One Simple Idea (29 page)

In Reagan’s private life, positive thinking didn’t always allow for deep relationships. Reagan’s campaign aides and White House staffers were sometimes seriously hurt by the manner in which he would forget all about people and relationships that no longer suited a new phase or role in which he found himself. This was his habit in all areas of life—and it layered him with a kind of emotional buffer. While recovering from an operation for colon cancer in 1985, Reagan pointed out to
Time
magazine that he did not “have cancer”—rather he was a man who “had cancer,” past tense. “But it’s gone,” he explained, “along with the surrounding tissue.… So I am someone who does not have cancer.”

That is how Reagan dealt with almost every challenge: He found the terms to conceptualize himself in the strongest possible manner based on the demands of the moment. That talent could make him seem shallow and insincere, yet it allowed him to adapt in unexpected ways. Just as the young New Dealer of the 1930s transformed into the law-and-order conservative of the 1960s, so did the man who campaigned as a flinty Cold Warrior transform into a global peacemaker during his second term.

In the latter years of his presidency, Reagan was one of the few world figures who not only believed in the authenticity of
glasnost
and
perestroika
in the Soviet Union (as most conservatives at the time did not) but who possessed a vision of what the post-Soviet era would look like (as most liberals then did not). In a mixture of dream making and idealism, Reagan
firmly believed that his “Star Wars” initiative would rid the world of the nuclear threat and open the borders of all nations to peaceful commerce and exchange.

For those who looked carefully, his global outlook had been foreshadowed during his Hollywood career. Soon after World War II, Reagan joined a group called the United World Federalists. The organization advocated a worldwide government organized along a United Nations–style system of rule making and dispute resolution. It was precisely the kind of “big picture” idea that excited Hollywood politicos of the mid-twentieth century (and that evokes deep suspicion in Tea Party activists of the twenty-first century). Globalist peacemaking touched something in Reagan’s earliest ideals. “I went through a period in college,” he later recalled, “in the aftermath of World War I, where I became a pacifist and thought the whole thing [i.e., the war] was a frame-up.”

Reagan’s penchant for science fiction has been widely noted. The United World Federalists could seem like the kind of universal government that sometimes showed up in sci-fi entertainment, like the United Federation of Planets in
Star Trek
, or the Galactic Republic (replaced by the evil Galactic Empire) in the
Star Wars
movies. Perhaps not coincidentally, Reagan also spoke openly of his belief in UFOs for much of his life. According to family friend Lucille Ball, Reagan insisted in the 1950s that he and Nancy had a close brush with a flying saucer while they were driving down the coastal highway one night. The couple, Ball recalled, arrived almost an hour late for a Los Angeles dinner party at the home of actor William Holden. They came in “all out of breath and so excited” and proceeded to tell shocked friends about witnessing a UFO. As president, Reagan more than once assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that an interstellar threat would unite U.S. and Soviet societies. Gorbachev honestly seemed perplexed as to whether Reagan was kidding, but ultimately decided he was not.

Reagan’s Irish ancestors might have called that side of him “barmy.” But this aspect of Reagan should not be dismissed as shallowness or mental weakness. Reagan thought in epic, picturesque terms—about
the Soviet Union as “evil,” about himself as a man of “destiny,” about the mission of America as “mystical.” Reagan’s mother, Nelle, left him with a sense of enchantment about the power of big ideas. One of the ironies of twenty-first-century politics is how the nationalistic, anti-immigration activists of the Tea Party often extol Reagan as their hero. However passionately Reagan favored tax cutting or getting rid of “government waste,” his outlook was fundamentally globalist and even a touch utopian.

Reagan also inherited his mother’s passion for self-improvement. As a boy, he learned to read before starting school. He mastered scripts and later policy papers with rapidity. Critics thought Reagan was not a details man, but that wasn’t exactly correct. Reagan could voraciously digest information that tapped his enthusiasm; he ran on enthusiasm, and without it he was adrift. In adulthood he maintained reading habits that extended to seven daily newspapers. Reagan would never be caught dead on camera, unlike his avowed admirer Sarah Palin, unable to cite a daily paper he read or to identify a favorite Founding Father. Part of Reagan’s ire toward student activists while he was governor of California stemmed from how the small-town college boy in him felt an Oz-like wonder toward the University of California and the motto on its coat of arms: “Let There Be Light.” He resented those who he believed desecrated its intellectual opportunities.

It must also be said, however, that Reagan’s style was to read selectively and to question narrowly. As soon as he homed in on a position—such as his belief in massive welfare fraud—he would constantly happen upon fact after fact, usually in the form of stories or an offbeat statistic, to buttress his conviction. Campaign aides told of sometimes “misplacing” the chief’s favorite magazines in order to avoid his glomming on to a factoid—such as trees causing air pollution—that would later prove an embarrassment. If there is an adjunct to Reagan’s credo “Nothing is impossible,” it might be:
If I believe it that makes it so
. That outlook may have helped a poor Depression-era boy adopt a powerful (and needed) faith
in self. But it could reflect a dangerous self-indulgence in the realm of policy making.

Reagan, Peale, Hill, Carnegie, and other positive thinkers had so thoroughly, and subtly, convinced the public over the course of decades that what you think is what matters most that by 2010 few objected or even noticed when New York’s Democratic senator Charles Schumer defended a scaled-down jobs creation bill by claiming that it was the very act of passage, rather than the policy particulars themselves, that made the difference: “… the longer I am around, I think it’s the market’s psychology that matters dramatically.” In substance, it was not much different from mental healer Phineas Quimby concluding a century and a half earlier: “Man’s happiness is in his belief.”

The era of the mind-power pioneers reached a close by the Age of Reagan. The “philosophy of happiness,” as Reagan called it, appeared everywhere; the landmark texts had been written; the theology had been dispersed across mainline churches or secularized within business culture; and much of the public viewed a “positive attitude” as a naturally desirable, if elusive, aim.

As it happens, the year Reagan took office in 1981 marked the passing of New Thought minister and metaphysical writer Joseph Murphy, who was the last real innovator from the field’s formative years. Murphy formed a link to the generation of American mystical thinkers who were unchurched, self-schooled, and made a comfortable, though not lavish, livelihood from book royalties, speaking fees, and the collection-basket offerings at metaphysical churches and meeting halls. Murphy’s death concluded the period in which New Thought was shaped by itinerant figures who lacked a significant business apparatus.

The motivational up-and-comers of the 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, were not classifiable by any one philosophy, and were far more plugged in to the business of publishing, weekend seminars, audio programs, and for-profit teaching institutes. They included sales coaches Zig Ziglar and Og Mandino; human-potential author Stephen Covey; management experts Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson; metaphysical publisher Louise Hay; inspirational writers Jack Canfield and Richard Carlson; life coaches Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy; plus a wide range of spiritual self-help authors, including Wayne Dyer, Jean Houston, and Marianne Williamson (who got her start as a Unity minister).

There were also prominent voices on the evangelical circuit, often reaching millions of people, such as the spiritual healer and televangelist Oral Roberts and the provocatively audacious prosperity minister Reverend Ike, who became a media sensation in the 1970s with his claim that “God wants you to be rich.” The New Thought movement’s indispensable phrase, Law of Attraction, was retooled by Rev. Pat Robertson as Law of Reciprocity, and by popular Korean evangelist David Yonggi Cho as Law of Incubation. This concept, which began with Spiritualist medium Andrew Jackson Davis, became a staple of New-Agers and evangelical media ministers alike.

The most distinctive evangelical figure who spread motivational philosophy in the 1970s and ’80s was
Hour of Power
television host and Norman Vincent Peale protégé Rev. Robert H. Schuller. From the pulpit of his massive, glass-paneled Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California,
Schuller preached a philosophy he called “possibility thinking.” He eschewed the politics of evangelism. As a result, Schuller attracted a following among both mainline Christians and New-Agers. He was one of very few figures of whom this was true.

Yet Schuller’s retirement in 2006 brought disorder and financial chaos to the Crystal Cathedral organization, which filed for bankruptcy in fall 2010. The once-formidable ministry had built too ambitiously and suffered a drop in broadcast audiences. Facing a $43 million debt, the megachurch was forced to rely on volunteers to landscape its forty-acre campus.

In 2011 the Schuller ministry announced the sale of its grounds and the 10,664-windowed Crystal Cathedral to the Catholic Church. The landmark structure, which had been designed as a four-pointed star by architect Philip Johnson, was redubbed Christ Cathedral by its new owners. In early 2012 Robert Schuller cut ties with the church amid board disputes, and most other Schuller family members departed in an atmosphere of power struggles and accusations. The remaining ministry struggled to maintain a sizable audience for the once-popular
Hour of Power
show.

While the fortunes of individual figures could rise and fall, the business of motivation, from the broadcasts of Oprah Winfrey to a wideranging network of multimedia seminars and workshops, was a staple of the American scene by the late twentieth century. The persona of the motivational coach was sufficiently recognizable to be routinely satirized in movies and on television, including in
Saturday Night Live
actor Chris Farley’s 1990 sendup of motivational speaker “Matt Foley,” who bellowed:
You’re gonna end up livin’ in a van down by the river!
Either as sources of inspiration or as objects of derision, empowerment coaches became an American archetype.

In actuality, the motivational field as a modern business phenomenon received its start from a man of reserved character and dignity. He neither charged around stages, waved his arms, nor raised his voice above the tone that one might expect from a trusted family physician.
His work ignited the business motivation genre at a time when the television and recording industries were in their infancy.

The emergence of business motivation as a field—one that played out in books and convention halls and also became a powerful electronic medium, first on vinyl albums and audio tapes, and then later on television, DVDs, the Internet, and apps—can be traced back to the experience of a child of the Great Depression. He was a Marine who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, a successful broadcaster and salesman, and, above all, a relentlessly curious man who yearned to know what set apart successful people. His deep, sonorous voice became familiar to millions after he recorded “the secret” to success on a vinyl record in 1956. His name was Earl Nightingale.

Nightingale was born in 1921 in Long Beach, California. By the time Earl was twelve, in 1933, his father had abandoned the family. Earl, his mother, and two brothers lived destitute in a “tent city” near the Long Beach waterfront, a home to people displaced in the Depression. Earl’s mother supported the family by working as a seamstress in a WPA factory. The adolescent Earl despaired not only of the family’s poverty but also of the people he came in touch with. Everyone around him seemed backbiting, sullen, and directionless.

“I started looking for security when I was 12,” Nightingale recalled. What he specifically meant was that he wanted to determine why some people were poor while others thrived. He hungered to be a member of the latter group. As a twelve-year-old, he ignored broader socioeconomic factors. This may have reflected a certain blindness to the larger mechanics of life, not dissimilar to the outlook found in a young Ronald Reagan. But the wish to succeed also drove him to read voraciously in search of “the answer.” He haunted the Long Beach Public Library, poring over every available work of religion, psychology, and philosophy.