You know, I received an invitation
that said, "Please come to Ellis Island July 4
"for the hundredth birthday celebration
of an American institution."
Somebody goofed-- my birthday isn't until February.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: On July 4, 1986,
as he lit a refurbished Statue of Liberty,
Ronald Reagan was at the height of his prestige.
Many wondered which American icon was being celebrated.
(orchestra playing intro to "America the Beautiful")
REAGAN: Tonight we pledge ourselves to each other
and to the cause of human freedom--
a cause that has given light to this land and hope to the world.
(crowd applauding)
CHORUS: ♪ O beautiful for spacious skies... ♪
NARRATOR: Ronald Reagan saw America as a special place,
a shining city on a hill, set by God between two oceans
as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.
Reagan is brilliant
at creating a kind of rapport with the country,
appealing to its better angels,
appealing to the native optimism,
which is so much a part of our culture and our tradition.
♪ God shed his grace on thee ♪
♪ And crown thy good with brotherhood... ♪
MAN: When he was asked, on the eve of his election,
"What is it, Governor, that people see in you?"
And Reagan responds, "Would you laugh if I told you
that they look at me and they see themselves?"
WOMAN: And I didn't understand
why people had this adulation for him.
I thought he could possibly press the button.
Yeah.
I was terrified.
(crowd cheering)
MAN: If you seek his monument, look around at what you don't see.
You don't see the Berlin Wall.
You don't see the Iron Curtain from Stettin to Trieste.
NARRATOR: He was America's most ideological president
in his rhetoric,
yet pragmatic in his actions.
He believed in balanced budgets, but never submitted one.
He hated nuclear weapons, but built them by the thousands.
He would write checks to a poor person
as he cut the benefits of many.
He united the country with renewed patriotism,
but his vision of America alienated millions.
He preached family values,
but presided over a dysfunctional family.
You're not going to figure him out.
That's the first thing you need to know.
I don't think he's figured himself out.
I haven't figured him out.
I don't know anybody who has figured him out.
There is this mystery about Reagan that pervades everything,
which is, how much was he aware of what he was doing?
NARRATOR: Inattentive to detail and often disengaged,
Reagan led a revolution based on a few simple ideals--
to free Americans from big government
and the world from communist oppression.
MAN: Before Reagan,
every Western leader had
the same strategic objective regarding the Soviet Union,
which is to not lose.
Reagan came in and he said,
"I don't want to play to not lose; I want to play to win."
MAN: He's tough.
He braces to talk to you.
It's confrontational.
Not unpleasant, but confrontational.
MAN: I often think of him as a nice, soft, silky pillow,
and you could touch it and feel it, it was very nice.
But if you decided, well, let's take a hard punch
and you hit it hard,
you would find in the middle a solid-steel tempered bar.
That was the real Ronald Reagan.
That was the essence of Reagan.
(crowd cheering)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: As president, Ronald Reagan evoked
a simpler place and a simpler time.
(crowd cheering)
♪ ♪
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.
MAN: Always in childhood, you will see this distance.
In a group of small-town schoolchildren,
little Ronnie will 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.
On the one hand,
he's 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."
MAN: 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."
MAN: It was the era of Calvin Coolidge's presidency.
Values that Coolidge espoused
were small-town, churchgoing... 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 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 11 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.
He would never say anything negative about his father,
but the moral disdain behind what he would say
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.