Ronald Reagan at 100: A true believer who caught destiny's eye

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:


Ronald Reagan at 100

"Within the Reagan household, and perhaps in Ronald Reagan's heart," his definitive biographer Lou Cannon writes, "there was an early sense that he was a child of destiny." Certainly there was not much in his family background to suggest that. The 40th president was born one hundred years ago on Feb. 6 in the second floor of a gritty-looking building in Tampico, Ill. The family moved to other towns, and briefly to Chicago, before shoe salesman Jack Reagan and his wife, Nell, settled in the prosperous town of Dixon when Reagan was 9.

Reagan always remembered his boyhood there in elegiac terms, and the modest but comfortable hillside house where he spent several years seems to confirm that impression. But Jack Reagan was overfond of drink and failed at one business after another, and Lee County tax records indicate that each place the Reagans rented was worth less than the one before. They ended up in an apartment literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

Yet from an early age Ronald Reagan seems to have been, as one biographer said of Abraham Lincoln, "a little engine of ambition." An ambition to be someone important in the world, someone who could do things for others; maybe, although he never said so, to be president.

[Valin]

"Ask seasoned baseball people to name the best player they ever saw, and you are apt to elicit quizzical looks, then this"you must mean other than Willy Mays." Ask seasoned students of American society to name the best writer on this subject, and the response is apt to be a quizzical look, then this: "You must mean other than Micheal Barone."

George F Will

Hard America Soft America

[Valin]