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  How did he handle this second eviction from the limelight? In the official narrative of Reagan’s rise, he didn’t mind much at all. By his own account, Reagan was happy to have more time off to spend at Yearling Row, tending to his hunters and jumpers and working the land, coming down from the mountains only to film the occasional spot on TV. The years immediately following the end of GE Theater, Nancy Reagan would later say, were “years … of relative calm” when her husband was “glad to have a full-time family life.”

  But this image of Reagan as the happy gentleman farmer who moonlighted as an actor, the rancher who was satisfied with life out of the public eye, begins to crack on close inspection. In the early sixties, Dean Miller traveled to Yearling Row for an episode of his celebrity profile program Here’s Hollywood to interview the Reagans. “Ronnie Reagan,” Miller told his viewers, was “an intent man, not only about his career but about life in general. In fact it has often been said that Ronald Reagan is on a constant crusade and a man on a soap box.”

  For his interview, Ronnie leaned against a white fence, his brown hair uncharacteristically flying free in the wind. Then it was Nancy’s turn. She answered questions haltingly while, in the background but well within the camera’s view, her husband paraded proudly on his horse. Finally the star rejoined his wife. “Nancy, what is he?” Miller asked. “Is he an actor/rancher or a rancher/actor?”

  “Oh,” said Nancy, not sure what to say. She smiled and laughed uncomfortably. “Well, I think probably rancher/actor.”

  “Which do you think he likes better?” Miller pressed.

  Nancy was still unsure of herself. She looked to her husband.

  “Go ahead!” said Ronnie. “I won’t step on your foot right here.”

  Nancy proceeded cautiously. “Well, he’s very fond of ranching …”

  Miller didn’t wait for her to finish the thought. “Yeah, I think some day when you hang up the grease paint,” he said, turning back to Ronnie, “you probably want to come out here and settle down with the kids and lead the life of a country gentleman and a working rancher.”

  “Yes,” said Reagan, broadening his grin to show his impeccably white teeth. “I’d like that very much.” His smile grew wider and his face tighter. Reagan was a better actor than he ever got credit for, but this particular performance was far from convincing. By the looks of him, settling down as a gentleman rancher was the last thing he wanted.

  And that makes sense. The story of Reagan settling into life as the happy country squire has one big problem. It neglects the power of a central, shaping force in Reagan’s life: his remarkable ambition.

  At its heart, the life story of Ronald Reagan is the story of an uncommon ambition pursued. It is a rare ambition that gets a teenage boy out of bed in the morning every day of his summer vacation so he can work twelve-hour shifts as a lifeguard. A rare ambition that convinces a boy from a forgettable Midwestern town that he can be a star, that propels him to talk his way into a career on the radio and then in the movies. A rare ambition that gets the GE spokesman onto a train into the hinterlands week after week, year after year, in search of crowds he hasn’t yet met. A rare ambition that makes the second son of a failed dreamer into the most famous man of his age.

  To Nancy, Reagan’s ambition was essential to understanding him—the key part that everyone always missed. “Ronnie’s easygoing manner is deceiving,” she wrote after the Reagans left the White House. “Underneath that calm exterior is a tenacious, stubborn, and very competitive man. Just look at the record. Ronnie rarely loses.”

  And yet, somehow, this man with the unceasing desire to win, this man whose life had been shaped by his need to be a star, this man was, at the age of fifty-one, perfectly happy to settle down into a quiet life on his ranch?

  The people around Reagan when he parted company with GE would remember otherwise. By the time the Reagans wrote their postpresidential memoirs, in which they professed to have been happy to have the extra time with the family in the post-GE years, Ralph Cordiner, the chairman of GE who fired Reagan, had died, as had Charles Brower, the head of BBD&O, the advertising agency that produced the program. For his biography of Reagan, Edmund Morris spoke to Brower’s widow. She recalled the fired Reagan as despondent: “What can I do, Charley? I can’t act anymore, I can’t do anything else. How can I support my family?”

  Reagan denied Mrs. Brower’s account, but it’s clear that his prospects were indeed bleak. He went back to his old agent, Lew Wasserman, who by then had become one of the great men of Hollywood, having merged his talent agency MCA with Universal Studios. Wasserman reluctantly agreed to send around Reagan’s résumé but was not very encouraging, warning him, “You’ve been around this business long enough to know that I can’t force someone on a producer if he doesn’t want to use him.”

  Out of work, out of the public eye, Reagan was at a crossroads once again. “Like any actor,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1961, “I keep thinking that the big part is still ahead of me.” But he was fifty-one years old when GE Theater was canceled. His father, Jack, had not lived to see sixty. He had been given a chance at fame not once but twice. There was little reason to believe that a chance would come a third time.

  So it is no surprise that when at last Wasserman had a role to offer Reagan, in Johnny North, Reagan agreed to take it, bad guy or no.

  And it is even less of a surprise that when Reagan saw the reality of the role he had accepted, he was not pleased.

  For the rest of his life, Reagan would say that agreeing to appear in Johnny North, later renamed The Killers before its theatrical release in 1964, had been a mistake. Some of his admirers expunge the movie from the record entirely, claiming his movie career ended with Hellcats of the Navy, a 1957 tale of heroism in World War II. For his part, Reagan would acknowledge The Killers, but only to disparage it.

  Officially, his objection was the casting—he was simply not meant to play a villain. “A lot of people who went to see The Killers,” he wrote in his postpresidential memoirs, “kept waiting for me to turn out to be a good guy in the end and dispatch the villains in the last reel, because that’s how they had always seen me before.”

  And it’s true that The Killers was not the sort of film for him. Reagan not only preferred to be the good guy, he preferred stories that affirmed the essential goodness of the rest of his country and humankind, too. That wasn’t The Killers, a film that depicts characters without conscience and a world without good. It delights in violence. The theme of evil is there from the very beginning of the film, when viewers see Marvin’s and Gulager’s characters hunting down North at a school for the blind where he works as a teacher under an assumed name. Entering the school, they approach the receptionist, a blind middle-aged woman in pearls, and ask where they might find him. When she tells them that he is not available, they brutally assault her, pouncing on her in her chair and throwing her onto the floor. Even to audiences in later generations, the brutality of the sequence is jarring. Later in the movie, viewers see a disturbing scene in which Dickinson’s Farr receives a forceful blow to the face from her boyfriend, not quite a punch but significantly more than a slap. The actor to deliver the blow was none other than Reagan himself. The film takes a casual attitude toward murder—by its conclusion, all of the leading players have been killed by someone else. After the movie’s release, Reagan’s daughter Patti was forbidden by her parents to see it. “Everybody dies in it,” her mother explained.

  “Mr. Norm,” in other words, was well outside his comfort zone on this particular movie set. Still, Reagan’s real problem with The Killers may have had as much to do with the parts of the film he found familiar as with the parts that were foreign and abhorrent. For in truth, Ronald Reagan and his character, Jack Browning, had more in common than the actor would care to admit. In the film, the relationship between Reagan’s Browning and Dickinson’s Sheila Farr is a complicated one. She is his girlfriend, he pays her bills and keeps her in fancy clothes. But she
looks elsewhere for romance and doesn’t mind flaunting her liaisons with other men in front of the world, even in front of Browning himself. Browning endures these exhibitions in silence.

  Browning was a cuckold. And playing him, Reagan might have been transported back to the lowest moment of his life: Right now Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it.

  Earlier that fall, Reagan had filmed his entrance in the film in preproduction. No one would ever mistake it for a hero’s entry—for one thing, it comes thirty minutes into the film, in a scene at a racetrack, where Cassavetes’s Johnny North is about to take part in an auto race. With a large crowd seated in the stands, Farr joins North in the driver’s pit. She drapes her arms over his shoulder and flirts: “Just kiss me, you fool!” He obliges, passionately.

  The camera cuts to view the kiss from farther away, through two round holes surrounded by darkness. Someone is watching the lovers through a pair of binoculars. Then the camera cuts again, to reveal, for the first time, the face of Ronald Reagan. He is in the stands with everyone else. And he is the one holding the binoculars, pulling them slowly down from his eyes.

  That was the future that lay ahead of Reagan that weekend in November. Someone else would get the girl. He would be the one who watched.

  THROUGH THAT AWFUL weekend, people kept their televisions on. For most, the days blended together to make one long ghastly montage, the days distinguishable only by subtle shifts in color and motion.

  Friday: Darkness and chaos at Andrews Air Force Base … the dead president coming down in his coffin … the shadows falling over the faces of the mourners … the widow in her pink suit with its awful stains.

  Saturday: Gray everywhere. Gray skies over the White House where the president’s body lay in state in the East Room. The gray-faced president, hurrying out of the West Wing … a series of gray-haired men parading into the Executive Office Building to meet with him. In the afternoon, the new president makes a brief statement, declaring Monday a national day of mourning. When he finishes speaking, the NBC correspondent offers commentary: President Johnson “has been, shall we say, a little bit in the background today …”

  Sunday: A hint of light … a clearing in the skies above the Capitol dome … flags and crosses flicker across the television screen … a crowd of unfathomable magnitude gathers on the Mall, lining up to bid the fallen leader goodbye … the networks show Army cadets in the chapel at Valley Forge, singing aloud the Lord’s Prayer as they kneel row on row.

  But then there was another, even darker turn. From nearly the moment of his arrest for the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald had been a fixture on television sets. Mesmerized by the camera lights pointed at him, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry had given the media the run of his police department. An FBI agent, arriving to sit in on Oswald’s interrogation, had been amazed to find whole offices reordered to accommodate network cables creeping in through windows from the street. When, just before noon Eastern Time that Sunday, the press got word that Oswald was about to be transferred to the county jail, the assembled correspondents and photographers scrambled to get fresh pictures of the most hated man in the country.

  And so NBC was broadcasting live when a man dressed in a dark suit and hat emerged from a crowd of reporters in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and walked right up to the assassin. Viewers at home saw this man shout at the assassin and then shoot him in the abdomen. “He’s been shot!” NBC’s correspondent Tom Pettit narrated, just a few feet from Oswald’s crumpled body. “There is absolute panic.… Pandemonium has broken loose!” And the images on the screen showed this was in fact the case. As reporters rushed for the body, the police tried to push them back. But they seemed unsure of themselves.

  News anchors did not yet have the ability to interview their correspondents by satellite link, so the only choice the networks had was to let the chaotic images from Dallas roll—the police seizing Oswald’s assailant, an ambulance arriving to take Oswald away, the ambulance pulling up the ramp out of the basement, headed to a hospital, probably Parkland, one of the bystanders observed. It all created the effect of watching a gruesome TV crime procedural as it played out in tight TV time. Within twenty minutes, the assailant had been identified as Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with ties to the underworld.

  By nightfall, Kennedy’s assassin had died and the networks had more sordid information about Oswald and Ruby than they knew what to do with. NBC aired a special broadcast on the two killers, retracing the steps of each over the previous three days. The program reached a climax with a scene from the Texas Theater, the movie house where Oswald had been arrested on Friday afternoon. The empty theater had been turned into a crime scene and was out of reach of a cleaning crew. The camera turned askew as it surveyed the interior, revealing discarded popcorn and drink containers. It was the kind of place that nearly every American had visited but that most had never really seen, not under the glare of bright lights. The scene was horrible, the effect chilling. It made it seem as though guilt for the nation’s tragedy could not be confined to Oswald or Ruby or Dallas. It extended further, to any American who’d nibbled popcorn in a movie theater. Offscreen, a correspondent’s voice made the link more explicit:

  The chase ends in a theater. A movie theater: This tawdry place of escape for our century. This place of cheap glamour, of magnified unrealities, of safe darkness for the lonely. This place to run to when, outside, the sunlight and the glare of noise and the competition and the dangers are too much. He came to this pathetic hiding place.

  So there was Ronald Reagan, who’d made his life in that place of cheap glamour and magnified unrealities.

  Reagan, who’d just started filming his awful new movie, ninety minutes of shooting and dying paraded across the screen.

  Reagan, whose passion was politics, but whose politics was suddenly taboo.

  Reagan, who longed to be the hero but was stuck with the only part he could get: the sleazy gangster in the dark suit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Myths

  November 25–29, 1963

  Monday, November 25, was the day of mourning. Virtually all businesses were closed, and those who had to work were never far from a television. The sounds and images shown that day would endure perpetually in the nation’s memory: Black Jack, the riderless horse trotting fitfully through the streets of Washington; the din of fifty fighter jets—one for each state—and Air Force One flying in tribute over the caisson as it reached Arlington Cemetery, the fallen president’s final resting place; harsh, haunting tones flowing from the bagpipes of the Black Watch of the Scottish Highlands; the hushed crowd of more than a million watching the cortege pass by on Pennsylvania Avenue; little John F. Kennedy, Jr., raising his three-year-old hand in salute.

  A collection of world leaders gathered to pay their respects in an assemblage not seen since the funeral of Great Britain’s King Edward VII in 1910. It included President Charles de Gaulle of France, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home of Great Britain, President Eamon de Valera of Ireland, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, King Baudouin of Belgium, Queen Frederica of Greece, and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Former presidents Truman and Eisenhower—old enemies—shared a pew in St. Matthew’s Cathedral and a bite to eat after the burial.

  But the center of the story was Jacqueline Kennedy, walking serene and stoic through the cold, clear day. Every move she made that long weekend was part of an exquisite pageant of agony. Her timing was eerie. On Sunday, around 12:30 P.M., she stepped in front of the cameras with her children at the North Portico of the White House to drive to a memorial service for her husband in the Capitol Rotunda. Mere minutes earlier, the nation had witnessed the shooting of Oswald on TV. Yet so powerful was the scene of Jackie in black with her children in blue coats and white gloves that the memory of the terrible scene in Dallas simply slipped away.

  A new hero: Johnson in the Oval Office, November 29, 1963.


  © Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

  The funeral and burial scenes on Monday were much the same—Jackie seemed to have the power to stop time. Partway through the funeral procession from the Capitol to her husband’s funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, she emerged from her car and walked the remainder of the journey in full view of the cameras. The visiting dignitaries, accustomed to traveling in grand processions, followed as an ordinary mob behind her, transfixed. At the funeral mass, she watched with studied concentration, her black veil framing her face. At the burial, she grasped the hands of her dead husband’s brothers and knelt on the Arlington sod in prayer. That evening, Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, watched Jackie conduct a reception for the visiting dignitaries at the White House. She looked, said Alphand, “like a Roman Queen, a stone statue.” London’s Evening Standard was especially generous: “Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on one thing they have always lacked—majesty.”

  Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson kept a respectful distance from Jackie as they all moved through the events of the day. They were around her always, even walking behind her in the procession to St. Matthew’s, despite the objections of the Secret Service. But they were careful to allow a few feet of space between themselves and the widow, her children, and her husband’s family.

  Still, it was awkward at times—hovering over another family in its hour of suffering. The Johnsons had never spent much private time with Jackie despite both Lyndon’s and Lady Bird’s best efforts. Johnson, who was powerfully drawn to vivacious and beautiful women, had feverishly sought the favor of the First Lady during his time as vice president. But his Texan courtship rituals sometimes didn’t translate. In one extravagant gesture early in Kennedy’s term, he’d presented Jackie with two Hereford heifers and a pony named Tex. Jackie accepted the gifts warmly but returned them two years later, saying she had no place to keep them. Undeterred, Johnson took back the animals, sold them at market, and used the proceeds to purchase the appointment book used by Abraham Lincoln in the White House. He donated the book to Jackie’s White House restoration project. When Jackie wrote Johnson to thank him, Johnson penned a provocative response: “Never before has Texas beef found a market of such quality in winding up on Mrs. Kennedy’s bookshelves between the covers of Mr. Lincoln’s records. Too bad it couldn’t be on Mr. Lincoln’s bookshelves between the … well, never mind.” As Lady Bird’s biographer Jan Jarboe Russell notes, “the tantalizing ellipses were LBJ’s.” Liz Carpenter, a clear-eyed Johnson aide, quashed the letter before it could be delivered to Jackie, noting diplomatically in the margins that the letter was “too flip.”