With Father’s Day a week away, the publisher of Michael Reagan’s Lessons My Father Taught Me reminded us of the story of the Reagan children’s sometimes awkward relationship with their father and how it ended with a hug.
In Lessons, from Humanix Books, Michael Reagan first tackled the issue of Ron and Patti’s estrangement from their father. He concluded that politics simply got in the way.
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“The reality is that a political career is all-consuming. Who suffered? Patti and Ron,” said Michael Reagan.
“I was born in 1945, so I got to spend more than 20 years with my father before he ever campaigned for political office,” he said.
“It was different for Patti, who was born in 1952, and Ron, born in 1958,” he wrote. “Both were at a vulnerable age when the Republican Party took their father away from them.”
The bottom line, he concluded, was that “it’s understandable that Patti would be liberal — because in her mind, the conservatives, the Republicans, took her father away from her. The party of ‘family values’ robbed her of time with her father. And it’s understandable that Ron would be a liberal and an atheist, because who were Ronald Reagan’s biggest supporters? The Moral Majority — conservative Christians. It’s not hard to see why Ron might blame Christianity for taking his father from him.”
Patti, he reminded readers, reconciled while her father struggled with Alzheimer’s disease. She had written scathing things about Reagan’s policies, but then wrote after her father’s death:
“My father, for his part, was not a man to begrudge anyone a divergent opinion; he’d have been fine if I had written some articles disagreeing with his policies, or even given interviews, as long as I was respectful and civil. But I chose stridency instead. . . . I was a child railing against a parent, nothing more. . . .Decades later I would look into my father’s eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer’s with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.”
Michael Reagan also told of how his father overcame his generation’s awkwardness with public displays of affection by becoming a big hugger. He wrote:
“Dad didn’t realize how I struggled with the emotional distance between us. He didn’t understand that all four of his children felt unsure of his love for us.” One day after Reagan had left the White House, he appeared on Michael Reagan’s radio show, and the host decided to end it with a hug.
“There were Secret Service agents, reporters, and station personnel all around. I didn’t care. I reached out, wrapped my arms around my father, and hugged him. And how did my father react? He tensed up! He wasn’t ready for it, he was embarrassed by it, and he wasn’t sure how to react. But I hugged him tight.
“And after an awkward moment or two, he returned my hug. In that moment, something changed. Our relationship was never the same. From then on, whenever my father and I said hello or good-bye, we hugged each other.”
Three years later, Reagan announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Reagan said that as the former president faded, he always remembered his son for hugs.
“I was the guy who hugged him,” wrote Reagan.
Once he forgot, and as he walked to his car, his wife Colleen told him to turn around.
“I looked — and there was Dad, standing at the door, arms outstretched, waiting for his hug. I ran back and hugged him and said, ‘I love you, Dad. I love you.’”
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He added, “I’m glad I finally stopped resenting the distance between my father and me and started bridging the distance. That was a lesson Dad learned from me, and I learned from him: Take the initiative. Put your arms around someone you love. Say ‘I love you,’ before it’s too late. That’s the greatest lesson of all.”
Columnist’s note: In a version of this report published in the Washington Examiner Magazine, Secrets erroneously called Reagan’s 2016 book “new” and apologizes for that error.
