I remember, as a child, how the sun slanted through the trees as I stood out in the driveway waiting for my father to come out of the house. If I squinted hard, the sunlight became prisms in my eyes—a revelation I’d excitedly shared with him, hanging onto his smile and the way he nodded his head.
My father, Ronald Reagan, was always bigger than life to me, always someone I was reaching for.
When the sound of his riding boots clicked on the driveway and our day together horseback riding at our ranch was about to unfold, I was as close to heaven as a kid could get.
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A lifetime later, when Alzheimer’s disease descended on him and started siphoning off his memory, his cognition, he still had that mysterious ability to command the air around him. His presence was still huge, magnetic, even when he was sitting quietly, trying to decipher the surroundings that were once familiar to him.
Each year as his birthday, February 6, approaches, my thoughts turn to him in different ways, depending on what’s happening in the world and in this country he loved so much.
This year, I’ve been thinking about the quality of leadership—that mysterious X factor that some people possess and others simply strive for.
I thought about it recently when President Joe Biden gave his two-hour press conference and mentioned how the Republican agenda is to oppose anything and everything he puts on the table. He said it as if he were dismissing it as the toxic foolishness it is, yet there was something ever so slight that revealed how much it got to him. Maybe that’s it, I thought—someone who seems born to lead has an impenetrable shield that keeps even the most clever opponents at arm’s length.
My father had that quality; so does Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. JFK had it. I don’t know if there is anyone in the current political field who has that, who seems born to step into the role of leader, and I wonder how America is going to survive without such a leader.
Greater minds than mine are worried about the future of our fragile democracy. And while it is vital for citizens who do not want to live under authoritarian rule to stand strong and speak up, I don’t know how we prevail without a strong leader. Someone who radiates the confidence that nothing can undermine him (or her.) Someone who seems to hover above petty conflicts. If only one would step out of the shadows, I think we would know intuitively that we were in the presence of leadership.
My family took a photo on my father’s birthday in 1995, less than a year after he announced to the world that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My sister Maureen and I spent the afternoon with him and had an early dinner, presenting him with a cake at the end. In the photo, I can see the difference in his eyes—the way they search for what’s familiar and hold back with trepidation. But there is also a confidence that the disease could never erode—a core of him that was rooted in something mysterious and resilient, that had a life of its own.
I was born to a man who believed in the power of prayer. In fact, I believe that people praying for his healing had something to do with a miraculous and unexplained remission of ulcers that plagued him when he was governor of California.
My prayer for this country is that a leader will emerge who will stir in us our better angels and who will wave away the darkness that’s nipping at our heels.
Patti Davis is the daughter of President Ronald Reagan and an author whose latest book is Floating in the Deep End.
