Basic Information
Name: Ronald Wilson Reagan
Nickname: The Great Communicator, The Gipper, The Teflon President, Dutch, Ronnie, Bonzo
Born: February 6, 1911
Died: June 5, 2004
Nationality: American; like, super American
Hometown: Tampico, Illinois, and other small towns in northern IL; moved to Hollywood in 1937
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Lifeguard-turned-sports announcer-turned-actor-turned politician
Education: Economics degree from Eureka College in 1932
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: John Edward "Jack" Reagan, Nelle Clyde Wilson Reagan
Siblings: Neil
Spouse: Jane Wyman (1940-1949); Nancy Davis Reagan (survived him as a widow)
Children: Maureen, Christine, and Michael from his marriage to Jane; Patti and Ron from his marriage to Nancy
Friends: Willard "Barney" Barnett, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev (Ronnie was kind of a loner friends-wise)
Foes: Communism, John Hinckley Jr.
Analysis
It All Started in a Small Town Called Tampico…
Way back in 1911, Jack and Nelle Reagan gave birth to their second child, a smiling baby boy they named Ronald. Their son would come to have many nicknames during his lifetime, but the first one that stuck was "Dutch."
Why Dutch? His dad said he looked like a "fat little Dutchman," and then little Ronald went and got his toddler self what was known as a "Dutch Boy haircut," and that was that.
In fact, Dutch held onto this super-flattering nickname all the way through high school, despite moving all over Illinois as his father struggled to find and hold down jobs. They finally settled in Dixon, which is where Ronald went to high school.
Now, one might think that a future POTUS would spend his high school days taking on extra homework and hanging out with the debate team, but not our Dutch. His interests were mainly football and drama, and he often reminisced that the lifeguarding job he had during those summers was one of his favorite jobs that he ever had.
Like, including the presidency.
To be fair, he didn't lifeguard at your ordinary average neighborhood pool. No, he lifeguarded at a river that is now considered so dangerous, you can't swim there anymore. He's credited with saving seventy-seven lives…and one set of false teeth.
Reagan went from superhero lifeguard to mediocre college student. His grades were "meh," but he kicked butt in football, swimming, drama, and student council politics. Just like in high school, he served as student body president. He became the first person in his family to get a college degree, and it was in economics and sociology.
Seems like our boy was all set to start his career as an American statesman.
Or was he?
Detour to Tinseltown, By Way of Des Moines
A lot of would-be politicians either go to law school or a different field of graduate school before running for office somewhere. Probably none of them decide to go into sportscasting…none, that is, except for our Ronnie.
After graduation, he spent a few years in Iowa "recreating" Cubs games on the radio before heading out west to Los Angeles, where his next career calling would find him.
The governorship?
Yeah, eventually—but not just yet.
First, Reagan became a Hollywood movie actor. He signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1937 and, over the course of the next twenty years, appeared in more than fifty movies. His role as George "the Gipper" Gipp in 1940's Knute Rockne, All American is what earned him his next lifelong nickname: "the Knuteman."
Just kidding, it was "the Gipper."
Interestingly, it was during his Hollywood years that Reagan really got into the whole anti-communism thing. He served as a secret FBI informant during the late 1940s, passing along information about suspected communists that he came across in his role as the president of Hollywood's Screen Actors Guild. He even had a code name: T-10.
That's a nickname that didn't stick, though, and after his movie career tapered off and he'd married his second wife, an actress named Nancy Davis, he spent the next eight years hosting General Electric Theater. GE Theater was an anthology series, kind of like American Horror Story…minus the horror.
But all good things must come to an end, and eventually Reagan was ready for yet another big career change.
Arnold Wasn't the First Actor to Run California
Reagan had been active in politics for a while, campaigning for Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and, most recently, Barry Goldwater. In fact, it was his speech in support of Goldwater, "A Time for Choosing," that launched his own political career.
In 1966, he was elected Governor of California in a ginormous landslide victory over the sitting governor, Pat Brown. In 1970 he was reelected, and when his term expired in 1974, he made no bones about the fact that he was gearing up to make a run for POTUS.
In 1980, the dream was realized. In another landslide election, Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Forty-four states went for Reagan, and Ronald "Dutch" "the Gipper" Reagan became the 40th President of the United States.
It was a wonderful opportunity for him to add to his ever-growing list of nicknames.
It was also a wonderful opportunity for him to confront his foe, communism, head-on. He had a detailed and complex foreign policy strategy in mind to deal with the Cold War threat, and we'll line it out for you now:
"We win, they lose."
Yep, that's it. We'll give you time to absorb the finer points.
Now that we get where Ronnie was coming from, it's easy to see why he was so amped to give that speech in West Berlin. He got to stand right in front of the huge ugly wall that represented everything the world hated about communism and he got to make a speech about it to thousands of people and a bunch of TV crews.
It's worth noting that Reagan had always hated the Berlin Wall. When he visited the city in 1978, before he was president, he remarked that the Wall needed to come down. Directly asking Gorbachev to tear the wall down now was just the icing on his anti-communism cake.
After the Berlin Wall
After leaving the presidency in 1989, and after watching the Soviet Union collapse in 1991 like he'd always known it would, Reagan and Nancy moved to a fancy little neighborhood in California known as Bel Air. He did cool stuff during his retirement, like build a presidential library in Simi Valley.
Then in 1994, he released a handwritten letter to the public in which he dropped this bombshell: he'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
Ten years later, after dealing with his illness uber privately, Ronald Reagan passed away in his home. His old buddy Mikhail came all the way in from Moscow for the funeral, and we think that's pretty cool. Friendship can triumph over pretty much anything—including Cold War rivalries.