Reagan: The Life Read Online Free

that soiled paper.” But they have to try. They race to the local police station and convey their intelligence to the sergeant, who piles them into his squad car to chase down the plotters. They catch them, only to have the desperate pair laugh in their faces. They are not criminals at all, but fugitives from a mental asylum, as Mark discovers from a newspaper conveniently at hand. “He held before our startled eyes a screaming headline, ‘Lunatics Escape. Reward.’ Beneath these startling words were photographs of our new found friends. So the honor of ‘old Eli’ was upheld.”
    B. J. Frazer headed Dixon High’s drama program when he wasn’t teaching English, and he encouraged Reagan to try out. Reagan did so gladly, seeking more of that welcome music. By this time he had outgrown a bit of his shyness, not least by discovering a sport, football, that required neither keen eyesight nor particular coordination in those who played the line. Yet the sensitivities of earlier days remained, and performing onstage continued to ease them. “For a teenager still carrying around some old feelings of insecurity, the reaction of my classmates was more music to my ears,” he said. The experience grew more habit-forming with each curtain call. “By the time I was a senior, I was so addicted to student theatrical productions that you couldn’t keep me out of them.”
    In later years he would reflect on the phenomenon. “There’s something about the entertainment world that attracts people who may have had youthful feelings of shyness or insecurity,” he observed. “After I went to Hollywood, some of the most successful people I met—a lot of actors and great comedians like Jack Benny, for example—would just sit quietly, even shyly, at a party while some of the funniest people were writers whotook center stage and became the real show-offs. It made me wonder if some entertainers hadn’t gravitated to their calling because they’d been a little insecure and the job gave them a chance to be someone they’re not, at least for a while.”
    A MERICANS LIKED STORIES as much as Reagan did, and for similar reasons. America’s national youth had been difficult. Where the inhabitants of other countries drew their common identities from shared histories and long attachment to particular pieces of ground, Americans—overwhelmingly immigrants and their offspring—shared little except a rejection of the lands whence they came. New kids all, they sought a common story, a cultural glue that gave their disparate experiences a collective meaning.
    They found their most satisfying story in what they came to callAmerican exceptionalism.John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared the Puritan settlement a “city upon a hill”: a model to people everywhere.Thomas Jefferson and the signers of theDeclaration of Independence placed their dispute with Britain squarely in “the course of human events,” not simply events of North America or the British Empire. The exponents ofManifest Destiny in the 1840s spoke of America’s divinely ordained mission to spread the blessings of liberty and democracy from sea to sea.Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg declared the Civil War a struggle to determine whether government of, by, and for the people would perish not merely from America but from the earth. Advocates of overseas expansion during the 1890s updated the Manifest Destiny argument, alternately asserting a Christian duty to baptize heathens and citing Darwin to explain American superiority as the result of the competitive struggle among peoples and cultures.
    By the early twentieth century the concept of American exceptionalism was rooted firmly in the national psyche.Woodrow Wilson led America intoWorld War I contending that only the example and guidance of the United States, the most selfless of nations and the most developed democracy, could enable Western civilization to survive the horrendous destruction it was