THE MARCH 30, 1981, ASSASSINATION attempt nearly ended my father’s life. It also left three other people severely wounded. A few days after that attempt, Dad recorded his thoughts of that day in his diary. It wasn’t until his diaries were published in 2007 that I read this entry:
Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.1
When those thoughts were going through his mind, Dad had a bullet lodged about a quarter of an inch from his heart. For all he knew, that gurney could have been his deathbed. Yet his chief concern was forgiveness for the young gunman who had shot him.
I visited my father in the hospital after the surgery, and he told me he believed God had spared him for a purpose. “Michael,” he said, “I’m committing the rest of my presidency to God.”
In June 1982, Dad visited the Vatican and met with Pope John Paul II. What did these two men have to talk about? What did they have in common? They shared a special bond—both had recently survived assassination attempts. The pope had been shot by a Turkish gunman six weeks after the attack on my father. Both the pope and the president had had come within inches of death—and both freely forgave their attackers. Because they both exemplified forgiveness, their leadership was blessed. Freedom ultimately came to Poland, the land of the pope’s birth. And the Berlin Wall that Ronald Reagan had hated for years ultimately came down. Neither man demanded credit. Both acted in humility and forgiveness—and the world became freer as a result.
Many of us can recite The Lord’s Prayer—“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”2 Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II lived The Lord’s Prayer. Both men expressed forgiveness for their attackers even before they left the hospital. I believe that’s why God used them to change the world.
In 1983, my father reached out to Dr. Roger Peele, head of psychiatry at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Dad’s attacker was confined after being found “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Dad wanted to meet privately with the young man and express his forgiveness in person, but he didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the young man’s treatment. Dr. Peele recommended against a meeting, fearing it might diminish his patient’s sense of responsibility. So the meeting never took place. But I was impressed that my father wanted to take that extra step and express his forgiveness man-to-man. Dad’s ability to forgive the troubled young gunman made a huge impression on me.
Forgiveness wasn’t just a one-time event in my father’s life. Like his traits of compassion, humility, and generosity, the trait of forgiveness was an ongoing theme of his life.
It’s no secret that the Reagan family experienced its share of dysfunctional behavior. For example, my sister Patti was involved in the nuclear freeze movement and she organized protests against Dad’s strategic policies. She also wrote a scathing tell-all book in 1992 that she later disavowed (she has since written two loving tributes to my father, The Long Goodbye and Angels Don’t Die). Dad was frustrated by her political activities and hurt by her first book, but he never held a grudge. At Thanksgiving dinner, we all sat at the same table, we ate from the same turkey, and we were a family. A few years after Dad passed away, Patti wrote:
My father, for his part, was not a man to begrudge anyone a divergent opinion; he’d have been fine if I had written some articles disagreeing with his policies, or even given interviews, as long as I was respectful and civil. But I chose stridency instead. . . . I was a child railing against a parent, nothing more. . . .
Decades later I would look into my father’s eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer’s with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.3
And let’s face it, there were some things in my first book, On the Outside Looking In, that must have been difficult for Dad to read—yet he wrote a very gracious and loving foreword for the paperback edition of that book.
Conservative journalist Patrick B. McGuigan once wrote a book about the Reagan administration’s failed attempt to confirm Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court—and that book included a number of harsh criticisms of my father. Dad read the book, then wrote a public letter urging conservatives to study McGuigan’s book and learn the lessons so that the next conservative nominee would be confirmed.
McGuigan was amazed that my father forgave him for what he wrote in the book, and observed, “That was classic Reagan. He never held a grudge. It served him well in a profession where grudge-holding has defined too many. . . . He was the gentlest of souls after political conflicts.”4
It’s true. Dad regularly forgave his many political opponents. He forgave George H. W. Bush, who attacked Dad’s economic policies as “voodoo economics,” and he brought Bush aboard as his running mate. He even forgave the vicious attacks from Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill and managed to win their support for many of his most important policy initiatives.
I studied the way my father responded to his would-be assassin; his political rivals and enemies; and yes, his often ungrateful and ungracious children, and I learned lessons in forgiveness that have impacted my life in a powerful way. Why was my father always so positive and optimistic despite all the obstacles and opposition he faced? Without any doubt, it’s because he had learned the secret of forgiveness.
For most of my life, I had hated myself for being molested. I carried around an enormous load of rage, guilt, and fear. My wife Colleen knew I was struggling with a terrible inner conflict, but she didn’t know what it was. I had never told her about the molestation. I was scared to death that she would hate me and leave me if she ever found out. So Colleen could only pray for me and ask God to heal me. Thank God, he honored and answered my wife’s prayers.
One day, with Colleen at my side, I went down on my knees beside my bed and prayed, “God, forgive me, make me clean, take over my life.” And in the days that followed, a change took place in my life. I felt forgiven and accepted at last—and my anger began to melt away. On Father’s Day 1985, Colleen and I were baptized together at Faith Church in the San Fernando Valley. Colleen had been baptized years earlier, and I had been baptized as a child into the Catholic Church, but we wanted to be baptized together.
That was the turning point of my life. God has been reshaping and rebuilding my life ever since. But even though I had turned a spiritual corner, I still had a lot of residue from the old life inside me. I saw my past through the eyes of a child—and I blamed God and Mom and Dad for the problems in my life.
I hadn’t told anyone, not even Colleen, about the molestation. And I intended to take that secret to my grave.
But God had other plans.
In early 1987, a publisher offered a huge sum of money for me to write a book about my life in the Reagan family. There was one huge condition: it had to be a revealing tell-all book—one of those scandal books in which Hollywood children tell the world what miserable parents they had. In 1978, Christina Crawford, daughter of actress Joan Crawford, had shredded her late mother’s reputation in Mommie Dearest, a runaway bestseller that was made into a movie. In 1983, Gary Crosby had published a similar tell-all, Going My Own Way, about his late father, Bing Crosby.
Here I was, with the offer of a huge advance on the table—and all I had to do to claim that money was to blow up the reputation of Dad, Nancy, and my mother, Jane Wyman. It was a tremendous temptation. I was working hard, struggling to make ends meet—but I could cure all my financial woes with one book.
But what about the truth?
Dad had taught me to speak the truth and live the truth. Could I write a book about my life and leave out the truth about the molestation? If I didn’t mention what the pedophile had done to me, the book would be a big lie.
Yet I didn’t dare mention the molestation. I had kept that secret from a psychiatrist, a priest, and even my own wife. I sure wasn’t about to tell the whole world in a book!
I decided to take the easy way out. I would tell my story, but leave out the molestation. I would blame all my problems on my parents, on the divorce, on boarding school. And after selling out my parents for cold hard cash, I would put that money in the bank and never have to work again.
After all, I had been blaming God and Mom and Dad for my problems throughout my life. Why not blame them in a book and get paid for it?
Looking back, I’m amazed that I was ready to betray my parents. I’d had a life-changing encounter with God—yet, like Judas, I was willing to sell out Mom and Dad for cash.
How could I do that?
I remember my mind-set at the time. I wanted to follow God, but I also wanted that money, and above all else, I had to keep my darkest secret hidden.
The publisher put me together with writer Joe Hyams, a syndicated Hollywood columnist who had interviewed such celebrities as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn. Before the publisher would pay out such a large advance, the editors wanted to see a thirty-page treatment so they’d know what they were getting for their money. So Joe and I met together to hammer out the treatment.
We met at Joe’s house, and he spent a lot of hours asking questions and recording my conversation. I knew I would have to give him material that would make Dad and other family members look bad. That’s the essence of a tell-all book. I wasn’t planning to tell an outright lie or make anything up. But I was prepared to make the facts seem as scandalous as possible.
As Joe interviewed me, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was an attack of conscience. Maybe it was God trying to get through to me. It was as if a voice inside me said, “Michael, what are you doing? The story you’re telling isn’t true—and you know it. By leaving out the key truth—the molestation—you’re turning this book into a pack of lies. Stop lying. Tell the truth.”
I couldn’t go on. I broke down and began to cry uncontrollably. Poor Joe! He had no idea what I was going through, so my emotional breakdown seemed to come right out of the blue. He leaned away from me and said, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t do it, Joe. I just can’t do it.”
As my writing partner, Joe Hyams was to receive half the advance and royalties from the book—so when I said, “I can’t do it,” he was thinking, There goes a ton of money, right out the window. He said, “What do you mean, you can’t do it?”
“I can’t do this to my parents,” I said. “I can’t write a book that blames them for all my problems. It’s not their fault. They never knew what happened to me.”
“What happened to you?”
I took a deep breath—then I told him the story of how a day camp counselor repeatedly molested me when I was in the third grade. I didn’t go into all the details, but I told him how the memories, the fear, and the guilt had affected my relationships with everybody in my life.
“Joe,” I said, “if I write a book blaming Mom and Dad for all my problems, it’ll be a lie. I can’t do that.”
“Who else have you told about this?”
“No one. You’re the first person I’ve told. Even my wife doesn’t know.”
“You need to tell her. Let’s sleep on this and talk tomorrow.”
I left Joe’s house and drove home, determined to finally tell Colleen about my past. We had been married for twelve years, and I owed her the truth. If I didn’t tell her that night, I might never work up the nerve again. I arrived home and found Colleen in the kitchen. “Honey,” I said, “we’ve got to talk.”
We went into the living room and sat together on the couch. I took her hand and said, “I’ve got to tell you something about my life—something I’ve never told you before. And I’m going to write a book about it.”
Then I told her the story of how the man molested me, took pictures of me, controlled me, and blackmailed me. I had told Joe Hyams a sketchy version of the story, but Colleen was the first to hear the details. I was scared to death. She held my life in her hands, and everything depended on what she would say after hearing me out.
For all I knew, she’d be disgusted—and she’d want to end the marriage. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit. I blamed myself for what happened to me—and hated myself for it.
I finished and I waited for her reaction. She put her arms around me, cradled my head, and told me over and over in a soothing voice, “I love you, Michael. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
For the first time in my life, someone knew my secret—and still loved me. For the first time, I truly felt loved.
I knew that Mom, Dad, Colleen, and the kids all loved me. But they didn’t know my secret. I always felt that, if they knew, they could never love me. At last, it wasn’t a secret anymore—and Colleen still loved me.
Now the healing could begin.
On Sunday, April 12, 1987, Colleen and I took the kids to Dad’s Santa Barbara ranch to celebrate our daughter Ashley’s fourth birthday. And I had another reason for visiting Dad and Nancy. While Colleen took Cameron and Ashley to the corral to see the horses, I walked with Dad and Nancy to the edge of Lake Lucky—the pond where Dad took Nancy for canoe rides.
When the three of us reached the water’s edge, Nancy broke the silence. “Michael,” she said, “we know you’re writing a book. What’s in the book that we should know about?”
I tried to look them in the eye, but I couldn’t. All I could do was look at Dad’s belt buckle and his boots. I took a deep breath—then I began telling them the story. They needed to know exactly what that child molester did to me, so I explained it in blunt terms.
As the story came out of me, everything came out of me. I was crying and I was throwing up, and it was all landing on my dad’s boots. I thought, Dad, don’t look down at your boots or you’ll be really mad at me. Because I’m really ruining your boots. It’s funny the things you think about such times.
I kept talking, and I didn’t dare stop or I might never get it all out. I didn’t know how Dad and Nancy would take it. I fully expected my father to hate me and turn away from me. Finally, I got it all said, and I fell silent.
Dad was angry. “Where is the guy? I’ll kick his butt!”
“Honey,” Nancy said, “he probably doesn’t have a butt anymore.” I think Nancy thought that, after so many years, the molester was probably dead.
To my amazement, Dad and Nancy were as understanding as Colleen had been.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Dad said. “If you had told me back then, I would’ve done something.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t like me anymore.”
“Oh, Michael,” Dad said gently. “You should have known better.”
Yes, I should have known. My father had always been understanding, forgiving, and protective. If I had told Dad at the time, he would have made sure that the man would never hurt me—or any other boy—again.
But I had been tricked by the abuser’s lies. He knew how to keep me under his control—and how to put a wall of fear and guilt between my parents and me. He had used fear and guilt to keep me silent all these years.
For much of my life, Dad had wondered why I was so angry all the time. He had been baffled by my rebellion and rage. He had wondered if he’d failed me somehow. For the first time, the secret was out, and our relationship as father and son finally made sense.
I had kept that secret inside me until I was forty-two years old. And it wasn’t until I let go of that secret that I was finally able to see all the good things my father and my mother tried to do in my life. And I thank God that I was finally able to unburden myself and see how God had used Dad and Mom to bless my life.
I still struggle with what it means to live out the kind of forgiveness my father showed to the man who shot him. I still struggle daily to live out The Lord’s Prayer—“forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Does that mean I have to forgive the man who molested me when I was a child? Yes, it does. But what does forgiveness mean when we’re talking about a monster who destroys the lives of children?
Forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing what he did. It doesn’t mean pretending it never happened. It doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be arrested, prosecuted, and punished as harshly as the law allows. Forgiveness simply means that I let go of the right to resentment and revenge. It means I leave him to God’s judgment. My decision to forgive benefits me and liberates me, not the child molester.
The man who molested me died in February 2008. For decades, I had lived in fear that the pictures he took of me would become public. After his death, his sister-in-law wrote to me and told me he was dead. She said, “He was as evil the day he died as he was when he molested you. But rest assured, all the pictures he possessed have been destroyed.” When I read the letter, I was glad to know that the pictures were gone and glad that he could never hurt any more children. But I didn’t feel vindictive. I had moved on.
According to The Lord’s Prayer, I can forgive—I must forgive—those who do harm to me. But I don’t have the right or the power to forgive what a child molester does to other children. It’s simply not my place to forgive what one person does to another person. It’s not my place to forgive what Hitler did to the Jews, or what ISIS is doing to people across the Middle East. Only God has the right to judge sin or forgive sin in that broad sense. All I can do—all God expects me to do—is to let go of bitterness toward those who hurt me.
Forgiveness is not something you do once and for all. When people have hurt us deeply, the hurt keeps coming back, and we have to forgive them again and again. We have to let go of resentment again and again. We may think, “I forgave that person. It’s over, it’s all in the past.” But then some reminder of the old hurt will resurface—and we’ll have to forgive all over again.
People often think that when you come out publicly and tell your story, you’re over it. But I’m not really over it. Whenever I feel that someone is attacking me or trying to corner me in some way, I’m a child again, being blackmailed by that pedophile. When people attacked me on my radio show or spewed hate on my Twitter feed or my Facebook page, I would take it personally. When I was involved in a tough contract negotiation, I unconsciously saw the person across the table as my molester, my attacker. I could really fly into a rage in my attorney’s office.
I’m still learning forgiveness from my father. People have said the most outrageous things about Ronald Reagan. They’ve lied about him, smeared him, assassinated his character, and attacked his reputation—yet I never saw my father lose his temper (unless you count the “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green” incident in 1980). Some of the things Sam Donaldson or The Washington Post said about Dad would keep Nancy up all night long—but he’d sleep like a baby. No matter what anyone said about him, he never took it personally.
And that’s what I’m still trying to learn from my father. He showed me how to forgive, but I haven’t mastered it. I haven’t figured it all out. I’m a work in progress.
Meanwhile, child molesters continue to prey on children. The average pedophile will victimize 260 children over a lifetime. And more than 90 percent of convicted child molesters will victimize more children after they are released from prison.5
If I had the power to write the laws affecting child molesters in America today, I would lift the statute of limitations off the crime of child molestation. I would not protect convicted child molesters from the natural consequences of their actions but would incarcerate them in the general population. And I would like to see the Catholic Church show leadership on this issue, demand harsh punishment of all offenders (including offenders who happen to be clergy), and make strides in protecting the innocence of children, as Jesus taught us to do.6
We have to do a better job of protecting children from these monsters. We have a lot of work to do.
When Joe Hyams informed the publisher about our planned content for the book, the huge advance offer came off the table. That was fine with me. Now that I was no longer hiding that secret, I just wanted to tell my story honestly.
So Joe and I hammered out a book about my adoption, my life in the Reagan family, and the molestation and the impact it had on my life. I called the book On the Outside Looking In, and it was published in early 1988, during the final year of my father’s presidency. The book quickly became a New York Times bestseller. The moment it was published, the news media combed it for juicy tidbits to use against Dad. I got to go on the Today Show and Larry King Live to talk about the stories in the book. Media attention subsided when reporters discovered it wasn’t another Mommie Dearest.
It was a liberating experience to tell my story. Secrets imprison us; the truth sets us free. For thirty-five years, I was in a prison of silence and fear. Once I let go of my secret, it lost its power over me.
Years ago, when I had my radio talk show, I talked on the air about the molestation. I said:
People sometimes tell me that, after all these years, those childhood hurts shouldn’t affect me anymore. And they really don’t, at least not very often. But when you have been keeping a secret for years, with no way of dealing with it and no one to talk to about it, something builds up inside you. I could compartmentalize it, but I couldn’t make it go away.
Sometimes I still get angry. I’ll be going along for a while and everything will be just fine—and then the moment I feel somebody pressuring me, those old feelings will come right back. Something that happened decades ago will affect me as if it happened just this morning.
After I shared those thoughts, I received a call on the air from a man who was probably in his fifties. He said, “Michael, the same thing that happened to you, happened to me. I was molested when I was a boy, but I never told anyone. That memory has been with me all my life. Tonight, I’m sitting in this chair and all I have is my dog.” At that point, he started to cry.
“I understand,” I said. “Believe me, I do.”
He composed himself and continued, “I lost my wife, I lost my kids, I lost everyone I ever cared about. You’re right, Michael. When you’ve been molested, it affects all your relationships. I’ve never told anyone about this, and I was never able to let it go. I let this secret destroy my whole life. When you told your story tonight, you gave me the courage to pick up the phone and finally tell someone what happened to me. I knew you would understand.”
I pray that this man will learn to forgive himself and receive God’s forgiveness, the way I have. I pray that he will continue to let go of his secret so that healing can come into his life.
I have learned from my father and from Colleen how to love and forgive others and how to forgive myself. Once I was able to unlock that secret, I began to move past the trauma of the molestation and toward a new relationship with my father.
To my amazement, I even found that God was able to bring something good out of that awful experience. While that doesn’t excuse what the molester did, it does show that God is able to bring his redemptive benefits into my life despite all that I suffered.
I discovered that I owe my personality—and possibly my success in radio and public speaking—to the hurt the molester inflicted on me. As a boy, I developed a gregarious, class-clown personality to hide the fear and rage inside me. Originally, my outgoing personality was a disguise. Today, it’s simply who I am. By the grace of God, I’ve found a pony buried in the manure pile of childhood abuse.
When my father lay on that hospital gurney, bleeding internally and struggling for breath, there was an excellent chance that he would die in the next few minutes or hours. What was at the forefront of his mind? Forgiveness.
Dad was well acquainted with The Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”—he took that prescription literally. If he was about to enter eternity, he wanted to go with his hands clean, his conscience clear, and his soul washed free of sin. So he began by forgiving the young man who shot him.
What if he had not forgiven his attacker? And what if Pope John Paul II hadn’t forgiven his? These two men, along with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Czech dissident Václav Havel, Poland’s Lech Wałęsa, and others, helped change the world and bring down the Soviet Empire. Would Dad and the pope have succeeded if they had not been men of forgiveness? I don’t know.
But I do believe God honored their prayers of forgiveness when their lives were on the line. I believe God crowned them with success because they made themselves available as instruments of forgiveness. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from observing my father—lessons in how to forgive and how to be forgiven:
Don’t wait for an apology before you forgive. Dad prayed for his attacker within the same hour that he was shot. If he had waited for an apology, he would still be waiting. In all the years since that day, the man who shot my father has never expressed remorse for the attack.
If the person who hurt you apologizes, that’s great. That will make reconciliation much easier. But if that person never apologizes, you can still forgive. In fact, you owe it to yourself to forgive that person and get on with your life.
Try to understand. As a young man, I used every excuse to avoid recognizing how my father really felt about me. But a few years ago, I was going through some of Dad’s possessions, and I came across a war bond. During World War II, the government issued war bonds to finance the defense effort. These bonds were sold in banks and even in movie theaters. Many Hollywood personalities, including my mother and father, actively promoted the sale of war bonds to support the defense effort.
I saw that my father had purchased this bond in my name on March 18, 1945, the day I was born. Even before I was officially adopted, he bought this war bond as a “welcome to the family” gift. That piece of paper spoke volumes to me about how my father really felt about me when I was born.
My birth mother was an aspiring actress named Irene Flaugher, and my birth father was an Army corporal named John Bourgholtzer. When Irene became pregnant, John was stationed in Arizona. He gave four hundred dollars to Irene and told her, “Go to California and have the baby.” So I was born at the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles. Irene wanted me to have a good home, so she insisted on meeting my adoptive parents, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. Mom and Dad adopted me three days after my birth.
When I searched for my birth mother in 1987, I learned that she had kept a scrapbook of my life with clippings from movie magazines and newspapers, right up until her death on December 24, 1985. She never got to hear me say, “Thank you, Irene, for giving me life,” but I am very grateful and I honor her.
(By the way, both Flaugher and Bourgholtzer are German names. So I was born German, but three days later, I became Irish.)
I used to wonder why my birth mother gave me up for adoption. I wondered why she didn’t love me enough to keep me. I used to wonder if Mom and Dad loved me. Today, knowing what I know, I realize I was surrounded by love—but I didn’t know it. My birth mother sacrificed her happiness so that I could grow up in a two-parent family. And Mom and Dad showered me with love, but I wasn’t able to recognize it.
Only after I let go of my secret did I begin to understand all that my father did out of love for me. It has taken me decades to realize that he was continually trying to show me how much he loved me. I think a lot of people grow up angry with their parents because they are dealing with the same issues I was. If they could gain some adult perspective on their childhood, they might understand—and forgive.
In many ways, the art of forgiveness is really the art of understanding—of children understanding parents and of parents understanding children. My father was a master in the art of forgiveness. We, his children, dropped out of college, violated his rules, spoke out against him, and embarrassed him in many ways. And he always welcomed us, embraced us, and forgave us.
When I speak to pro-life groups, I often say, “Do you realize that 80 percent of abortions are performed on young women who profess to believe in God? We have to ask ourselves, ‘Why are our daughters having abortions?’ Maybe the answer is that we have told them, ‘Don’t you dare do anything to embarrass our family. Don’t you dare get pregnant outside of marriage. If you do, you won’t be welcome in this family.’”
Shouldn’t we be willing to get on the cross for our children’s sins, just as Christ died on the cross for ours? Shouldn’t we be willing to accept some embarrassment, some humiliation, in order to show our children we love them, accept them, and forgive them? How many of our daughters have we chased to an abortion clinic through our pride and lack of forgiveness?
If we parents would try to understand our children, if we children would try to understand our parents, I think we would find it easier to forgive.
Understand what forgiveness is—and what it isn’t. Forgiveness is a choice, not a feeling or an emotion. Forgiveness is a decision to give up the right to hurt the person who hurt me. When we forgive, we surrender the right to get even.
Another way of looking at forgiveness is that we are canceling a debt. That’s why Jesus, when he taught his disciples to pray, said, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” When we forgive, we wipe the slate clean.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning evil. When we forgive, we honestly and objectively say that sin is sin, evil is evil, wrong is wrong—but we choose not to hold onto our anger and resentment. The point of forgiveness is not to shield wrongdoers from the consequences of their sin, but to liberate ourselves from bitterness, so that we can get on with our lives.
When my father forgave the man who shot him, he let go of his own personal resentment toward the gunmen, his own right to get even. Dad canceled any debt the gunman owed him. Of course, the gunman had also wounded three other people and committed a crime. So the gunman owed a debt to those victims and to society. In forgiving that man, Dad didn’t cancel the gunman’s debt to anyone else or to society. The shooter was still accountable for his crime.
Once you understand what forgiveness is—and what it isn’t—you may find it easier to forgive.
Forgiving does not equal forgetting. There’s an old cliché—forgive and forget. Well, it’s not always possible to forget. But we can still forgive even when we can’t forget. The memory of the wrong someone did to you may always be there, but you can let go of the right to get even for it. If you don’t, you’ll remain stuck in bitterness and resentment—and you’ll always be an emotional hostage of the person who hurt you.
Don’t expect to forgive once and for all. If someone has hurt you deeply, the pain will surface again and again, and you will probably have to make the decision to forgive again and again as well. That’s normal and understandable.
Holding a grudge is easy. Forgiveness is hard. It takes a great deal of strength and toughness to forgive.
Being wronged is no excuse for doing wrong. The man who molested me is morally responsible for what he did to me. But I am morally responsible for what I do to others.
I recently talked to Boz Tchividjian, a former child abuse prosecutor who currently teaches Child Abuse and the Law at Liberty University School of Law. Boz is also the founder of GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), which educates the faith community in responding to sexual abuse—and he is a grandson of the Rev. Billy Graham.
I’m on the board of GRACE, and Boz and I were talking about the abuse I suffered as a child. I said, “Here’s what most adults don’t understand about child abuse. We look at abuse through the eyes of an adult, not the eyes of a child. And what do we always tell the child who is abused? We say, ‘You were a child. It wasn’t your fault.’ And that’s true as far as it goes. The guy who molested me was an adult, and what he did wasn’t my fault, it was his fault.
“But tell me this: Whose fault was it the way I treated my mother after that? Whose fault was it the way I treated my father? Whose fault was it that I acted out and was disruptive in school? Whose fault was it that I stole money from Dad’s wallet to pay for prostitutes on Saturday nights so I could prove to myself I wasn’t homosexual? You see, Boz, the first sin—the molestation—belongs to the perpetrator. But everything I did after that, I’m responsible for.”
Boz said, “I’ve never heard anybody put it that way.”
I think we are often so eager to comfort the child who has been abused that we are too quick to say, “Everything is the molester’s fault. Nothing is your fault.” And that’s simply not true. The fact that I was molested doesn’t excuse the sins I committed against Mom and Dad and others.
I think it is actually a healing and empowering experience for an abuse victim to say, “I am responsible for my own actions. Just because I’ve been hurt doesn’t mean I have to hurt others. Just because I was exploited doesn’t mean I have to hate others. The cycle of abuse ends with me. I am personally responsible for my own actions.”
Forgiveness does not equal reconciliation. Forgiving doesn’t mean that we condone what other people do. It doesn’t mean that there are no consequences for the other person. And it doesn’t mean we have to reconcile with, or become friends with, the person who wronged us. It just means we give up the right to retaliate.
Sometimes people are so troubled or mentally ill or obnoxious or just plain evil that it is impossible for us to be friends with them. But we can still forgive them. We can keep them at a distance so they won’t hurt us again, but we can give up our right to hate them and hold a grudge against them.
My father wanted a chance to tell the man who shot him that he forgave him, face-to-face. But the young man’s doctors said it would not be in his best interests. So it’s not always best to say to a person, “I forgive you.” But it’s always possible to make the choice to forgive that person within your own heart.
If you can express forgiveness to the other person, fine. If you can’t, that doesn’t take anything away from the forgiveness that you have experienced inside.
Forgive yourself. And let others forgive you. If you’re holding a secret you think no one could ever forgive, go to someone—a pastor, a priest, a counselor—and let that secret go. Forgiving yourself may be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. I know it wasn’t easy for my father to forgive himself for something that happened during his first term as president.
It took place at dawn on Sunday, October 23, 1983. A truck loaded with the equivalent of 21,000 pounds of TNT, driven by a suicide bomber, plowed into a U.S. Marine compound outside of Beirut, Lebanon. The bomb detonated, producing the largest nonnuclear blast since World War II. The explosion lifted the building off its foundation and collapsed it to a pile of smoking rubble. The attack killed 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. servicemen. It was the heaviest one-day death toll suffered by the Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima. My father called it the saddest day of his presidency, and perhaps of his life. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as he and Nancy passed by the rows of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base.
My father had sent those Marines, sailors, and soldiers to Beirut, and they had died there. And I know that one of the hardest things my father ever had to do was to forgive himself for those 241 deaths. I think many of us find it much easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves. I know that Dad internalized the blame for that loss of life.
That’s why, from that point on, my father was much more forceful in dealing with the Gaddafis and Gorbachevs of the world. He never wanted to see such wholesale slaughter on his watch. It wasn’t in my father’s makeup to avoid responsibility. If anything, he tended to accept more blame than he deserved. But I believe he ultimately did forgive himself for sending those servicemen to Beirut—and that’s why he was able to move forward.
We all have regrets, but we can’t change the past. We have to learn the lessons of the past, seek God’s forgiveness, and move on. That’s the example my father set. That’s the lesson he left for me—and for all of us.
Dad’s example played a big role in my life. I saw that he was able to forgive himself, and from his example, I learned to forgive myself for being molested, and for all my other sins and regrets.
The next time you struggle to forgive someone who has hurt you, remember my father, lying on that gurney, with a bullet lodged next to his heart. His first impulse was forgiveness.
So forgive and be forgiven. Set yourself free and live.