[applause] >> is this thing on? pleased to be here to this very unlikely event actually i have to say, not that they don't do readings and things as they call them all the time at politics & prose. in the unlikely part of this because i never really intended to do anything like as. i'm 52 years old. i got throughout the century without ever considering i would do something like this. but a little less than a year ago, it was a 36 last year, i was talking to my mother on the occasion of my father's 99th birthday when of course the 100 are taking a. can you believe daddy's going to be 100 she says to me? she calls him daddy of course to a kid still. and i'm singing to her job, boys, isn't that something? fascist incredible. inside i'm thinking police on another aircraft carrier. please don't make me go to the dedication of a bridge or something like that. but then i got to thinking about that 100 years. 100 years is a long time. that hundred years is a particularly long time and momentous time. it was a different world that he came from, my father, which may explain some of his peculiarities that we had the family noticed often. nothing grim, nothing creepy really. not at all creepy and sad. he was an odd duck, my father. he never gossiped about anybody. never pass up, not once. like most men on occasion he would come home. but he never raised his voice. he did once almost knock makes dieter over with a set of keys by fighting them into his chest. i don't know what he was upset about, but he never yielded us anything like that. is this outspoken kind of guy. if he wanted to make you feel bad because he had done something wrong, his tone would acquire this gravitas and he would start speaking slower and slower and softer and softer until finally you were whining, just as they say in the book, sounded like gerbils squeaking after a while. but i was conscious of the fact that my father has this sort is scarcely reachable core. the 90% that all this talk is president of the united states, which you see is what you get. same guy at the dinner table as the v. delivering the state of the union address. that's 92 was absolutely trustworthy, count on it all day long. there was this 10% of them, metaphorically speaking, to be held very close. everybody and his family, those of us who knew him very well where aware of this 10%, were aware it was a part of him, even my mother commented she couldn't always reach a very, very private part. and now is the part of him that i determined to go looking for because that was the part that was the most inaccessible. that was the mysterious part of him, the enigma. not the 90%. that was right up there. but the 10%, where did that come from? what was that all about? so i was looking in nature term and got married to the 100 years was telling me something. the 10% had to be forming itself in his early years, way back in tampa co. and dixon in galesburg and monmouth and all these other towns where i went searching. now i have to say that if you're going to write a story about your own father, it certainly helps if you have a pulitzer prize-winning biographer tailing him around for 14 years taking notes. a lot of your research is 30 times. so i relied on many of the books that has already been written on him for facts and dates and figures and things like that. but of course those people, accomplished as they may be, edward morris retired him for 14 years, but they didn't grow up with them. they were looking on from the out side. looking at them from the inside. there many people who know much more about his policies and politics than i do. i did make a study of him. i didn't cover him while he was in the white house. but i grew up with him. i knew him since i was this big. people remember him as president and for the challenger disaster may be poor state of the union address, assassination attempt on the things like that. i remember him way back when i would pick him he would pick me up over his head and make a propeller sound that he would do under the doorways and into the bed and finally he would sing me a little song and sing me to sleep there. that's my memory of him. but still, he was mysterious. still he was something of an enigma. so off i go looking. i didn't stop at just his childhood. i was somewhat interested in the family as well. so i went on the back to ireland, although a factual, so reagan who came down from the cold. nobody's quite sure. there was both when he talked about him and married a girl named margaret murphy. they lived in a huddle called duelists, which may be time to ireland you've heard of if you followed my father. the list was where they lived. there is no duelists anymore because duelists is a collection of waddling tub at, like mud and sticks to you and me. good may come out of mud and sticks. they melt back into the turf after a while. these were peasants really. they owned nothing. they were landless laborers. they would work other people skills and the irish potato famine came, but the great calamities of the 19th century. the population of ireland today has not recovered fully from the potato famine of the late 1840s. there still aren't as many people living in ireland today as they were in 1845 let's say. so right in the middle of this comment or poorer, literally dirt poor is the ranking -- the weekend family and a point. thomas and margaret die, michael reagan is the only child in the family. my great ,-com,-com ma great grandfather is that right? grandfather -- he learned to read somehow. he was the only one that wasn't a literate and became a soap maker and then moved the family took him win. and here's one of the only pieces of original research i can claim to be very proud of. i got a little e-mail from ancestry.com. ancestry.com is the genealogical website that i signed up four years ago. the 1851 british census/1851? admits in 1841 to britain first. maybe they are inoffensive. maybe michael reagan and his bride are inoffensive. i thought man, they are irish peasants living in a slum. they were very efficient in britain in 1851 if it turns out and of course they did count those kinds of people. there is michael a weekend. now the oath of office he crushed the piracy to britain. he is now a soap maker, living with a bunch of other poor irish youths from southwest of ireland and done that lee street in south london. i know he's going to marry a k. he while he is fair and i wonder, is she in the census? to go looking for her and sure enough there is catherine mulcahey living kitty corner across the street on bentley from michael reagan. i must admit ratepayer. she's a gardener, living with a poor young irish people from the south west of ireland, including one woman who was identified as a heather picker. you don't see too many heather picker's these days. so this is the sort of family that he came from. michael o'regan comes to america. he has an children, one of which is john michael reagan now for the first time, reagan, who begets jack reagan, john edwards reagan that everybody kojak and that is my father's father. so, what did i find when i actually started looking up my father? getting pats on the family history and of? we think of him i think i do is the sort of big strapping confident kind of guy, you know, not afraid of anyone. what was kerry him. but when he was a little boy, it turns out -- he was a little boy. he was undersized as a youth. his family moved around a lot. he was the new kid in school, perennially. who is picked on by bullies, chosen last four games on the playground. and he spent a lot of his time alone. he spent a lot of his time in places like the attic of a rental house in galesburg, where they lived, where the previous owner had left strange artifacts as he saw it up in the attic. so you would spend his time in the dusty sunbeams in the attic, going through all these stuffed birds and things, strange plants, many of which had seemed to come from the west. they think they're you begin to form this impression of the west as a wide-open landscape. and instead of roaming the landscape as an undersized kid would be picked on by bullies, he saw himself is growing into a hero in that landscape. he could do heroic things he thought. in his mother encouraged him in this. when he was born she called him perfectly wonderful and she never changed her opinion of him. he was always her perfectly wonderful ronald. to his father, when he saw him being born so that they make a of a lot of noise for a fat little bit of a dutchman. that's how he became dutch to everybody but his mother. his mother called him ronald, but everybody else called him dutch when he was young. so dutch is this little kid, and treating these streams of this life ahead, where he will be a hero and he will roam this wide-open land gave been the guy who writes in the third wheel and saves the day. the compassionate yet removed hero because he is satisfied to a certain extent alone, being solitary. by the time he is 15, he has found perhaps the perfect job for him. he called it the best job he ever had. he was the life guard on the rocks river, lowell park, just north of dixon, illinois, where the family had moved at that time. he had taken some lifeguarding classes at the local ymca, distinguished himself as a phenomenally talented swimmer. and he studied artificial restoration. went out to lowell park and his dad driven down. and they took a look at this skinny kid, 15 years old, just completed his sophomore year in high school. and he wants to be the lifeguard at this big beach, where lots of people calm. hundreds of people in the summer would there. they looked at him and said, you know, i don't know. he may of taken classes at the wide, but he is going have to dive in there and save people. jack said give the boy a chance. he can do it. and indeed he did. seven years, 77 people pulled out of that river. if i did the math correctly, that would come to about 11 and a summer, which would work out to about one person say one life saved every 10 days or so on that river. imagine the 15-year-old or 17 or 20 year old for that matter. what you do for your summer job? well, every 10 days or so i'll save somebody's life. that some people say you know, sure, he goes into the river and he pulled some person now, you know, that can't be too impressive. well, i visited the river for the first time when i went there. it flows into the mississippi, a feeder to the mississippi. it is a major river. it is a powerful river. you get caught in the middle of that current and you don't know how to swim come you're in trouble. you are heading down stream in a hurry. somebody's going have to get you out of trouble. well, guess who that was for seven years. he learned -- i said i think it was the perfect job for him because he was at the same time the focus of attention, the man of the hour when things went wrong, he was the one everybody turned to end at the same time he could remain solitary. you have to be removed as lifeguard. you can't be option is that the concession stand or hanging out with your buddies. you've got to be watching. you got to be paying attention. given his nearsighted, he's really got to pay attention. he is tearing through his glasses the whole time at this river in trying to figure out who is going to get in trouble anyway or the whole time. he was, i think, keeping the planets aligned. he was keeping the universe in order, by pulling those people out of the river. drowning people were chaos. and my father couldn't stand chaos. he liked his world orderly. he liked his world orderly so he would be free to dream and streams in peaceful tranquility. and so, he would dive into these rivers and pull people out. now, almost nobody ever thinks them for doing this. he learned a lot about human nature, too. no man but then came for being rescued. used to do a little imitation of him because after he would do a rescue, his father jack told him, because he complained, nobody ever thinks me. i tell you what, get a log, stomp, carve a notch for every person you rescue. and 77 notches on a trip weblog eventually. but he used to imitate people coming up to him. he pulled out of their affair, well, you know, i wasn't really in trouble out there at all, really. and he would keep carbon monoxide in the log. okay, carve, carve, cars. the only man who ever thanked him -- this is a giant of a man who arrived at the river one day with somebody leading him because he was totally blind. he was six-foot five, 350 -- i mean, he was huge to hear my father tell it. how am i going to get him out of the river if he gives out of the river? he told me when he was little there were some techniques they didn't teach you at the ymca for rescuing people, some of which involved hitting them with a right cross to the jaw in order to subdue them so you can safely get them back to shore. a drowning man, a drowning anybody will kill their rescuer. i mean, you are frantic out there. again, a 15-year-old boy has to rescue grown men who are now desperately terrified, klein at anything trying to stay on top of the water. and now he's confronted with the guy who is, you know, five times his size. what is he going to do quite sure enough someone gets into the water and start paddling out and get into the middle of the current and downstream he goes and does what drowning people do, vertically instructing that the water but that begs arms and hands. and into the water goes my father, thinking all the time this may be the last time i to this, you know, this guy is going to take me to the bottom and will be rolling on the river bottom down to sterling downstream. but he said as soon as he reached the man and put his hand on him, the man instantly relaxed and let him do whatever he wanted because he was blind and he had been led around all his life. as soon as he felt a human touch, he thought i'm safe. he simply relaxed. and that was the only man who ever thanked him. he did get some notoriety for doing this. the first time he got his name in the paper was a rescue. he had closed at the park at about 9:30. he used to do this by the way on hot summer nights. people linger forever in the water and he had been there since 10:00 in the morning. he wanted to go home, but people wanted to stay because it was hot. so he would start taking pebbles and flicking them into the water. and sure enough, people go what was that? but with? just the old. they come out this time of night. so this night, the rats had done their job. he was hoping that a great vocals that they are although said in comment three people, two young women and the young man come screaming out of the darkness. help, help, their friend. they had snuck down the river unbeknownst to anyone and one of the friends who wasn't as strong of a summer is the thought went under. now it's 9:30, 10:00 at night. it's dark. and there's a man out there in the river who is drowning. so off my father goes at full gallop towards the river, listening now because he can't see the man. remember he is nearsighted and he's got to get rid of his classes. so he is listening for the sound of the man struggling out there. you know, where do i need to go here to find him? plunges in the darkness, swim so. next day's headlines, james raeder snatched from the jaws of death you lifeguard ronald dutch reagan had engaged in quite a struggle they reported before he was able to subdue him and bring him to shore, pulling one arm against the current with them, drag him up onto the log performed artificial respiration to revive him after which time it was determined he was okay and sent him home. but he had his name in the paper. i think he was probably pretty happy about that. other than that, in the lateness of the hour, the rescue probably would've seemed rather routine to him. just another day on the rock river. my father was a storyteller. his great opus west and south. he created a narrative, a template for his life. not that he was making a story for himself that he would pretend to live out. he was creating a template in his mind and trying to live up to it. he wanted to be a hero, but not to be seen as a hero. he wanted to be a hero. when you are a storyteller, sometimes editing is required. i discovered and some of my father's early stories that i discovered as an early child, there was editing done to focus the narrative a little more, usually focusing on hand. the iconic story from his youth is one winter night, in 1922, he comes home from hawaii or maybe the library. he also spent a lot of time reading their period and is coming up in a pen avenue towards his home in dixon any notices towards the front door there is a dark shape on the doorstep, which he comes closer he discovers his own father passed out cruciform comment that drunk, belching up corn whiskey. now he's been dimly aware that his father was given some drinking. i think that's been exaggerated but he did drink and if parents would eyebrows about this because nelle, his mother, was quite pious and didn't approve of all of this with the speakeasy and such. he'd always heard the fights before, but pulled the covers and try to ignore it. but now, in this iconic moment, he is having his coming-of-age experience. and so he says while he was tempted to step over his father and simply go inside and fix and sell something to eat and go to bed, he knew he couldn't leave him in the snow. and so in his telling, and he grabs father's coat collar and drag them over the threshold and then somehow must open up the steep narrow, angled stairway and put them into bed and breathes not a word to his mother when she gets home as if she wouldn't know of course. well, i went back and looked at the threshold and the staircase and i thought about little dutch who probably couldn't have weighed 100 pounds at that point. i thought of a rather burly jack wade about 180 or so. i thought to myself, he didn't drag anybody anywhere. he certainly didn't drag him up those stairs. i've no doubt he found him passed out drunk on the doorstep and i have no doubt that he grabbed his coat and probably gave him a shake, but what happened i suspect was that jack woke up in jack staggered to his feet and jack being jack probably had a few pithy things to say at that point, profaned probably as well. but that gets edited out of the story because that would be as destruction. the focus of the story is a young man who's having his coming-of-age moment, giving jack too many lines would just not work. jack has to hit the cutting room floor there. and he would do things like this. he had a tendency. i'm skipping through a lot of stuff here, but he had a tendency to engage in a certain amount of denial. he was very talented at denial when he needed to be, sometimes to rather humorous effect. my wife and i went in washington while he was president work on beating him to some of them. i get remember what it was but we're in the presidential motorcade and the big armored limo coming back from whenever this is the people lining the streets to get a glimpse of him leaving in all that. at this point in his life he decided what america really needed was the revival of a thumbs-up gesture. but he'd been traveling around the country thumbsucking people, no gesture ever suited a man so well i have to say. as we were driving back, he was thumbsucking people out the window of the car. we reach a certain point in some youngish man, maybe in his 30s or so somehow got under the sawhorses of the police tape or broke through the secret service. i don't know how he got so close to the cars, but there he was maybe a body length or two from the presidential limousine on my fathers side of the car. he was promoting a different hand gesture. last night and he had an entirely different digit wasted in my father's direction. he couldn't hear him through the bulletproof