Word: actorisms
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...wasn't, of course. This was the actor's gift, to be both larger than life and disarming at the same time. He was, in fact, never so simple as he seemed. A fervent tax cutter, he raised taxes significantly four times as economic conditions and reform demanded. The man who said government was not the solution, it was the problem, actually presided over its continued expansion. Far from abolishing the departments of Energy and Education, he added a new Cabinet-level department, for Veterans Affairs. The archconservative who was skeptical of Social Security ultimately was credited with saving...
...changed or expediency required. Likewise, the man himself was not so simple, not to mention simpleminded, as his critics held--the "kindly fanatic" in Garry Wills' phrase. He confounded his biographer Edmund Morris, remained opaque even to friends of many years. The notion that he was a second-rate actor who did well with a script continues to be dispelled with the release of his radio addresses and more recently, his personal letters, which show a far more subtle mind and sophisticated outlook than the caricature ever suggested. But then, Reagan had a gift for being underestimated, which served...
Reagan also discovered that he was an actor. Taken to see a touring antiwar play, Journey's End, he identified strongly with the hero, even began to feel that he was the hero. "Nature was trying to tell me something," he recalled later, "namely that my heart is a ham loaf." He spent much of his time thereafter in student theatricals as well as football and swimming, with only the minimum study necessary to major in economics. Dutch Reagan (his father had bestowed the nickname at birth) emerged into the Depression-stricken America of 1932 and found there were very...
Reagan felt with some justification that his union activity damaged his career as an actor. After more than 50 films, he was getting no offers of good parts. By 1953 he was reduced to doing a nightclub routine in Las Vegas, where he introduced various singers and dancers and made apologetic jokes about his own inability to either sing or dance. Was the optimist discouraged? Hardly. He was soon offered a new job that was to change his whole life. For $125,000 a year, he would act as host and occasional star of a weekly television drama series...
...first prominent Hollywood actors to defect to the much scorned new medium of TV, Reagan revived his acting career. The General Electric Theater, with Reagan as host from 1954 to 1962, dominated the Sunday-night ratings. But what changed Reagan was his tours of the GE plants. Later, Reagan's opponents often underestimated him, dismissing him as "just an actor," an amateur lacking political experience. What they failed to see was that although Reagan had not spent much time in conventional politics, he had gained both skill and experience in what was to become the politics...