Ronald Reagan's early life and Hollywood years

Ronald Reagan

The Younger Years

Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in the small town of Tampico, Illinois. His parents were John Jack Reagan and Nelle Wilson Reagan. Like a lot of other kids growing up in the Midwest after the turn of the century, Ronald was of mainly Irish descent. His father was a strong Irish-American shoe salesman and his mother was of Scottish-Irish descent. Ronald went by the name Dutch during most of his childhood for the reason that he disliked his given name and, according to tale, for the reason that Jack had said that his son looked like a fat little Dutchman when he was born. Dutch had one brother named Neil (Early Life: 1911 -- 1932, 2010).

During Ronald's earlier years, his family moved many times all over Illinois, living in Tampico, Chicago, Galesburg, Monmouth, and finally Dixon where the family finally settled when Ronald was nine years old. Because of the regular moves, Dutch didn't make a lot of, if any, enduring relationships. As an alternative, he turned to his family for companionship, as did the rest of the family. As a consequence, the four family members became a tightly knit unit. The family was so close and well-known with each other that by the time Ronald and his brother where in high school, they had taken to referring to their parents by their first names. Prior to moving to Dixon, Dutch was also quite a withdrawn boy. He liked playing calmly by himself with his toys. He particularly liked reading books having to do with natural history. He later recollected that as a child he had read his favorite book on wolves so many times that later on, he could still narrate the entire book word for word. He complemented these books with a tiny collection of mounted butterflies that had been given to him (Early Life: 1911 -- 1932, 2010).

The Hollywood Years

After finishing college, Ronald found employment as a sports broadcaster, ultimately for Chicago Cubs baseball games, sharpening his play-by-play imagery to a highest association with his widespread audience. While in Los Angeles he took someone's recommendation and thrived in obtaining an acting agreement at Warner Brother's motion pictures studio. When the war started in 1941, Reagan was thirty years old. He enlisted in the Army as a second lieutenant and finished as a captain on duty in California, an adjutant and personnel officer at Fort Roach, a movie studio utilized by the military. Working with civilians assigned to Fort Roach, Reagan first learned about government (Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 2010).

Reagan was obtaining dislike for big government, but at the end of the war he described himself as a New Dealer to the center. He did not trust big business. From a family that understood in just and honest behavior towards blacks, he was distressed by racism. At the end of the war there were a lot of new veterans' groups that sprung up across the nation and tired to sell some of the same poison of fascist prejudice that we had just been overcome in the war. Reagan became a member of the United World Federalists and the American Veterans Committee, because he liked their slogan (Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 2010).

In the meantime, the Marxist-Leninist control of the Communist Party in the United States was continuing its attachment to the Soviet Union. The Communist Party USA saw oral assaults against Stalin or the Soviet Union as deceit, bourgeois propaganda and as counter radical, ten years prior to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would condemn Stalin. Not following a strategy independent of Stalin, Yugoslavia's Communist leader, would made the Communist Party USA more at odds with public opinion and more susceptible to assault. In Hollywood, the Party's enthusiasm to move forward itself within leftist organizations appears to have put it on a crash course with a variety of individuals in Hollywood, together with Ronald Reagan (Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 2010).

The Cold War

The Soviets were in a voracious frame of mind when Reagan took over the White House. In the 1970's the Soviets had made quick progress in Asia, Africa and South America, concluding with the attack of Afghanistan in 1979. Additionally, the Soviet Union had piled up the most alarming nuclear arsenal in the world. The Warsaw Pact also had overpowering dominance over NATO in its conservative forces and Moscow had put into place a new generation of intermediate range missiles, the giant SS-20s, aimed at European cities (President Ronald Reagan: Winning the Cold War, 2006).

Reagan did not simply just act in response to these disturbing events; he put together an extensive counterattack policy. He commenced a $1.5 trillion military upsurge, the biggest in American peacetime history, which was designed to draw the Soviets into an arms race he was certain they could not win. He was also resolute to lead the Western coalition in positioning 108 Pershing II and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles in Europe to oppose the SS-20s. Simultaneously, Reagan did not shun arms control discussions. In fact, he recommended that for the first time the two superpowers significantly lessen their nuclear supplies. If the Soviets would remove their SS-20s, the United States would not carry on with the Pershing and Tomahawk deployments. This was known as the zero option. In the end Reagan had a much more refined perception of communism than most. Even a few who had beforehand been cynical of Reagan in the end had to confess that his strategies had been systematically justified. Reagan's archenemy, Henry Kissinger, noted that while it was George H.W. Bush who supervised over the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet empire, it was Ronald Reagan's presidency which lead to the end (President Ronald Reagan: Winning the Cold War, 2006).

Ronald Regan lived a long and prosperous life. There were many events that took place in his life that shaped him into what he was. Some people saw him as brilliant while others saw him as bungling, but now matter how he was perceived he was a great man who will always be a legend in this country.