Reading the Candidates

...One of the few advantages of naivete," Reagan notes, "lies in the fact that you don't have too much mental rubbish...

...Duella, Sloan and Pearce...

...Composed when their authors were between 48 and 54—although as much in anticipation of future success as in retrospect—these books will discourage readers of a Freudian bent...

...Not surprisingly, after all that, Anderson says: "I would without hesitation maintain that man is a sinner, and that all of his social institutions are affected by sin...

...But this does not deny our obligation to bring social institutions to the limits of perfection possible within the framework of an unregenerate society...

...True, it was handicapped by segregated schools and churches, anti-black voting laws, ballot-stuffing and a malapportioned legislature, among other things...

...The difference among the three candidates can be summarized in Augus-tinian terms...

...Reagan describes an adolescence of incurious innocence...

...Five years after graduation, Ron was happily acting for $5,000 a year...

...But Reagan did not try to reform liberal groups...

...But it is almost impossible to locate Reagan's 1965 show-business autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me...

...Carter thinks the City of Man is the City of God...

...They are just borrowing her patio.' As Bill explained it, a half-dozen innocents, Ida among them, had been invited to a meeting supposedly to hear about the labor dispute and decide what actors should do about it...

...His politics, he implies, were similarly innocent...

...Carter, who worked six days on the family farm and went to Sunday school and morning service on the seventh, paints rural Georgia as a world of good people, kind to him and to each other...

...Instead, he intrigued skillfully, testified as a friendly witness before Congressional Communist-hunting committees, quit all organizations except the Screen Actors Guild, and began to carry a gun...

...Shocked, Reagan tried to return to the ideological virginity he thought Dixon, Eureka and Hollywood had enjoyed before the War...

...As Christians, we must not, I repeat, succumb to the illusion that all man needs to do is to restructure his environment...

...Our government should be the same in all its actions and attitudes...

...One exchange with William Holden is typical of dozens recounted in Reagan's book: " 'I've found out that there is a meeting at Ida Lupino's,' he told me...

...rather, it demands it...

...But Ida isn't one of Them,' I expostulated...

...Not until he was in high school, when he borrowed his mother's glasses, did he learn that other people could read blackboards easily and see the leaves on distant trees...

...The family doctor had advised, "Keep her stuffed to the gills with old green cheese, the moldier, the better...

...Carter's 1975 campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best...

...Because these tidbits which I recalled from their first books proved to be more tantalizing than what the candidates were saying to us this spring—and conceivably were more relevant—it was off the press bus and into the Library of Congress for me in early May...

...Carter does not refer to his being born again in the Georgia woods after losing his first bid for that state's governorship...

...We recognize that basic to ultimate social change is the necessity that man have a new nature, that he become a new creature in Christ...

...But other omissions are more noteworthy...

...Anderson thinks the first is to be endured while journeying to the second, which we will reach through Christ after death...

...Ronald Reagan, who addressed his parents as Jack and Nelle, wrote that he credited his mother's recovery from influenza during World War I "not so much to the candles that my [Irish Catholic] father paid for in church as to the primitive use of yet-undiscovered penicillin...

...Reagan does not mention his supporting Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon in the 1948 California Congressional race, or raising an unprecedented $600,000 for Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 with a single television speech...

...with Richard G. Hubler...

...Wishington^USA READING THE CANDIDATES by andrew mollison JWashington immy Carter, who addressed his matter-of-fact Southern Baptist parents as Mother and Daddy, wrote that as a youngster in Plains, Georgia, he "felt close to nature, close to the members of our family and close to God...

...He felt the same way about life, but then at age 36 he discovered Communists, labor goons and recalcitrant management...

...All Ron had to say for his membership in his Scots-English mother's church in Dixon, Illinois, was that it helped him beat out his best friend in competition for a girl, "since Dick was a Methodist and I was one of her father's congregation...

...Still, however cautiously couched, these writings provide us with realistic details that help explain how three quite different men developed from similar competitive, white, middle-class, smalltown families that emphasized religion, discipline and education as the avenues of upward mobility...

...Paul Rood, "I know that he knows that I know him...

...As Reagan rose to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, all this began to change...

...Reagan, raised in rented homes in five Illinois towns before settling down in Dixon, started out as a believer in the perfectibility of man...

...No rebellious vandalism, temptations to cheat in school or (except for Reagan's sweet recollection of a tongue-tied high school romance) even serious dates with women other than their wives are recorded...

...3 divided into good guys (Us) and bad guys (Them...

...Their books, in short, indicate that what we face this fall is not so much a political choice as a theological one...

...At Eureka College in Illinois, a Midwestern cousin of Texas Christian University, Reagan spent the energy on sports, drama and the social life of Tau Kappa Epsilon that Carter and Anderson dissipated in prayer and striving for high marks...

...I know,' Bill said impatiently...

...Bill said, 'Let's go.'" At the meeting, Reagan says, he confounded the forces of evil with his arguments...

...Of course, the whole thing was a brainwash job to hook the half-dozen big names for a coverup...

...I was wrong...

...He played football because poor sight prevented him from seeing a baseball soon enough to bat well...

...The opposite conviction arises in Anderson, who lost three of his five siblings to pneumonia and scarlet fever in Rockford, a northern Illinois city of 75,000...

...Anderson studiously ignores his having introduced—in three different sessions of Congress—a resolution declaring the United States a Christian theocracy...

...He was brought up "not just on the Puritan work ethic"—his chores in his parents' grocery store "made the after-school hours and Saturdays fly" —but on Sunday School, followed by Sunday morning church service, young people's church service at 5 p.m., and Sunday evening evangelistic service...

...He describes himself as "a near-hopeless hemophilic liberal" who "bled for causes" and "voted Democratic, following my father, in every election...

...Carter emerged thinking that everyone is inherently good, Anderson that everyone is inherently evil, and Reagan that the world is Andrew Mollison, a previous New Leader contributor, is chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...Reagan thinks the City of Man can be restored in our lifetime to what he calls "that shining city on the hill...

...Yet Carter sees these as institutional "mistakes" which institutional changes have corrected, and concludes: "The people of this country are inherently unselfish, open, honest, decent, competent, and compassionate...

...He discovered that the union movement suffered jurisdictional disputes, and had thugs, Left-wingers and Communists, as well as regular guys, in its membership...

...Broadman Press, Nashville) is still available in Bantam paperback...

...or Anderson's Between Two Worlds: A Congressman's Choice (Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids), an autobiographical examination, published in 1970, of the dilemmas facing a theologically conservative Christian lawmaker with liberal political opinions...

...Then there were Wednesday night prayer meeting services, occasional special meetings with traveling Bible teachers, yearly missionary conferences, summers at Camp Epworth for Bible study in a rickety tabernacle, and every August, of course, the five-church Union Tent Campaign...

...Twenty years later Reagan bought his father "a small house and lot" in Hollywood, and arranged a job for him opening his son's fan mail...

...Only youthful monkeyshines are chronicled...

...Confronted at age 11 with the need to drag a bender-prone father ("his arms spread out on the snow as if he were crucified") into the house, Ron "felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time I was feeling sorry for myself...

...Writes Reagan: "It was the most satisfying gift of my life...

...He continues: "I hoped and believed that the blood and death and confusion of World War II would result in a regeneration of mankind, that the whole struggle was simply the immolation of the phoenix of human liberties and that the bird of happiness would rise out of the ashes and fly everywhere at once...

...you can approach a fresh notion with the delight of a child snatching up a bright new dime...

...John Anderson wrote that Mother and Dad prayed next to him at the annual tent revival meeting sponsored by five of Rockford, Illinois' East Side Swedish churches...

...Thus was born The Speech, honed by eight years of General Electric television shows and plant visits, that we still hear today...

...At age nine, he finally stepped forward, fell on his knees, beseeched God's mercy and testified to Dr...

...His mother, Nelle, "had the conviction that everyone loved her just because she loved them," recalls her son...