Ronnie and Nancy (23 page)

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Loyal’s friend Homer Hargrave Sr., while admiring of America First, was not a member, according to his son. “He was very sympathetic to Lindbergh and Senator [Burton] Wheeler,” Hargrave Junior said,35 referring to the Montana Democrat who was in the forefront of the isolationist movement and whose wife was on the AFC’s board. Hargrave added that his father, having lived through World War I, was adamantly opposed to going to war again but was neither pro-German nor anti-Semitic. He told a story to illustrate his point, though it also conveyed a sense of how nonchalant the Davises’ social set seemed about the rise of right-wing au-thoritarian regimes in Europe (an attitude shared by many Americans, including Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, both of whom had entertained Mussolini’s son Vittorio in Hollywood in 1937).36

“In 1938, when Colleen and my father went to Europe on their honeymoon, she said she wanted to bring me a present. I said I’d like a black shirt from Italy and a swastika. She was trying to make friends with me, so she brought both back. I put the swastika up on my bedroom wall with the college pennants. One day I came home from school and the swastika was gone. I asked Colleen where it was. ‘Your father couldn’t stand it anymore.

It went down the incinerator.’”37 According to his son, this was Homer Hargrave Sr.’s reaction to Kristallnacht, the first organized attack on Jewish communities in Germany, which occurred on November 9, 1938.

Richard Davis recalled his parents’ lunching with the Lindberghs at the Arizona Biltmore, probably in the spring of 1940. “I don’t think Dr.

Loyal was impressed by Charles Lindbergh at all. He was very impressed by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was a marvelous author.” Davis also recalled, “Walter and Nan Huston were very much against Hitler. This went back to when we spent two summers with them, and I heard a lot of conversations at the dinner table. They were very pro-European. They were oriented to the British and the French.”38

On the other hand, Edith and Loyal saw a lot of Lillian Gish in Chicago in 1940 and 1941. Richard Davis said he had never heard any talk of America First during the dinners they had with the actress, but of all Edith’s actress friends, the conservative Gish was his father’s favorite. “She and Loyal were very close. I always thought they had a thing for each other.”39

Historians have made much of Loyal Davis’s political views and his influence on those of the future First Lady and her husband. According to the stock portrayal, the doctor was a relentless right-wing bigot who turned 1 2 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House his stepdaughter into a Republican zombie and through her converted Ronald Reagan from a New Deal liberal to a New Right conservative. As former California governor Pat Brown, whom Reagan defeated in 1966, put it, “There is no doubt that Reagan’s move to the far right began after he met and married Nancy.”40

Loyal Davis was a Republican, but he was neither a party activist nor a significant donor to any candidate other than his son-in-law. Whether he was particularly right-wing is difficult to say—his friends insist he wasn’t, his enemies insist he was. Allegations of his racism and anti-Semitism appear to be exaggerated, though not far-fetched. In discussing such matters, there is a natural but simplistic tendency to apply the standards of the present to those of the past. What can be said unequivocally about Loyal Davis is that he was very much of his time, place, class, race, sex, and profession. Only his negative attitude toward religion in general was unusual.

As a self-proclaimed Southern Democrat, Edith held views that were even more clichéd than her husband’s.

Nancy Reagan always maintained that her stepfather had little interest in politics and no influence on her views or Ronald Reagan’s, which is somewhat disingenuous and clearly overstated. “His life was medicine,”

she told me. “I never heard him say that he was a Republican. My mother was a Democrat—Southern Democrat, y’all. And I knew nothing about politics.”41

Richard Davis told me his father was a standard-issue Republican: “He didn’t like Roosevelt, but no one in upper-middle-class America did.”

Davis was uncertain as to whether Edith ever voted for Roosevelt: “If she did, she didn’t tell Loyal, that’s for sure.”42 Edith’s political hero, he noted, was Senator Carter Glass, an eminent conservative Democrat from her home state of Virginia and the last surviving member of the Senate born in the antebellum South; he had authored the Federal Reserve Act of 1913

and been secretary of the treasury under Woodrow Wilson. Nicknamed the Unreconstructed Rebel by FDR, Glass led the fight against his attempt to abolish the poll tax, which effectively deprived blacks of the vote in many Southern states, and he opposed Roosevelt’s renomination in 1936

and 1940.43

Edith was “as bigoted as her husband,” according to Kitty Kelley, who relied heavily on the recollections of Lester Weinrott, Edith’s producer and director, to reach this conclusion. “Loyal was the worst bigot in the world,”

Weinrott told Kelley. “He was a racist who called all blacks niggers, and an
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anti-Semite who called all Jews kikes. He hated every Catholic he ever met.

His mother . . . was president of the Eastern Star [a Masonic order], and she spat on the floor every time a Catholic entered the room. Loyal was the same way. We had a federal judge in Chicago named Mike Igoe, who married a nice Catholic girl from Galesburg, and Loyal never referred to Mrs.

Igoe as anything but ‘that Catholic bitch.’ Not to her face, of course, just behind her back.”44

“I never heard any racial or anti-Semitic utterance from my grandparents, nor Dr. Loyal or Edith,” Richard Davis insisted. “My father’s best friend and colleague all of his life was Dr. Louis J. Pollock, who was Jewish. A Jewish surgeon, Jacob Bookbinder, operated on my grandfather, Albert, for cancer of the bowel. My father trusted him to take care of his own father. Edith would go out to black churches on the South Side of Chicago on Sunday afternoons and participate in their activities. Lester Weinrott knew all of this. He and his wife, Betty, were at the house all the time. Les Weinrott was a very, very dear friend of Edith and Loyal. And I was extraordinarily fond of him. I don’t understand why he said what he said to Kitty Kelley.”45

Mike Wallace, the CBS newsman, whose long friendship with the Davises began in the early 1940s when he worked at the same Chicago radio station as Edith, told me, “I’m Jewish, and I never had that feeling from anybody in that family. I never heard a whisper about anti-Semitism.”

Asked why Lester Weinrott, whom he also knew, would have made such statements, Wallace answered, “He was probably bitter, because he was left behind, so to speak. He disappeared after doing radio soap operas.”46

“Dr. Davis was certainly not anti-Semitic,” said Dr. Nicholas Wetzel, who started as a clerk with Loyal Davis in 1945 and was a partner in his practice until 1977. “He brought any number of Jews on the staff at Passavant.”47 Both Wetzel and Richard Davis cited Loyal’s intervention in 1946

or 1947 on behalf of Dr. Harold Laufman, a talented surgeon whose appointment was actively opposed by many doctors at the hospital because he was Jewish. “My father absolutely blew everybody away who objected to it,” Davis recalled, “because Dr. Laufman was an outstanding surgeon.”48

Although this incident took place after the end of World War II, when the revelation of the concentration camps put a muzzle on American anti-Semitism, quotas on Jewish students persisted at some colleges and universities into the 1960s.

Wetzel also said that he saw no evidence of anti-Catholicism in Loyal, 1 3 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House pointing out that he himself was a Catholic. He added that, while Edith was a regular attendant at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, her husband seldom accompanied her. “I don’t think he was atheistic, but he was certainly irreligious,” said Wetzel, “and that dated back to his grade school days, when he had perfect attendance at Sunday school and the prize was given to the son of the local department store owner. I think that totally soured him on the church.”49

“I never joined a church,” Loyal wrote. “I have tried to practice the golden rule. I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor to his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or a hell as places. If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward and mortality for having led a good life. I have never thought these beliefs necessary to the recognition of the great influence Christ’s teachings have had and which I have tried to follow. . . . I have always been affected by flagrant acts of injustice.”50

“My father loved to discuss serious topics,” Nancy Reagan explained,

“and I can remember more than one conversation about whether there really was such a thing as a human soul. I don’t remember the answers, but I recall, unlike my mother, Loyal wasn’t religious. I once asked him what happiness was. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘the answer to that question is almost twenty-five centuries old, and it’s basically what the Greeks said. Happiness is the pursuit of excellence in all aspects of one’s life.’ ”51

One of the most oft-repeated—and damning—stories about Loyal Davis was originally reported by Lou Cannon in his first book about Reagan, in 1969: “A California physician who interned under Dr. Davis remembers that his fellow interns chafed under his strictness. In those days the interns were frequently called to deliver babies in the city’s Negro districts and they would, on occasion, be asked by the mother to suggest a name for the child they had helped bring into the world. The interns invariably suggested the name Loyal Davis, a practice that was brought to the attention of the esteemed surgeon and finally prompted a bulletin board edict that interns were in no case to assist in naming an infant.”52

(Cannon repeated this story in his second Reagan book in 1982 , but not his third in 1991.)

In her version, Kitty Kelley omits Cannon’s reference to Loyal’s strictness as the basis of the resentments against him: “The prejudices of Loyal Davis were not hidden from the medical community, or from the interns
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and residents who worked for him. Some were so appalled by his virulent racism that when they went into the Chicago ghetto to deliver babies, they persuaded the black mothers to name their children ‘Loyal’ out of spite.”53

Although Cannon based the story on a single source, who apparently didn’t date it, there probably was some truth to it. “I’ve heard that story, but an equal number of babies were named after Irving Cutter,” Wetzel said, referring to the dean of Northwestern University Medical School. “It was probably before the war, because Dean Cutter quit in 1942.”54 Loyal Davis’s other longtime partner, Dr. Daniel Ruge, concurred. “I had a patient one time whose name was Loyal Davis Washington. I think it was done more as a joke, but you can’t tell. It’s true, a lot of people didn’t like him. He was a strong personality.”55

“It was always a joke,” said Richard Davis, who told an anecdote suggesting that Loyal was less a racist than a snob. When Richard was in medical school at Northwestern in the 1950s, pairs of students would go to the South Side and other neighborhoods “where people couldn’t afford hospitalization to have babies. Dr. Loyal always used to kid us— ‘Dicky, you better take a good catcher’s mitt, just to catch the babies as they fly out.’

The students would name not only the black children but all the others after their professors.

“Before and after the war, Dr. Loyal had a very famous class for junior medical students, which they nicknamed the Hour of Charm,” Davis continued. (
The Hour of Charm
was a popular radio show, featuring Phil Spi-talny and His All-Girl Orchestra, that aired from 1934 to 1948 on CBS

and NBC.) “Now, if you came to that without a necktie and a coat, you were thrown out. He taught doctors to be doctors. To act like doctors and to think like doctors. In neurosurgery you can’t be sloppy.”56

No discussion of the Davises’ political attitudes would be complete without considering their relationship with Mayor Edward Kelly, which began in the early 1930s and lasted until his death, in 1950. Kelly’s wife, Margaret, was almost as close to Edith as Colleen Moore Hargrave was. Loyal and Ed Kelly also grew quite close, the train engineer’s son from Galesburg and the policeman’s son from the Southwest Side having developed a deep respect for each other as neighbors on the Gold Coast. The Kellys lived just down the block from the Davises, at 209 East Lake Shore Drive, which was considered the finest address in the city.

In the 1940s, Kelly was at the height of his power. Along with Cook 1 3 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House County Democratic Party chairman Pat Nash, he ran one of the most powerful political machines in the country, rivaling those of Boston’s James Michael Curley, Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast, and Jersey City’s Frank Hague. A member of FDR’s inner circle, he engineered the President’s nomination to a third term at the 1940 convention, and also the replacement of his left-wing vice president, Henry Wallace, with the middle-of-the-road Harry Truman at the 1944 convention. Both conventions were held in Chicago. Kelly supported the New Deal, but at heart he was a law-and-order fiscal conservative who knew how to get along with the city’s Republican business establishment, especially Colonel McCormick (who had roomed with Franklin Roosevelt at Groton and hated him ever after). He was also cozy with the heirs to Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate, which along with other criminal interests was said to provide the Kelly-Nash machine with an estimated $12 to $20 million annually in return for lax enforcement of the anti-gambling laws.57 Pat Nash’s nephew was Capone’s lawyer.58 (The Mafia boss had been convicted of federal income tax evasion the year Kelly became mayor; released from prison in 1939, he died in 1947.)

Kelly is not even mentioned in either
Nancy
or
My Turn,
but Nancy Reagan confirmed that he and his wife were close to her mother and stepfather. “I remember there was a picture of Mother and Margaret Kelly in our apartment,” she said. What was Mrs. Kelly like? “She was very nice.