None of Reagan's four children is dedicated to politics
No law ever decreed that a presidential candidate must be accompanied on the campaign trail by a smiling wife and a bevy of pink-cheeked children. But a long tradition claims that the voters want a close look at every prospective First Family, and that they want any such family to be very familial indeed. No divorced man has ever been elected President, and except for Warren Harding, there has not been a childless President since James Buchanan (1857-61), who was also the only President to remain a lifelong bachelor.
Ronald Reagan lists family along with neighborhood, work, peace and freedom as the core of Americans' "shared values," so it seems somewhat odd that his own children were so rarely seen during the primary campaign. It also seems somewhat odd that Reagan barely mentioned his children in his official biography. "We would be," jokes Reagan's oldest son, Mike, 35, "the unknown First Family."
There have occasionally been stories about the younger Reagans, and occasionally embarrassments. Oldest Daughter Maureen, 39, sometimes gets headlines for her ardent support of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Reagan just as ardently opposes. Second Daughter Patti, 27, attracted attention by going around with Bernie Leadon, former banjo player with the Eagles. And when Younger Son Ronald, 22, became a dancer with Manhattan's Jeffrey II Company, the training troupe for the Jeffrey Ballet, gossip columnists began raising eyebrows and talking of family hostilities. "How embarrassed is Ronald Reagan [really] about his ballet-dancing son?" leered the New York Post. "Answer: plenty."
TIME Senior Correspondent Laurence I. Barrett interviewed all four of the younger Reagans and found them engagingly different from what the gossip suggested. His report:
The Reagan children are hardly recluses, but neither are they as funky as sometimes portrayed. They have lives of their own. None is dedicated to politics.
Reagan's public reticence about them comes partly from his strong sense of privacy. It also comes, say his aides, from Nancy Reagan's extreme sensitivity to Reagan's marriage to Jane Wyman. Nancy, the mother of the two younger children, would like to pretend that the first marriage never happened. Reagan caters to this sensitivity, and that is why there was so little mention of the marriage and the children in his autobiography. In fact, some friends think that the extreme closeness of Reagan and Nancy has created a barrier for all the children.
Maureen, now a tall, sturdy, handsome woman, ebullient but more than a touch wary, was seven when her parents were divorced. She lived with her mother, but remembers going riding on her fa ther's ranch and hearing him recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew. She jocularly refers to him as "Dear Old Dad." Like all the other Reagan children, she spent much of her youth in private boarding schools; like all of them, she dropped out of college (Marymount College of Virginia). She went to work as a Republican volunteer in Nixon's Washington campaign headquarters in 1960, while Dear Old Dad was an active Democrat for Nixon. "Once in a while," she says, "I remind him that I have time on him as a Republican."