One Simple Idea (28 page)

None of this was a source of embarrassment to Reagan. Throughout
his life he was at ease discussing premonitory dreams, astrology, number symbolism, out-of-body experiences, and his belief in UFOs, including personal sightings in the 1950s and ’70s.

During his 1980 presidential campaign, he sat for a three-hour interview with journalist Angela Fox Dunn, the daughter of Malvina Fox Dunn, Reagan’s drama coach at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. Reagan never opened up so much as when he was around people with ties to his movie days. With surprising frankness, the Republican nominee expounded on topics ranging from the astrological signs of past presidents, to his mother’s religious beliefs, to the prophetic qualities of psychic Jeane Dixon, another old Hollywood friend. While Dixon was “always gung ho for me to be president,” Reagan related, in the “foretelling part of her mind” the prophetess didn’t see him in the Oval Office. (A prediction that, more or less, squared with Dixon’s record.) He also boasted to Dunn of being an Aquarius, the most mystical of all the zodiac signs. “I believe you’ll find that 80 percent of the people in New York’s Hall of Fame are Aquarians,” he said.
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At the back of his personality, Reagan was the man he proudly described to Dunn: an Aquarian. He was influenced by various mystical and mind-power cultures, whose mark he left permanently stamped on America.

Long before his life in Hollywood, Reagan was at home with various blends of American mysticism. A combination of the conventional and otherworldly characterized his childhood.

“The best part,” he recalled, “was that I was allowed to dream. Many the day I spent deep in a huge rocker in the mystic atmosphere of Aunt Emma’s living room with its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its
shawls and antimacassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors …”

His mother, Nelle, was, by turns, religiously conservative, but she also infused her sons with a freethinking streak, telling Ron and his brother to address their parents by first names. In a progressive viewpoint that wouldn’t gain currency until many years later, Nelle told the boys that their father’s alcoholism was really a disease. Nelle was committed to seeing her sons well rounded, and she took them to plays, recitals, and lectures. One biographer called her a “determined improver.” Another noted that she “encouraged positive thinking.” Nelle wrote a poem for her Disciples of Christ church newsletter, “On the Sunnyside”:

Nelle doted on Ron as her favorite. “Within the Reagan household,” observed biographer Lou Cannon, “and perhaps in Ronald Reagan’s heart, there was an early sense that he was a child of destiny.” By the time Reagan arrived at Eureka College in central Illinois in 1928, he was comfortable with this perspective. He fondly recalled a French professor with a reputation as a psychic who forecast his greatness. “This is a class of destiny,” she announced at the start of the term, and he felt she was speaking directly to him.

Reagan’s break into radio came in 1932, when he was hired by the Palmer family, who were proprietors of an Iowa radio station. The Palmers were also a clan of Spiritualists, mystics, high eccentrics, and visionaries. The family patriarch, D. D. Palmer, was the founder of chiropractic healing in the late nineteenth century. A Mesmerist and Spiritualist, D. D. Palmer said that the chiropractic method was transmitted to him
from “an intelligence in the spiritual world” during an Iowa Spiritualist convention.

D.D.’s son and successor, “Colonel” B. J. Palmer—the man who hired young Reagan as a broadcaster—developed his own variant of mind-power philosophy. Colorful and fearless, B.J. expanded the college of chiropractic and mental healing, which his father had founded in Davenport, Iowa. This was where Reagan walked the halls and grounds as an employee at the radio station called WOC, for “World of Chiropractic.” Its programming promoted the school but also featured standard broadcasts of sports, news, and music.

Part showman, B. J. Palmer created a strange otherworld on the campus, which had an adjacent mansion and gardens nicknamed “A Little Bit O’Heaven.” B.J. festooned the Iowa property with curios from his world travels: statues of the Hindu gods Kali and Ganesha, massive Buddha heads and shrines, Chinese Foo Dogs, bronze and marble renderings of Venus, Japanese temple gates, and a truly eerie, enormous stone mosaic of a coiled, fanged serpent. (“The serpent was cast out of heaven,” B.J. explained in a visitors’ guide.)

Reagan spent his working hours at the college’s rooftop station and joined the chiropractic students for meals in the basement cafeteria. Making his way from the roof to the basement, Reagan recalled seeing the hallways of the Palmer School of Chiropractic emblazoned with bits of B.J.’s philosophy, such as: “THINK! SPEAK! ACT, POSITIVE! I AM! I WILL! I CAN! I MUST!” Like many mental mystics, B.J. believed that man possessed an inner divine sense, a branch of the “Universal Intelligence,” which he termed
Innate
. “INNATE,” Palmer wrote, “is the ONE eternal, internal, stable, and permanent factor that is a fixed and reliable entity … the same capable INNER VOICE that is capable of getting any sick organ well.”

To Reagan, B. J. Palmer’s world was neither shocking nor surprising. It primed him for the spiritual culture he soon discovered in Hollywood. During his film career, Reagan encountered a mystical influence that left its mark on his political vision.

Reagan often spoke of America’s divine purpose and of a mysterious plan behind the nation’s founding. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.

When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.

From the dawn of Hall’s career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990, the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America’s “secret destiny.” The United States, in Hall’s view, was a society that had been planned and founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to the world.

In 1928, Hall attained underground fame when, at the remarkably young age of twenty-seven, he published
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
, a massive codex to the mystical and esoteric philosophies of antiquity. Exploring subjects from Native American mythology to Pythagorean mathematics to the geometry of ancient Egypt, this
encyclopedia arcana
remains the unparalleled guidebook to ancient symbols and esoteric thought.
The Secret Teachings
won the admiration of figures ranging from General John Pershing to Elvis Presley. Novelist Dan Brown cites it as a key source.

After publishing his “Great Book,” Hall spent the rest of his life lecturing and writing within the walls of his Egypto–art deco campus, the Philosophical Research Society, in LA’s Griffith Park neighborhood. Hall called the place a “mystery school” in the mold of Pythagoras’s ancient academy.

It was there in 1944 that the occult thinker produced a short work, one little known beyond his immediate circle. This book,
The Secret Destiny
of America
, evidently caught the eye of Reagan, then a middling movie actor gravitating toward politics.

Hall’s concise volume described how America was the product of a “Great Plan” for religious liberty and self-governance, launched by a hidden order of ancient philosophers and secret societies. In one chapter, Hall described a rousing speech delivered by a mysterious “unknown speaker” before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The “strange man,” wrote Hall, invisibly entered and exited the locked doors of the statehouse in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, delivering an oration that bolstered the wavering spirits of the delegates. “God has given America to be free!” commanded the mysterious speaker, urging the men to overcome their fears of being hanged or beheaded, and to seal destiny by signing the great document. Newly emboldened, the delegates rushed forward to add their names. They looked to thank the stranger only to discover that he had vanished from the locked room. Was this, Hall wondered, “one of the agents of the secret Order, guarding and directing the destiny of America?”

At a 1957 commencement address at his alma mater Eureka College, Reagan, then a corporate spokesman for General Electric, sought to inspire students with this leaf from occult history. “This is a land of destiny,” Reagan said, “and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps.” Reagan then retold (without naming a source) the tale of Hall’s unknown speaker. “When they turned to thank the speaker for his timely words,” Reagan concluded, “he couldn’t be found and to this day no one knows who he was or how he entered or left the guarded room.” Reagan revived the story in 1981, when
Parade
magazine asked the president for a personal essay on what July 4 meant to him. Presidential aide Michael Deaver delivered the piece with a note saying, “This Fourth of July message is the president’s own words and written initially in the president’s hand,” on a yellow pad at Camp David. Reagan retold the legend of the unknown
speaker—this time using language very close to Hall’s own: “When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.”

Where did Hall uncover the tale that inspired a president? The episode originated as “The Speech of the Unknown” in a collection of folkloric stories about America’s founding, published in 1847 under the title
Washington and His Generals, or Legends of the Revolution
by American social reformer and muckraker George Lippard. Lippard, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, had a strong taste for the gothic—he cloaked his mystery man in a “dark robe.” He also tacitly acknowledged inventing the story: “The name of the Orator … is not definitely known. In this speech, it is my wish to compress some portion of the fiery eloquence of the time.”

For his part, Hall seemed to know almost nothing about the story’s point of origin. He had been given a copy of the “Speech of the Unknown” by a since-deceased secretary of the occult Theosophical Society, but with no bibliographical information other than its being from a “rare old volume of early American political speeches.” The speech appeared in 1938 in the Society’s journal,
The Theosophist
, with the sole note that it was “published in a rare volume of addresses, and known probably to only one in a million, even of American citizens.”

There are indications that Reagan and Hall may have personally met to discuss the story. In an element unique to Hall’s version, the mystic-writer (dubiously) attributed the tale of the unknown speaker to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. When Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on January 25, 1974, he again told the story, but this time cited an attribution—of sorts. Reagan said the tale was told to him “some years ago” by “a writer, who happened to be an avid student of history.… I was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it.”

Whether the president and the occultist ever met, it is Hall’s language that unmistakably marks the Reagan telling.

Biographer Edmund Morris noted Reagan’s fondness for apocryphal tales and his “Dalíesque ability to bend reality to his own purposes.” Yet he added that the president’s stories “should be taken seriously because they represent core philosophy.” This influential (and sometimes inscrutable) president of the late twentieth century found an illustration of his core belief in America’s purpose within the pages of an occult work little known beyond its genre.

During the 1980 president campaign, many Americans were electrified by Reagan’s depiction of America as a divinely ordained nation where anything could be willed into existence.

In announcing his candidacy in 1979, Reagan declared: “To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible.… If there is one thing we are sure of it is … that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact.” It was a vastly different kind of political oratory than the restrained, moralistic tones of his opponent, Jimmy Carter.

Through his reiteration of this theme of America’s destiny, and his powers as a communicator, Reagan shaped how Americans
wanted
to see themselves: as a portentous people possessed of the indomitable spirit to scale any height. This American self-perception could bitterly clash with reality in the face of a declining industrial base and falling middle-class wages. Nonetheless, the image that Reagan gave Americans of themselves—as a people always ushering in new dawns—formed the political template to which every president who followed him had to publicly adhere.
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After Reagan, virtually every major campaign address included paeans to better tomorrows, from Bill Clinton’s invocation of “a place called Hope” (and his use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”), to Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can.” In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama echoed one of Reagan’s signature lines when he declared: “This is a country where anything is possible.” The one recent president who complained that he couldn’t master “the vision thing,” George H. W. Bush, was not returned to office.