Transcript: Chapter 02

Title Card: Part One: Lifeguard

Narrator: As president, Ronald Reagan evoked a simpler place and a simpler time. Small towns, patriotic values, family, and community. An idealized America that no longer was. That perhaps never was. Even for Ronald Reagan. He was born in 1911 on the main and only street of Tampico, Illinois; in circumstances so poor that years later, while visiting his birthplace, "he visibly recoiled." His father, Jack, was a shoe salesman with a taste for whiskey who spent his life in search of his big break.

From age four, Dutch -- as his parents called him -- lived the life of a gypsy. Every year a new town. New neighbors. Friends left behind. Dutch had nowhere to go, except within.

Edmund Morris, Official Biographer: Always in childhood you will see this distance in a group of small-town school children little Ronnie would always be sitting with his face on his left hand. A remote little boy who somehow held himself aloof from everybody else. He carried this distance, this remoteness, this aloofness right through.

Ron Reagan: On the one hand he is one of the warmest, most amiable, gentlemanly, kindest people you'd ever want to meet. And yet he has almost no close friends. I mean really, in fact, no close friends.

Narrator: Reagan would rarely speak of the pain of his childhood. He would recall it as "one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls. There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing; those were the days when I learned the real riches of rags."

Richard Norton Smith, Former Director, Reagan Library: I think it's that kind of willful optimism in the face of reality, as experienced and defined by others that tells you a lot about Ronald Reagan and perhaps even is one clue to understanding his presidency.

Narrator: Dutch was nine years old when the family finally settled in Dixon, Illinois. A town of 8,000 Dixon was the essence of "Main Street" America. Reagan would remember it as "a small universe where I learned standards and values that would guide me for the rest of my life."

Robert Dallek: It was the era of Calvin Coolidge's presidency. The values that Coolidge espoused were small-town, church-going, rugged individualism, the old 19th century values of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world, because it's beginning to pass. It's beginning to be eclipsed by the rise of American cities.

Narrator: The 1920s were a time of change and opportunity, even for the unpredictable Jack. He opened his own shoe store, The Fashion Boot Shop, which became a popular spot in downtown Dixon.

Morris: His father loved to tell stories. Stand outside his store and schmooze with whoever... whoever walked past. In fact, Reagan said that his father was the best storyteller he ever knew.

Narrator: Jack had a weakness Dutch had long known about, but never confronted. "I was eleven years old the first time I came home to find my father flat on his back on the front porch. ... He was drunk, dead to the world. His hair soaked with melting snow. ...I bent over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey. ...I managed to drag him inside and get him to bed."

Dallek: One of the threads I see running through Ronald Reagan's career is a great attraction to autonomy, to independence, to freedom. And I think a lot of this was a reaction against the fact that his father had this dependency on a substance and that he couldn't control himself.

Morris: He would never say anything negative about his father, but the moral disdain behind what he would say is, was quite palpable. He thought of his father, in other words, as a man with a weakness, who should have been strong enough to conquer it.

Narrator: Reagan's mother, Nelle, a devout Christian, became his moral compass. With her guidance he began to take charge of his life.

Morris: He happened to read a novel which his mother had picked up somewhere called That Printer of Udell's. It's the story of a young man born in a rather ugly industrial Midwestern town, who discovers through, um, a series of bitter experiences with an alcoholic father, who discovers that he has got the gift of oratory. And through his good looks and his voice and his convictions he manages to create a whole social movement in this town. The young man, Dick Falkner goes off to Washington to take his message to the world. He went to his mother when he finished that book, and he said, "I want to be like that man, and I want to be baptized."

Narrator: Reagan embraced his mother's faith; based on good works, The Bible, and the belief that the hand of God guides daily life.

Smith: I think it's easy to underestimate the place that fundamentalist Christianity plays in Reagan's life. It's a cynical age and when we heard that the president didn't go to church on Sunday, we wrote him off as a, as a phony evangelical. In fact, from his mother, he imbibed deeply of fundamentalist faith.

Cannon: She gave him this sort of sense of destiny which was a huge, ah, part of it. You know, if you know you're going to be a great man, you don't have to fret and worry about it because, the opportunity will come and seize you.

Narrator: Nelle's Church, the Disciples of Christ, became the center of Reagan's life. He led prayer meetings, taught Sunday school -- even dated the minister's daughter, Margaret Cleaver. Reagan determined to live a storybook life of an American youth. He played football, excelled in swimming, and often had the lead in school dramas. He would later remember those days as the happiest in his life. But life was sweetest two miles upstream from Dixon -- on the Rock River, where Dutch Reagan was the lifeguard.

Morris: "The Rock River flows for you tonight, Mr. President." It was something a radio announcer said to him after he was elected. It came over the airwaves and I've never forgotten that. "The Rock River flows for you tonight, Mr. President." I think the Rock River was the central symbol of his youth.

Narrator: Ronald Reagan is remembered as actor, governor, president.

But it was on the Rock River that he first discovered the role he came to love best.

Helen Lawton, Dixon Resident: I can remember him yet, very bronzed with his life guard sign on his swimsuit, and, a whistle around his neck, where he watched all of the younger kids so they wouldn't get into trouble. We just all remember him as lifeguard. That's ... that's the way so many of us do.

Narrator: Every day, Dutch arrived at Lowell Park at dawn, fetched 100 pound blocks of ice, stocked the snack bar and, for the next ten hours, watched swimmers negotiate the currents of the Rock River. During his six summers as lifeguard, he pulled 77 people from the water.

Dr. Lamar Wells, Dixon Resident: He always went up and cut a notch in the log after he pulled them out and they weren't probably all going to die, you know, and they all weren't going to drown but they were in serious shape out there. They needed help to get out of the water because of the river current. And seventy-seven is, is his count and there were seventy-seven notches in the log out there.

Morris: The poignant thing about the Rock River is that in his dotage, after he left the White House, when he began to lose his mind, the one thing he would still want to talk about was his days as a lifeguard on the Rock River. He had a picture in his office of um, of the spot where he used to stand as a boy. And he would say, "you see, that's where I used to be a lifeguard. I saved 77 lives there." His subsequent career, his subsequent political career at any rate, was devoted to the general theme of rescue.

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