goodwill ambassador for the company. Later, he became president of the Screen Actors Guild and was increasingly active in politics. His rousing televised speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964, defining the new Republican conservatism as a renaissance of the American right, was the rhetorical highlight of that campaign. Urged to run for governor of California, Reagan won in 1966 and was reelected in 1970, to the consternation of more experienced opponents who insisted he was “only an actor.” After two tentative but very visible attempts for the presidency, Reagan won both the nomination and election in 1980 and was resoundingly reelected in 1984. When he first entered the White House, he remarked, “Well, it looks like we’re living upstairs from the store again.”

So familiar to Americans, Reagan still remains something of a bane to biographers. He was a great storyteller, an inheritance from his father. But, as Cannon points out, “Ronald Reagan was always skilled at softening hard memories with happy stories,” sometimes leaving his associates up in the air. Even before his poignant, personal farewell to the American people in 1994, confirming that he had been diagnosed with his own case of Alzheimer’s disease, he was often viewed as an appealing enigma, possessed of a selective memory. Reagan himself sometimes all but supported such a view. So outwardly warm and congenial, he admitted in 1990 to an inclination from childhood “to hold back a little of myself.” His dedicated wife, Nancy, who passed away in 2016, once said, “There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when I feel that barrier.”

Ronald Wilson Reagan died a decade after that affecting message describing the implications of his Alzheimer’s, on June 5, 2004, at the age of ninety-three. As the colors fade, ideology aside, perhaps we should most appreciate him for his love of country and unmatched ability to express it, for what his “Shining City on a Hill” represents. That this very image derives from his mother’s church is another indication of his—and our—debt to her, and to his father, who taught him how to paint a picture with words.