Reagan Making the Leap From Politico to Hero

Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, the humble rail-splitter from the rugged frontier. He was a natural storyteller who used a common man’s touch and integrity to guide America through the Civil War.

Ronald Reagan is not on any such pedestal; such stature tends to come posthumously. But time and circumstance are already beginning to enshrine him in the canon of history, nowhere more strikingly than in his hometown.

Dixon, Ill., offers a Norman Rockwell version of Reagan’s boyhood, right down to the bathhouse he used while working as a teen-age lifeguard. An exhibit at Reagan’s college in Eureka, about 80 miles south, features everything from his movies with Bonzo to his meetings with Gorbachev.

The exhibits tend to Lincolnize Reagan--the Great Communicator from the idyllic Midwestern town, a natural storyteller who used a common man’s touch and integrity to guide America through the Cold War.

“There’s a tendency for people to create heroes,” says Doug Turco, a professor at Illinois State University who has advised would-be developers of Reagan historic sites. “Goodness knows there are so many fallen heroes and tragic figures in politics.”

The key spots in Reagan’s Illinois years, Dixon and Eureka, are quiet towns with tree-lined streets and prosperous economies. Town leaders hope to attract tourists by publicizing their Reagan connections.

A proposed “Reagan Roadway” would let tourists follow a route through his birthplace, home and alma mater. A Web site describes the places, and officials hope someday to link them to the more popular Illinois homes of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Planners in Dixon and Eureka already treat Reagan as part of the past, collecting oral histories and putting his presidency in context.

He didn’t learn to read by firelight, as Lincoln is said to have done, but he did grow up in the little prairie town of Dixon, the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman. His years as a movie star added glamour to his image.

Reagan faced off against the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union and--whether by planning or good timing--emerged victorious. An assassin nearly killed him in 1981, and his slow decline from Alzheimer’s disease adds a note of tragedy.

So Reagan, retired in California at age 87, has a unique claim on the nation’s memory.

Brian Sajko runs the Reagan exhibit at Eureka College, a small liberal arts school near Peoria. He believes that if anything of Reagan sticks in the national memory, it will be the image of the ordinary man doing extraordinary things.

The Eureka exhibit includes the mundane (Reagan’s Lions Club membership form), the hokey (movie posters, jelly beans) and the weighty (Reagan vs. the Soviet Union). The goal: to show people that Reagan the president was not that far removed from Reagan the small-town boy or Reagan the B-movie actor.

“We need to see that a normal person did it,” Sajko says.

If the Eureka exhibit seeks to show the real person, the boyhood home in Dixon offers an idealized version.

Videotaped interviews with Reagan tell heartwarming stories about his tough high school principal or the time young Ronnie shot off illegal fireworks and got nabbed by the cops. A University of Notre Dame pennant decorates Reagan’s bedroom--a touch that has more to do with his movie role as “The Gipper” than his actual childhood.

Outside is a bronze statue of Reagan examining Illinois corn. Down the street, his old school is being converted into a museum. Little is said about his father’s alcoholism or the wandering that took the family from town to town. Reagan spent only three years in the house, which was one of five the family lived in during their Dixon years.

Norman Wymbs, a former Reagan campaign worker and author of two books about him, led the effort to restore the house and now heads the Reagan Home Foundation. Wymbs predicts Reagan’s stature will grow as people appreciate his small-town heritage.

“With our present president, I think more and more Ronald Reagan is going to be remembered as one of the last of the really good guys,” Wymbs says. He and others say Alzheimer’s disease is speeding the process by which he begins to belong to the ages.

There is “an amazing double standard” in the way Reagan and other recent presidents are treated, says William Grover, chairman of the political science department at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and author of a book on the Reagan and Jimmy Carter presidencies.

Gerald Ford is still remembered as the president who pardoned Nixon, he says, and Carter remains the president who couldn’t handle a hostage crisis and economic meltdown. But Reagan’s policies do not seem to stick in the public mind. “There has been a willingness to let him off the hook,” Grover says.

So Reagan has airports and buildings and schools named in his honor. People want to see where he saved 77 people from drowning or where he went to school.

Sometimes, Turco says, people need to remember the positive and set aside messy details--Iran-contra, deficits, Cabinet scandals. “People who are looking to find a hero or elevate someone to a hero status, they tend to let those things slide.”