I OWE MY LATE SISTER Maureen a debt I can never repay. I owe her ninety-seven cents.
That’s how much Maureen paid to bring me into the Reagan family. She was three years old when she accompanied Mom and Dad to Schwab’s Pharmacy—yes, the famed Schwab’s Pharmacy at Sunset and Crescent Heights, where actress Lana Turner was discovered and where Harold Arlen sat at the lunch counter and wrote “Over the Rainbow.”
While Mom and Dad were browsing in the aisles, Maureen strode to the counter, opened her little pink purse, and dumped a pile of coins on the counter—ninety-seven cents.
The pharmacist peered over the counter. “What do you want, little girl?”
Maureen said, “I want to buy a brother.”
My mom and dad—Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan—witnessed this exchange. Mom hurried over and told Maureen to put her money back in her purse. To Mom, the incident was embarrassing. After her first child, doctors had told Mom she should not get pregnant again. To her, the whole issue of a baby brother was private family business.
Returning home, Mom and Dad talked it over. They had accepted the idea that Maureen would be an only child—but they hadn’t consulted with Maureen. Maybe she really did need a sibling to play with. So they decided to adopt.
I was born in Los Angeles on March 18, 1945. My birth mother was an unmarried aspiring actress named Irene Flaugher. Three days after my birth, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman adopted me as their son and brought me home from the hospital.
When they showed me to Maureen, she was indignant. “I don’t want a little brother—I want a big brother like my friends!”
“Well,” Mom said, “Michael was the only brother available. You’re going to love him very much.”
A nurse had come from the hospital to help care for me. When Maureen saw the nurse, she ran up the stairs to her room, snatched her piggy bank off the dresser, and threw it on the floor. She grabbed up the money from the shattered piggy bank—all ninety-seven cents of it—then ran downstairs and dumped the coins into the nurse’s hands.
“What’s this for?” the nurse asked.
“Keep it,” Dad said. “She wants to have a part in bringing Michael into the family.”
That’s how I came into the Reagan family. Maureen paid the price of my admission, and I’ll never be able to repay that ninety-seven-cent debt.
Mom and Dad met in 1938 while costarring in Brother Rat, a comedy about cadets at the Virginia Military Institute. They were married on January 26, 1940, at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Glendale, California. Their first child, Maureen Elizabeth Reagan, was born January 4, 1941. I was born four years later.
When I was two years old, Mom became pregnant again. The pregnancy was unplanned, but not unwanted. As soon as Mom knew she was pregnant, she wanted that baby very much and was determined to carry the baby to term.
But on June 26, 1947, just six months into the pregnancy, Mom went into labor and gave birth to a daughter, Christine, at Queen of Angels Hospital. Christine only lived for nine hours. It was the greatest heartbreak of Mom’s life—and she had to go through it alone. When baby Christine died, Dad was at another hospital, Cedars of Lebanon, with a serious case of viral pneumonia.
The death of a child often takes a devastating toll on a marriage. One day in May 1948, Dad came home and Mom stunned him with the news that she wanted a divorce. Dad was a devoted family man, and the notion of divorce had never entered his thoughts. He knew Mom was grieving, but he had no idea his marriage was in jeopardy. I was only three at the time, so I didn’t understand what was happening. But Maureen understood, and remembered. Years later, she recalled, “It just never occurred to him, no matter what their problems were, that he and mother would get a divorce; it was so foreign to his way of thinking, to the way he was brought up.”1
I think Mom had decided that there was only one thing she could do to escape the painful memories after Christine’s death: she had to go back to work. She immersed herself in her next role in a film called Johnny Belinda. She played a young deaf-mute woman, Belinda McDonald, who is raped and gives birth to a little boy named Johnny. It’s a powerful motion picture, and Mom gave the performance of a lifetime. The film was nominated for a dozen Academy Awards, including best picture, and Mom won an Oscar and the Golden Globe Award for best actress.
(Incidentally, my mother handled the divorce with consummate class and discretion. She never said a word about my father in public or in private. After Dad was elected president of the United States, publishers offered my mother a number of lucrative book deals if she would dish some dirt on the first divorced president. She didn’t give those offers a moment’s consideration. In fact, when she was starring in Falcon Crest on television in the 1980s, she had a written agreement with the studio to participate in any interview about the show, but if the interviewer brought up her marriage to Ronald Reagan, she would instantly walk out. From the divorce in 1948 until my father’s death in 2004, she never said one word about him and their marriage. A few days after his death, she did issue one brief yet touching statement: “America has lost a great president and a great, kind, and gentle man.”)
After the divorce, I saw my father on alternating Saturdays. Maureen and I would go outside at ten o’clock and sit on the curb in front of my mother’s two-story mansion at 333 S. Beverly Glen. We’d watch and wait, and soon we’d see Dad’s red station wagon turn from Sunset Boulevard onto Beverly Glen. Then I’d yell, “He’s here!”
I was practically quivering with excitement when Dad arrived to pick us up for the weekend. Those days with my father were very important to me, because they were so much fun—and so rare. For a little boy, having to wait two weeks to see your dad is like waiting an eternity. When I was with my father, I didn’t want to waste a moment.
We’d drive out to Yearling Row, Dad’s ranch in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, where he raised thoroughbred horses. Conditions at the ranch were primitive. The only structure was a one-room caretaker’s shack. Dad and his ranch foreman, Nino Peppetone, stayed in that shack on weekends when they worked with the horses.
While Dad and Nino put the horses through their paces, Maureen and I played with the goats or fed the chickens. At lunch time, Dad would open a picnic basket and we’d sit on the grass in the shade of an oak tree, talking and watching the clouds’ shadows move across the Santa Susana Mountains.
In 1951, Dad bought a new ranch near Malibu, adjacent to the 20th Century Fox movie ranch where M*A*S*H and Planet of the Apes were filmed. It became the new Yearling Row. It was four hundred acres of meadows and hills enclosed in a white fence that Dad built with his own hands. During our Saturdays at the ranch, I helped Dad dig the post holes for the fence, and I helped him repaint that fence many times over the years. The Malibu ranch had separate houses for the family and the foreman, and a swimming pool.
As Maureen grew older, she spent some of those weekends with her friends. So sometimes it would just be Dad and me at the ranch, or I might bring one of my friends along. My friends liked being with my father because he made everything fun. None of my friends were ever nervous around Dad. During the drive to the ranch, we’d play car games like Beaver—we’d shout out “Beaver!” whenever we saw a wood-paneled station wagon. The person with the most sightings by the end of the trip was the winner. Dad was the referee and scorekeeper, and somehow he managed to make every game end in a tie.
When we got to the ranch, there were usually some chores to do, but there was always plenty of time to run and play. The ranch was a great place for a game of hide-and-seek, which we played on horseback. My friends and I built forts out of hay from the hay barn. I can close my eyes and recall the earthy smell of the horses, the dust in my nose, the feel of the tall grass brushing against the legs of my blue jeans, and the dry-oak scent of the wood my father cut and split. I remember bouncing on the passenger seat of the Jeep as Dad drove us around on rugged dirt trails or off-road.
On late afternoons, after Dad had finished his chores, we’d ride horses or jump into the pool. Dad had one rule around the swimming pool—no running. To enforce that rule, he required that whenever Maureen and I were hurrying around the deck, playing tag, we had to stop at each corner and dip the toes of one foot into the pool.
Dad had taught me to swim when I was three years old. I have no memory of it, but Dad told me the story. We had a pool at our home in Trousdale Estates, and Dad was determined to “drown-proof” me, so I’d be safe around that pool. Mom had gotten me swimming lessons at a place where they put an inflatable life jacket on me and taught me some rudimentary water skills. Dad didn’t think much of that approach. He figured that if I fell in the pool by accident, I might not be wearing a flotation device. So he told Mom I didn’t need the life jacket anymore.
“You’re out of your mind, Ronnie,” Mom said. “Without that life jacket, he’ll sink to the bottom.”
Dad didn’t say a word. He just took off my life jacket, carried me to the pool, and—as Mom watched in horror—dropped me in.
Years later, after Dad told me that story, I asked him, “What did you expect me to do?”
“Well,” he said, “you swam, didn’t you?”
It’s true. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim.
Dad was an amazing swimmer. As a youth, he had worked as a lifeguard on the Rock River near his hometown of Dixon, Illinois. Because he was such a strong swimmer, Dad could hold his breath underwater forever. His swimming prowess came in handy when he played in the pool with Maureen and me at the Malibu ranch.
The pool water came from a well, and the water was green and rust brown with minerals. Dad would dive down into that murky water, and Maureen and I would try to find him. We’d thrash all over the pool and have to come up for air five or six times while he hid at the bottom. Sometimes we’d think he was never coming up—and then he’d pop up in the far corner of the pool. We’d play that game until it was time to head home.
At the end of the day, Maureen and I would flip a coin to decide whether to drive home via the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) or through the San Fernando Valley. The PCH was a spectacular drive, and we’d stop at the Foster’s Freeze by the Malibu pier for ice cream cones. The Valley road was lined with orange groves, apple orchards, and fruit stands, and if we went that way, we’d stop at a fresh cider stand on Ventura Boulevard.
On Sunday mornings, Dad would take Maureen and me to his mother Nelle’s house in Los Angeles. Nelle had moved from Illinois to California in 1938. She’d drive us to Sunday school in her old Studebaker then bring us back to her house for Sunday brunch.
In late 1949, Dad met an actress named Nancy Davis. They dated for about a year before Dad introduced her to Maureen and me. Soon, he was bringing her on our weekend trips to the Malibu ranch.
Later, when Maureen and I were alone, we’d talk about Dad and Nancy, and what it would be like if the two of them got married. By that time, Mom had sent Maureen and me to Chadwick, a private boarding school, so for most of the year I didn’t have much of a home life. I didn’t even get to see Maureen very much because she was four grades ahead of me. (I didn’t know then that I would spend most of my early years in boarding school and my summers at summer camp; only when I became an adult did I realize that because Mom was a working actress and a single mother, she really had no choice.) At night in the dorm, I’d lay awake, imagining how it would be if Dad and Nancy got married. In my childish naïveté, I pictured myself moving in with them, escaping from boarding school, and finally having a normal home life like families on television.
Dad never raised his hand to us and rarely raised his voice. He had an unusual parenting style: he wouldn’t spank or scold—he’d tell a story. He spoke in parables—and he hoped you would connect the dots and get the point of the story. My father was the kind of guy who, if you asked him for the time, would tell you how the watch is made. That was his approach to parenting—and as we will later see, he approached politics the same way.
I didn’t fear my father, but I respected him. I frequently disobeyed him behind his back, but I never defied him to his face. When he caught me doing something wrong, he’d give me that Ronald Reagan frown, and I’d instantly feel guilty. I almost never went to him with problems because our time together was too brief and I didn’t want to say anything to upset him. I also knew that Dad and Mom had an understanding, and I was afraid that if I shared something with Dad, he’d feel obligated to report it to Mom.
At Chadwick, I appeared in a school play just before Memorial Day weekend. I had to wear a monkey costume, which was hot and made me feel sick. After the play, Dad and Nancy drove me home. I sat in the backseat of Dad’s convertible and felt sicker and sicker until I turned around, leaned over the backseat, and threw up. My stomach contents ended up in that recessed area that the car top folds into. I’m sure that when Dad discovered the mess, he figured out who did it—but he never said a word to me.
When Mom wasn’t working, she’d bring me home for the weekend. Sunday evenings, when I returned to Chadwick, we had a tradition: Mom would take me out for dinner at the Brown Derby, and I would order my usual avocado cocktail. (My mother was a longtime friend of the Brown Derby owners Bob and Sally Cobb—the originators of the Cobb salad—and she wrote the foreword to Sally Cobb’s memoir and recipe book, The Brown Derby Restaurant: A Hollywood Legend).
In the late 1950s, Mom was very busy with a weekly drama series on NBC, Jane Wyman Presents. On weekends when she was working and Maureen and I couldn’t go home, Dad would bring Nancy to Chadwick for a visit. I lived for those visits and reveled in our time together. As the visit was coming to an end, I’d feel a sense of melancholy setting in. When I watched Dad and Nancy drive away, the loneliness was almost unbearable.
Dad and Nancy were married on March 4, 1952, at the Little Brown Church in the Valley, a chapel in Studio City—but their marriage didn’t change my life the way I hoped it would. I continued going to boarding school, and I didn’t move in with Dad and Nancy. My father did the best he could to stay involved with Maureen and me. In fact, no one ever worked harder at staying involved with the children of his first marriage than Dad. And while it was hard for me to live in a home without my Dad, he was there on the weekends without fail. He tried hard to be a good father to all four of his children.
In November 1952, when I was seven, Mom also remarried. She had been dating a Hollywood bandleader, Fred Karger. Fred had composed the music for such films as From Here to Eternity, Magnificent Obsession, Gidget, and a string of Elvis Presley movies. One day, when his daughter Terry was visiting with us, our housekeeper, Carrie, called Maureen, Terry, and me together and gave us all handfuls of rice—then she told us to wait on the front porch. We said, “What’s this all about?” Carrie said, “You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, Freddy and Mom pulled up in his black 1956 Thunderbird. Mom got out of the car and said, “Good morning, children. Meet your new father!” That was Mom’s tongue-in-cheek way of announcing that she and Fred were now married—they had eloped to Santa Barbara. We didn’t need to “meet” Fred—he had been coming around for more than a year. Maureen and I already knew Fred very well, and we liked him. Fred was a good guy.
As Fred and Mom approached the front door, Carrie signaled us to throw the rice. As they walked through the door, Fred asked, “Where’s the toothache medicine?” (Translation: Where’s the scotch?) We told him, “You know where it is, Fred. Same place it’s been every other time you come here!”
My mother and Fred were married for three years and then divorced in December 1955. They married again in March 1961 and divorced in March 1965. Fred and Mom were two people who loved each other but couldn’t live with each other.
Fred’s daughter, Terry, is still a dear friend of mine today. I kid her and call her my stepsister twice removed. (Terry and Marilyn Monroe were best friends, and she’s writing a book about their friendship.)
Now it did bother me somewhat that Mom said that Fred would be my “new father.” I already had a father, and no one could replace him. As it turned out, Fred didn’t try to replace my father. My relationship with Dad continued pretty much as before, and he still came by every other Saturday to take us to the ranch.
On trips to the ranch, I watched Dad and learned from him. I’d see him working with his hands, cutting wood or fixing fences—and I admired his strength. He taught me how to ride horses and how to shoot a gun. He taught me not to lie or cut corners or take the easy way out. When I asked questions, he always had an answer that made sense.
I studied him in those unguarded moments when he didn’t know I was watching. I made sure his deeds matched his words. I measured myself against the example he set, and I realized I had a lot of growing to do. I wanted to be like him, and I wanted him to be proud of me.
Dad seemed to understand that I was dealing with a lot of confusion and conflicting loyalties because of the divorce and remarriages. I often say that a divorce is where two adults, a mom and a dad, take everything that’s important to a child—home, family, security—and smash it to pieces. Then they walk away and expect the child to put it all back together. Well, I wasn’t putting things together very well—and my father could see that.
One day, Dad did something amazing: he invited Fred to come out to the Malibu ranch. Looking back with an adult perspective, I can see what a wise gesture that was. Dad wanted to show me that he and Fred could get along. So Fred joined us for a day of hiking, riding, and four-wheeling around the ranch. Seeing Dad and Fred having a great time together made me feel happier than I had felt in months.
Later, as Fred and I drove home together, he leaned over and said, “Let’s not tell your mother how much fun we had, OK?”
“Why?”
“Well—it would only upset her.”
So I agreed, and I said nothing to Mom about our day.
I loved my dad—but sometimes I wondered if he really loved me. He didn’t do the things with me that other kids got to do. He never took me to a baseball game, a football game, or Disneyland. And the irony is that Dad helped open Disneyland—but he didn’t take me. On July 17, 1955, Dad was one of three celebrity emcees Walt Disney chose to host a live ABC telecast of Disneyland’s opening day. The other two were Art Linkletter and Robert Cummings.
I was ten years old at the time, and I would have loved to be at Disneyland on opening day. But I was home with Mom, watching the Disneyland special on television along with the rest of America. (However, in June 1959, my mother took me to Disneyland for the opening day of the Matterhorn Bobsleds—one of the best memories of my boyhood.)
I once kidded my father and said, “Hey, Dad—remember that day you and Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings opened up Disneyland?”
“Well, yes.”
“At any time that day, did you think, ‘I should have brought the kids’?”
“Well . . . no. It didn’t occur to me.”
“I didn’t think so.”
I was kidding—but I was also hurt. To Dad, opening Disneyland was a job. He was working, he was performing in front of the camera. He didn’t take his children to the movie set or the TV studio, so why should the Disneyland telecast be any different? But all I could see were the happy kids jumping aboard the Disneyland railroad, or running through the Fantasyland castle. And I couldn’t help wondering why I wasn’t one of those kids.
I’m glad I learned to understand my dad’s thinking as I grew older. A lot of “Beverly Hills brats” never understood why their parents made the choices they did. Many of them stayed angry with their parents, or used their parents as the excuse for their failure in life, or spent everything they had on therapy, booze, and drugs, or wrote bitter, hateful tell-all books.
Dad did everything he could to show me he loved me. To him, taking me to the ranch was the equivalent of taking me to a football game or a theme park. He assumed I’d understand that he couldn’t go out in public without being mobbed. But I didn’t understand at all—not until I was much older.
In my early twenties, hoping to win Dad’s approval, I became a powerboat racer. I was inboard rookie of the year in 1966, outboard world champion in 1967, and I set five world records in the 1980s. I raised almost $2 million for charitable causes, including Cystic Fibrosis, the 1984 Olympics, and the Statue of Liberty Foundation.
In 1969, while racing in the Speed Classic Circuit at Offats Bayou near Galveston, Texas, my twenty-foot Raysoncraft boat exploded, throwing me forty feet in the air. A rescue boat fished me out of the bayou, and I was fortunate to be alive.
Dad called me the next day and said, “Michael, you might consider selling boats instead of racing boats—it’s a lot safer.” A couple of years later, I took his advice and got a job selling boats.
Once, when I was in my late twenties, Dad called me at Harrison Boat Center, where I sold Sea Ray boats. He asked me to come to his office in Los Angeles because he needed—are you ready for this?—parenting advice. My brother Ron was a teenager at the time, and he was rebellious and angry. “Mike,” Dad said, “you’re closer in age to Ron than I am, so maybe you can tell me what his problem is.”
On my way to Dad’s office, I wondered, What do I say? I had a good idea what the problem was, but how should I tell Dad? I remembered how he always used stories and object lessons to make his point with me. I decided to use an object lesson to help him understand Ron’s problem.
Arriving in Dad’s office, I said, “I think I can help you with this. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.”
He looked at me as if to say, All right, where is this leading? Then he took a piece of paper and drew the line.
“Okay,” I said. “On the left side of the line, write the word ‘Football.’ On the right side, write the word ‘Baseball.’”
And he did.
“Now,” I said, “under ‘Football,’ write down the number of times you’ve taken Ron to a football game. Under ‘Baseball,’ write the number of times you’ve taken him to a baseball game.”
Dad frowned at the paper; then he looked up at me—but he didn’t write anything. He couldn’t. “Michael,” Dad said with a stricken expression, “you’re right. I’ve never taken either of you boys to any games.”
“Well, that’s the problem,” I said. “Dad, you need to sit Ron down and explain why. You’ve always taken us to the ranch to do what you wanted to do—and don’t get me wrong, we like going to the ranch. But a boy Ron’s age likes football and baseball like other kids do.”
“Thank you, Michael. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
Dad didn’t make excuses. He listened. He genuinely wanted to be a good father to all of his kids—from both marriages.
Fathers and sons make each other proud. But fathers and sons also disappoint and misunderstand each other. That’s why we need to honestly face the past, including our failures. When fathers and sons can tell each other the truth, seek each other’s counsel, and truly forgive each other, they make the bonds of love even stronger than before.
It took a lot of years for me to see how hard my father worked at being a father to all of his children—to Maureen and me, as well as to Patti and Ron. It took me a long time to gain an adult perspective on my childhood losses and hurts. It took me a long time to really understand how much Dad loved me and how many sacrifices he made for me.
Most of the questions I had about my relationship with Dad weren’t answered until very late in our relationship. In fact, I never even told him I had these questions about our relationship until 1988, the last year of his second term as president. What made those issues finally come into focus for me—and for him? I wrote a book.
The process of working on my first book, On the Outside Looking In, forced me to look back over my life and to take a good, hard look at my childhood. It forced me to reexamine many of the immature attitudes and assumptions I had held since I was a boy. And it forced Dad and me to finally talk about issues we had never discussed before.
During the process of writing that book, I visited Dad and Nancy in the residence quarters of the White House. We had dinner together, then Nancy retired for the evening and my father and I had a chance to talk. Dad recalled that conversation sometime later when he wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of my book:
It was a conversation we should have had years and years ago; too much had been left unsaid on both our parts—but the important thing is that we finally did have the chance to open up to each other, Michael to unburden himself of years of doubt and self-recrimination, I to say things I always assumed he knew.
Traveling back in my mind to Michael’s babyhood, seeing again his impish, angelic smile and recalling his unlimited energy, I now realize that many adopted children do see themselves as different. . . . As a parent then, I didn’t know how Michael felt inside. To me, he was my adorable little son, and from the moment he first smiled at me, I never recalled he was adopted. I loved him as I did my other children.
We, as parents, must always strive to communicate with our children, to let them know there is nothing they cannot tell us, to let them know our love will always be with them. . . .
Michael, whatever happens, always know I love you.2
I know, Dad. I really do know.
My father tried to show his love for me by spending as much time with me as he could. Sure, it would’ve been great fun to sit in the stands with him and watch a football game—but would that have been better than the times we spent bouncing around the ranch in his Jeep? Could I learn more about life from thrill rides in Disneyland—or by watching him cut wood and train his horses at the ranch?
Dad proved his love to me again and again throughout my life. I’m glad I finally grew up enough to see it.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that twenty-four million children in America—that’s one-third of all American kids—live in homes without their biological father.3 That’s twenty-four million kids who, at this very moment, are suffering the same insecurity and uncertainty I felt throughout my early years. That’s twenty-four million kids who are going to bed without daddy reading to them and tucking them in at night, who have no male role model in the home, and who are not being taught how a man should treat a woman or how a father should love his kids.
Adults look at divorce and remarriage through grown-up eyes. They don’t stop to think about how this all looks from a child’s perspective. As moms and dads, we often get so caught up in our “needs” and our “rights,” in our arguing and defending ourselves, that we don’t stop to consider the frightened little child huddled in the corner.
Dad didn’t understand everything I was going through, but he tried. I know he worked hard at making it up to my sister and me. He never forgot his first family after he remarried and started a second family.
Here, then, are some lessons I have learned from being the son of Ronald Reagan:
Love your family. And remember, love isn’t just a feeling—love is a verb, an action word. Dad demonstrated his love for Maureen and me through his actions, by spending as much time with us as he could, by going out of his way to visit us at boarding school, and by being a friend, guide, and mentor to me.
Love means understanding—and Dad worked hard at understanding his kids. Looking back, I realize how hard Dad tried to understand me and what I was going through—just as he tried to understand my brother Ron. True, Dad didn’t realize how much I wanted to be at Disneyland on opening day—but he understood the conflicting loyalties I felt, and he put me at ease by inviting Mom’s new husband, Fred, out to the ranch.
And family love is a two-way street. As children, we need to love our parents by understanding them—and yes, forgiving them. Mom and Dad made many sacrifices for me that I just wasn’t aware of. I went to school with Bob Hope’s kids and Bing Crosby’s kids, and we were all going through the same issues. We all hated being at boarding school, and we wondered if our parents really loved us. We didn’t know that all the actors and actresses in the Hollywood community talked to each other at cocktail parties and asked each other questions like, “Where are you sending your kids? Oh, that’s a fine school. We’ll send our kids there, too.”
When I became an adult, I was able to look back and realize that Mom didn’t send me to boarding schools because she didn’t love me. She sent me to the best schools because she loved me very much. Mom worked very long hours in a demanding industry, so she sent me to some excellent schools—but I didn’t want to be in the best boarding schools. I wanted to be with my family. That’s understandable. But the decisions my mother made were also understandable, once I became an adult.
We can sit and stew in our childhood anger, blaming our parents for all our problems. We can use them as an excuse for our own failures. Or we can choose to understand and forgive them, and we can thank them for the sacrifices they made out of their love for us. I’m glad I was able to understand, forgive, and appreciate my parents before it was too late. When I forgave my mom and dad, my eyes opened wide and I could see their greatness and I could feel their love—and I finally knew how fortunate I was to be the son of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.
Say “I love you” out loud. My father came from a generation in which men didn’t say “I love you” to their kids. Dad told me he envied the freedom I had to show affection to my son Cameron and my daughter Ashley. In his day, fathers didn’t spend “quality time” with their children, and they didn’t give hugs to their sons. Late in life, he managed to overcome those inhibitions and became a man who could express affection without embarrassment.
People can change. How about you? I know you love your family—but does your family know it? Have you told your kids you love them? Have you shown your love through your hugs, your touch, your words of affection and affirmation? If you are not telling your children you love them, if you are not giving them hugs and affirmation, you should ask yourself who is giving them the love they need. Trust me, if they aren’t receiving love from you, they will find it someplace else. Don’t wait—tomorrow might be too late. Tell your kids you love them, and show them you mean it.
Listen to your family. I’m grateful that when I was ready to talk to my father about those childhood issues, he was willing to listen. He even came to me and asked me for help in understanding my brother Ron. Dad was a good listener, and that’s why he was a great leader and a great father. When I would ask Dad questions, he’d always look me in the eye so that I knew he was listening and taking my questions seriously.
Listening is a learnable skill. A lot of people who think they are good listeners really aren’t. If your kids are talking to you and you’re looking at your phone and checking your texts or social media, you’re not really listening. You have to put the phone down and really give them 100 percent of your attention. Give them a nod, a smile, an arm around the shoulder, and some verbal feedback so they’ll really know you’re hearing them. And please, turn off the phone during meal times and family times.
Make time for your family. Dad had a busy schedule when I was growing up. He didn’t “find time” to spend with me—he made time. He set aside as much time as he possibly could so that he could be a strong and loving influence in Maureen’s life and mine. In the eyes of a child, love isn’t spelled l-o-v-e. It’s spelled t-i-m-e. If you want your children to know you love them, spend time with them.
Dad wasn’t a perfect father, but he was a good father, and he understood the importance of spending time with his kids. It’s impossible to put a price tag on the memories I have of all the weekends I spent at the ranch with my father. Looking back at those happy times, I realize that they spell l-o-v-e—a father’s love—in my life. I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the gold in the world.
I remember the day my father left office, January 20, 1989. I was at home in California, sitting with my wife Colleen and watching television. On the screen, Dad stood at the door of the presidential helicopter, Marine One, delivering a final salute and a wave. Then he stepped inside. Soon he would board the presidential airplane for his last flight from Andrews Air Force Base to California. I thought of how intense and all-consuming my father’s schedule had been during the eight years of his presidency and how little I had seen him during his White House years.
As I watched Marine One carry my father off the White House lawn and into the sky, I came to a decision. I turned to Colleen and said, “I’ve done my last weekend, Colleen. I will never give another speech or do another event on the weekend unless you approve it. I will be at home with you and the kids every Saturday and Sunday. Weekends are family time. That’s my promise to you.”
Why did I make that promise to Colleen at that particular moment? On one level, I was so proud of my father and all he had accomplished as president. But at the same time, I was keenly aware of all that his presidency had cost our family. Everyone in the Reagan family had sacrificed. Everyone had paid a price during the eight years we had shared Dad with the world.
Being a politician is a good news / bad news proposition. The good news is that you won the election—and the bad news is that you won the election. As soon as you win, your life is not your own. People start tugging at you. Events take over your life. You must speak at this fund-raiser, attend that dinner, and preside over those meetings. There’s an old political adage: if the party had wanted you to have a family, it would have issued you one when you signed up.
People often ask, “What were the best times you ever had with your father?” I answer, “The times before he got into politics. After he entered political life, he just didn’t have as much time as he used to.”
Another question people often ask is, “Why are Ron and Patti so liberal? Why are your brother and sister so different from you and your dad?” It’s a good question, and I have thought about it a lot over the years. The fact is, Ron and Patti both loved our father, yet they never voted for him. As I often say when I speak to adoption groups, if Ronald Reagan had not adopted me as his son, he would have been the only conservative in the family! My sister Maureen, with her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, was more of a moderate Republican than a conservative. Nancy was always trying to get Dad to moderate his positions and move to the political center. Of all his family members, I was the only one who was truly a Reagan conservative.
I was born in 1945, so I got to spend more than twenty years with my father before he ever campaigned for political office. I was able to spend weekends with him at the ranch, ride horses with him, shoot ground squirrels with him, go swimming in the pool at the ranch, and spend all those hours in the car with him, talking to him or listening to him sing patriotic songs. Dad would have the car radio tuned to Chuck Cecil’s Swingin’ Years, and I’d keep switching it over to The Beach Boys. Those were great times with Dad—and Maureen had four more years of those times than I did.
It was different for Patti, who was born in 1952, and Ron, born in 1958. Patti was thirteen when Dad got into politics and Ron was about seven. Both were at a vulnerable age when the Republican Party took their father away from them. Instead of weekend trips to the ranch with his children, Dad was attending political luncheons and cocktail receptions. His new family consisted of his staff, his advisers, and his constituents. He did what he could to spend time with his children, but the reality is that a political career is all-consuming. Who suffered? Patti and Ron.
So it’s understandable that Patti would be liberal—because in her mind, the conservatives, the Republicans, took her father away from her. The party of “family values” robbed her of time with her father. And it’s understandable that Ron would be a liberal and an atheist, because who were Ronald Reagan’s biggest supporters? The Moral Majority—conservative Christians. It’s not hard to see why Ron might blame Christianity for taking his father from him.
I’m who I am, in no small part, because of the things that happened to me as a child—both the good things and the bad things. And you, the person reading this book, are shaped in many ways by the things that have happened to you when you were a child. That doesn’t mean you have no free will. That doesn’t mean you can’t change, can’t grow, can’t be healed of old wounds. It simply means that the events of your past still affect you in the present—and will continue to influence you in the future.
When I was growing up, I was separated from my parents by divorce and boarding school. When Ron and Patti were growing up, they were separated from their parents by the Republican Party, Christian conservatives, and politics. And they were angry. And they refused to vote for my father because they didn’t want him to win. The country wanted a president, not a dad—but Ron and Patti wanted a dad, not a president.
This is my theory about our family dynamics. I haven’t discussed this theory with Ron and Patti, and I don’t know if they would agree. I can only say that this is the truth as I see it. It becomes easier to understand our family when we look at some of the wounds each family member suffered in their childhood. It becomes easier to forgive, easier to stop being angry, and easier to accept one another.
Dad was aware of the toll that politics took on our family life. He believed in what he was doing for America, but he understood that the demands of his political life stole time from his family. I remember how, during the 1980 campaign, he made a point of picking up the phone and calling Maureen and me at various times just to stay in touch. Dad’s example spoke to me and convinced me that I needed to be more protective of the precious time I have with my wife and children.
So on January 20, 1989, as I watched Marine One take my father away from the White House and into the mists of history, I turned to my wife and made a solemn promise to honor our family. And she will tell you that I kept that promise. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I have given a speech or made a personal appearance on a weekend since I made that vow. The few times I was away on a Saturday or Sunday, I did so with Colleen’s blessing and approval. If she had said no, I would not have gone.
I want my wife and children to always know that I love them. I want them to never have any doubts. The first lesson my father taught me was one of the most crucial of all: love your family.