The girls lean forward on their knees looking up at the stage. They are wearing white blouses, blue slacks, and bright red ribbons across their chests that say REAGAN in white letters. Their home-permed curls are crushed beneath straw hats that repeat his name in blue letters. In each hand they hold a pompom. Their young faces, uncreased by care, unfurrowed by time, unmarked by woe, follow the candidate's every word with unblinking devotion.

Ronald Reagan stands above them flanked by an American flag and a local politician. He is wearing a blue-black houndstooth jacket reminiscent of a '40s dance band or a '50s bar mitzvah. A silk handkerchief peeks from his breast pocket, even though by 1980 hardly anybody still wore them. (He will revive this fashion statement, however. By the 1988 campaign, six of the seven Republican candidates will show up at their first debate wearing pocket handkerchiefs. They must have figured Reagan's secret was in his linen.) Reagan has a face, as someone will write, like shattered china. He has a doll's pallor, all pale white and pink. His skin has gone crepey at the throat. His hair is deep chestnut, run through with gray and slicked back. (An aide will later reveal that Reagan uses Brylcreem every day, though he washes his hair but once a week.) He is 69 years old and he is running for president for the second time, having lost four years earlier to Gerald Ford. His age, his campaign knew, was going to be a problem. He had been born at a time when the Civil War was still America's defining moment (it was Civil War toy soldiers that young Dutch played with as a child), and if he won, he would be 70 within weeks of taking office. "William Henry Harrison, Old Tippeca-noe, was the only president to be inaugurated at that age," wrote syndicated columnist Marquis Childs, "and he died of pneumonia [a month] later." There was only one thing Reagan could do about it: Be so young in spirit that nobody would care about his flesh.

He is standing in a shopping mall in central Illinois, one with walkways of fake brick and with cast-iron lampposts that convey a Main Street, good-old-days air. Reagan is concluding his speech. "I just hope," he says, pointing down to the crouching girls in front of him, "that these children will know the freedom we once knew." The applause is warm. Let Jimmy Carter moan about conservation and dialing down and going without. Not Ronald Reagan. He is for letting the good times roll. "Carter says we've got to get used to austerity and sharing and scarcity and giving up luxury," he says to the crowd. "Well, I don't believe that! I think we should cover our children's ears when they hear that kind of talk!" Which was the essential Reagan. What, us worry? Not us. He was promising guns and butter—and not just any guns and butter, but the high-priced spread when it came to both. The glass was always half full for him, the cornucopia perpetually overflowing, and if government would just get out of the way, the goodies would spill forth in an endless stream. His optimism was simply uncrushable. His mother had gotten him into acting, and it was a world he never left. The America he loved was the America of the Hollywood movie, in which our motives were always true, our hearts always pure, and our ultimate victory never in doubt. And even when he left moviemaking, he never left the stage. In 1976, running against the incumbent but unelected Gerald Ford in the Republican primaries, Reagan's entire campaign resembled a feature-length film:

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