How Michael Reagan Says God Gave Him A Second Adoption

He’s the adopted son of a former U.S. president Obama but he says his life was not complete until he found God.

In this 2004 interview Michael Reagan talks about his book Twice Adopted.
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You may also enjoy my interviews with Dave Thomas and Maureen Reagan

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Photo by Gage Skidmore

#Adoption # abortion # Christian # Ronald Reagan

I'm Bill Thompson. Well, long before he entered

(00:26):
politics, Ronald Reagan was an actor under contract with Warner
Brothers. His wife was actress Jane Wyman,
and in 1945 they adopted a baby boy named Michael.
Over the course of the next few years, young Michael Reagan
faced a number of life altering challenges.
His parents divorced, he was sexually abused by a camp

(00:49):
counselor, and he felt abandonednot just by his adoptive
parents, but by God. Now, as he explains in his 2004
book called Twice Adopted, God gave him a second chance and it
turned his life around. He became a successful actor,
writer, eventually a radio talk show host.

(01:11):
Now, I met Mike Reagan in 2004, actually just a few months after
his adoptive father's passing. And we talked about his book.
So just a moment, our conversation.
No, Sherman, this isn't the Wayback Machine, but it is a
look back at an interview from the 30 year archive of national
radio personality Bill Thompson.Enjoy.

(01:36):
So here now from 2004, Michael Reagan, what was your impetus?
For writing this book, what was your inspiration?
Actually, my testimony, I, I'd given my Christian testimony at
church about two years ago and there was a, you know, copy made
of that, a CD. And the CD got out and then the

(01:58):
publisher heard the CD and contacted me.
We had breakfast and they said you've got to do a book around
this testimony. And so hence Twice Adopted is
the book around that testimony. Wow.
And, and what a powerful story this is.
This is not a political book. No, this is not strictly an
autobiography, although it is autobiographical.

(02:18):
It's autobiographical, but it's not the autobiography.
No, it, it's, it's a story aboutmy life.
It's a story about a lot of issues.
You know, I sit there as well, you know, do a talk radio show.
What are the issues we talked about today, whether it's radio
or television, newspaper, we read about divorce, we read
about adoption. We read about illegitimacy or we

(02:39):
talk about it. We read about molestation.
It is rampant in America today. And we read or we deal with the
issue of pornography or child pornography.
And I sit there and do a radio show and I'm thinking one day,
I've lived every one of these issues I've been part of.
Not something I look forward to.But you know, I got through it.

(03:00):
And I thought to myself, you know, there's, there's a reason
I got through it and maybe it's time I need to open up more
about it to help other people get through it.
Also, because so many people sitback and have things happen to
them in their lives. They're still mad at their
parents. They're 4050 years old.
They're still mad at mom and dadbecause mom and dad didn't hug
me when I was 8 years old, didn't love me enough.

(03:22):
So I'm going to, I'm going to fail and blame mom and dad for
it. Same thing with adoption.
My birth mother gave me away. She must not have wanted me.
Nobody wants me. I must be a terrible kid.
So guess what? I'm going to use that as an
excuse to fail. Molestation.
I use that as an excuse to fail for a long time.

(03:42):
But more so than that was the pornography part of it, which
now was the the solid evidence that I was a bad guy, a bad kid.
And so that became my reason to fail.
So these are issues that we talked about and I'm able to
share my feelings in the book isfrom a child's standpoint, what
I see as a child in you, the adults and what you don't see.

(04:05):
But I wonder if equally pervasive you you, you say in
your talk show, you talk about divorce and and child abuse.
But the thing that maybe you don't talk about every day on
your talk show, but that is probably just as pervasive is
what you talk about in the book.This feeling that many people
have that either they are mad atGod or that I feel or fear God
is mad at them. Absolutely right.
I, I remember I, I was given my testimony at church on the way

(04:27):
here last November. Jack Hayford is the pastor of
this church. I mean, and I'm now going to
speak from his pulpit and I'm telling you, I'm going, wow, I'm
liking Jack Hayford's pulpit speaking.
And he and Anna are sitting downfront.
My first question of the congregation is this 1000 people
there on a Sunday night, how many here believe God hates

(04:50):
them? You would not believe the number
of hands that went up in that congregation.
And Jack, you know, is kind of looking over his shoulder like,
you know, if I've been doing my job and he sees hands go up and
then the next question out, how many people here either now or

(05:12):
it's sometime in the past, have hated God and hands go up again.
And I do the same thing with kids.
When I go out and talk to high schools and talk to kids, I
don't believe the number of hands that will.
It will go up. And I can relate to them because
I was there. I believe God hated me.
I believe all the things that happened in my life in the very
youthful years from the time I was born till 8 years old, all

(05:34):
those things happened because I was illegitimate.
God hated me and was taking it out on me.
And so I figured, I feel or figured that if he hates me,
well my goodness gracious, I canhate him right back.
And the way I was controlling mylife was if I was going to go to
hell, I was going to go to hell my way, not anybody else's way.

(05:56):
So I would cuss him out, I wouldcuss him out, I'd cuss his son
out, I would cuss Mary out, and I would say, I wow, am I proud
of myself. Now I'm going to go to hell
because I've earned it, not because somebody did something
to me and made me believe I was going to go there anyway.
What a tragedy of of of happenstance that a little boy

(06:16):
is led to believe he'll never get into heaven by something
that was not his fault to begin with.
But you don't know that. See, kids don't know that.
Kids. Kids believe it's always been
them. You're the adult.
I'm the child. I'm supposed to respect you and
honor you. You're the adult.
That's what I'm told. So how do I know what you're
doing to me is not what adults do to children?

(06:37):
57% of the 4 million pedophiles that the Justice Department
knows about were sexually molested themselves, 57%.
I mean, what does that tell you?It tells you, you know, you do
it to me and it just becomes normal for me to do it to, to
somebody else, my own children, I didn't, but to others.
And it's the never ending story that goes on out there.

(07:01):
And people give Idlib service and say we care about the kids,
but they never really punish theabusers.
It's always a short term punishment like a slap on the
hand. And people need to understand
sexual abusers. Sexual predators will molest 100
to 200 children in their lifetimes.
So when the Catholic priests tell you I'll cop to 1, there's

(07:24):
probably 100 kids behind that one.
Like the burglar. You think they get caught the
first time they burglar house? How many do they burgle before
they got caught the very first time?
Same thing with child molestation.
That's why I work with Bill Hodgman, Sex Crimes Unit in Los
Angeles, CA and the book is fullof other stories of others who
went through what I went throughand how it just absolutely

(07:45):
destroyed their lives. Your book is so candid and so
straightforward that I discovered something in your
chapter on where you're talking about divorce and how easy
divorce has become. I was not aware that it was your
father who who actually set the wheels in motion for this.
Oh, yeah, the the no fault divorce, which by the way, later
on he said, you know, maybe I made a mistake here.
Yeah, dad, maybe you made a mistake, but it made it very

(08:08):
easy. So marriage could be treated
more like a date than it could be treated like a commitment to
the to the other person. So we have a lot more divorces.
You know, in this world today, people do treat it like a date.
They don't take relationships seriously.
And as I say in the book, when Idefine, you know, divorced, it's
when two people walk into a child's room, close the door,
break everything in that room that's near and dear to the

(08:30):
child's heart, walk out and expect the child to put it back
together. We can't put it back together.
We're trying to figure out how it got broken in the 1st place.
And we're not sure we're not theproblem.
We're not sure it wasn't us thatbroke it.
And nobody's told us that it wasn't us and nurtured us.
And so now we're living with thefact that we've got two
families, not one family. How do you deal with all of

(08:53):
that? Divorce happens because one or
two people in the relationship are selfish.
It's really that simple. When you have a child involved,
it's really selfishness not to think of that child.
You know when you're talking about abortion in your book as
well, Reminded me of the bumper sticker my daughter, a recent
mother, has on the back of her car, says choosy.
Moms choose life and you know that there's you.

(09:16):
You could easily have been a victim of an abortion.
I, I run a survey on my own showand when I go out and speak and
the survey question is how many adoptees are here, Raise your
hand. They raise their hand.
I said, OK, how many of you would have rather been aborted?
So far, 100% of the adoptees that I asked that question to
say, are you nuts? At least I have a chance at

(09:37):
life. And to think adoptees are the
closest to of being aborted. So why not ask them what they
think? And as I say in the book of my
life, if I'd gone through more than I went through, I still
would have chosen life, because then I had a chance the other
way. You never had a chance.
Do you think people with Down syndrome, people with some

(10:00):
horrible disfigurement at birth,whose parents chose not to abort
them, do you think they would have the same unit?
Yeah, because I've asked them and people, you know, life, life
is tough. We all have things that we face.
We all have our Goliath. You might say it's how do you
face these things, But at least with life you're able to face
them. With no life, what do you face?

(10:22):
You face nothingness. After this short break, Michael
Reagan talks about America's broken adoption system.
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(10:47):
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YouTube channel, AI After 40 andLet's keep learning.
Together now back to. My 2004 conversation with
Michael Reagan. And the figures that you have in
here on adoption, all the parents aching for somebody to

(11:09):
adopt. And at the same time, and you
know, we've heard this argument for 30 years, ever since Roe
versus Wade, that there there are all these people, women
choosing abortion when all theseparents are waiting for, you
know, for a child to adopt. What is there?
There's a There's a mismatch here going.
Oh, there is a mismatch. And a lot of it is just the the
regulatory burden that people have to face, the hoops they

(11:30):
have to jump through in order toadopt A child.
You know, it's easier to adopt Achild out of Russia than it is
to adopt A child in the United States of America.
I cannot tell you how many timesI'll go to an event and meet
adopted kids from Asia, from theSoviet bloc, you name it.
And I'm still looking for the kid who's an American kid who's

(11:51):
who's been adopted. And it's because we have put all
this political correctness around adopting a child.
Well, are you the right nationality, you know, and all
of these other things that go on.
And it's really sad because there's thousands, thousands of
of kids who want to be adopted. I was at a event in Lubbock, TX

(12:14):
earlier this year for the adoption home there in Lubbock
and their number one goal is to adopt out older kids.
I met a 13 year old boy who was going to be adopted the very
next day, smile from ear to ear on his face.
It's like they say older children, it's hard to adopt

(12:34):
them. They want to be adopted too.
Nothing wrong with a 13 year oldkid.
This kid was looking forward to having a home.
I mean, that's the greatest thing in the world for them.
And yet, when we do television shows about children, we do
television shows about the children of other countries.
When was the last time you saw atelevision show about the

(12:56):
children in this country wantingto be adopted?
You never see it here in America.
You always see the foreign country and the children there
waiting for American moms and dads.
What if we lost the whole idea that a stable home is the
bedrock of our society? It is a stable home, is the
bedrock, and we've forgotten that because we have become

(13:18):
selfish. We've become more material.
It's more important to have the big car and more important to
have the big house. More important to look important
than be important. You could be important to your
children. It's important to to give that
stability to your children so when they come home, there's
stable home that they come home to.
But today we have the latchkey kids.

(13:38):
We have kids being dropped off at daycare centers, you know,
and I equate that in the book with, you know, my lifetime.
Remember, we all went to boarding schools.
So the Crosby kids, the Crawfordkids, the Reagan kids, we all
went to boarding schools. Six years old, I was in boarding
school. But what am I saying as kids are
telling me how lucky I am because my parents are rich and
famous. They're going home every night

(13:59):
with their moms and dads. And if you could have stood
outside our dormitory at Chadwick School or St.
John's Military Academy, wherever it might have been, you
would have thought you were listening to the crying wall in
in Israel. I mean it just because we all
cried ourselves asleep every night because we missed our moms
and our dads. And we used to think the other
kids were the lucky ones becausethey went home.

(14:19):
And it began a process of anger in the Hollywood kids.
All those books that came out, they came out for a reason.
We didn't think our parents loved us.
They we just didn't think they did.
And So what I try to equate to the day is when you're dropping
a kid off a daycare center, they're seeing what time they're
being dropped off, they're seeing what time they're being
picked up. They're counting the ones that
are going home before them. And a molester came into my life

(14:44):
and started to affirm me. Every child wants affirmation.
And what you do is you open the door for others to come in to
affirm your child, to give them what they want, which is love.
So are you going to give love toyour child and affirm that
child? Or is some predator going to
walk in the door and affirm thatchild like I was affirmed?
Like thousands and thousands andthousands of kids are being

(15:05):
affirmed every day by child molesters and ruining their
lives. Child molesters are worse when a
John Allen Muhammad befriends a Lee Boyd Malvo.
That's right, which I talk aboutin the book.
When he had no parents. I mean, he had no father in the
home. Look at the fatherless homes in
America today. And then we say, Gee whiz, but
there's so many gangs. What are the gangs?
They're family because we've taken away the family unit and

(15:28):
all children do is find a new family.
So they find gangs in Los Angeles County alone, 1300
gangs, 100,000 gang members, allfatherless homes.
Lady Malveaux fatherless home. Somebody comes into his life,
boom. I'm going to make you feel like
family. I'm going to give you the love

(15:49):
your father never was able to give you.
And just like my molester done, I thought he was the greatest
guy in the world. All the kids in the day camp
thought he was the greatest guy in the world.
He gave us what we didn't have or what we thought we didn't
have. The parents thought he was a
great guy. Why?
Because he was the babysitter. In the afternoon.
He taught the kids how to play football and baseball and run

(16:11):
track and jump on a trampoline. And we came home tired out and
sweaty and we went to bed. We didn't cause any havoc at
home. Same thing with Malveaux.
He didn't have a father comes in, another guy comes in and
says I'm going to give you what you didn't have.
All of a sudden this kid says I'm beholden to you.
Whatever you want from me, I'm going to give you because nobody
else has given it to me. Now look what's going on guys in

(16:32):
jail for how many life terms andmaybe death sentence later on.
And who knows, dozens of lives that he's marred forever.
But in the end, are you an? Is this an optimistic?
Yeah. Absolutely optimistic because I
get I I get through it. I finally in my life changes and
instead of blaming God for everything I start, you know,
asking God for help and and bringing him into my life

(16:55):
instead of shoving him out of mylife.
It all happened because I found a wonderful woman in Colleen
1973 blind date moves into my life and and now we have our
29th wedding anniversary coming up and and she's been around and
she prays for me. She got me back into church and
and she really was the helpmate to me and that's how my life

(17:16):
changed. So it has a positive ending
allowed me to do the eulogy thatI did for my dad on June 11th.
If if I don't have her and I don't turn to ask God for help,
then I don't have the relationship with my father I
had at the end and I'm able to eulogize him the way I did.
I was. Going to say, are you just real
lucky that nothing bad? I mean that that, that you

(17:37):
weren't struck dead by a bus or something during the years that
you were estranged from God, I mean.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, remember, I, I mean, I,
I understand the anger that people have.
Remember I'm the kid that destroyed a 1965 Oldsmobile with
a sledgehammer. Told me about 20 or 30 minutes.
But I thought the car hated me. I thought my mom's bike, that
she loaned me the money for that, that bike hated me because

(17:57):
the chain came off. So I killed the bike.
I used to kill material things. So yeah, I was very lucky.
I was in the boat racing all kinds of things, trying to prove
my manhood and what have you. Because I worried about my
manhood. I worried about, you know, a
male touched me or people going to think I'm homosexual or
they're going to think I'm heterosexual.
I didn't know what you would think of me.
And I was thinking the worst. And I didn't want you to affirm

(18:19):
my worst fears. And then those photos were out
there and I worried about Dad's run for the presidency, his
governorship, if those came out,what would people think of him?
What would they think of me? So all those things were going
in on in my life. So I was very, very lucky.
But I think God kept me around for a reason, to write the book
and to help other people get through the system and enjoy a

(18:41):
life instead of tear themselves up as they have for so many
years. You know, I'm glad I was able.
I'm glad I was really able to, to put it down right in such a
way that isn't political. It is for families.
It is for people who are raisingfamilies.
It is for people who are who have gone through the same, one
of the same things. I've gone through one or all of

(19:03):
the above and the damage you cando to a child.
And maybe it finally explains topeople why we don't tell people
when we're 789 years old and whysometimes maybe we never tell
people and explains why we breakoff relationships and how we
need to start dealing with this issue as a serious issue.
And with the pornography issue, because of the damage that it

(19:24):
can do to families, does do to families and what child
pornography does to the picture,we always think about it in the
way of, well, I know child pornography when I see it.
I know child pornography becauseI was it.
I was the photograph. Did we ever ask the question
about the person in the photograph, the damage to that
child who may be damaging othersin the future?

(19:46):
It's an issue that needs to be taken on.
Michael Reagan is 80 now. He and his wife have been
married for 50 years now. You can get your copy of Twice
Adopted by Michael Reagan by tapping the link in our show
notes by clicking the link in the description below.
If you're watching this on YouTube or by going to our
website heardeverything.com, we may earn an Amazon Commission if

(20:07):
you make a purchase. Heard everything.com is where
you can also find my 1994 conversation with another famous
adoptee, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas.
My adopted grandmother many really a nice lady to me but
she's the one that told me and Idon't know why she didn't tell
me earlier but everyone else I thought was didn't trust me.
But I also tell you this, that maybe they didn't know.

(20:29):
And my 1989 conversation with Michael Reagan's sister, Maureen
Reagan. He.
Came on the scene at a time whenthe American people were losing
confidence in themselves, and his confidence in them allowed
this nation to begin to get its own wheel moving, and that was

(20:50):
the most important thing that hecould bring.
And of course, we post new episodes of Now I've Heard
Everything every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
And you can find us any place you find podcasts.
And thank you so much for listening.
Next time on NOW I've Heard Everything.
We always hear the Republicans and Democrats alike batting
about the name Abraham Lincoln. But once what relevance does
Abraham Lincoln have today? My 2004 conversation with

(21:13):
Democrat former New York Governor Mario Cuomo.
Lincoln said. Show me a religion that believes
in just one thing, love one another as you love yourself,
and I will belong to that religion.
Unfortunately, most of them had all kinds of rules and
regulations. That's next time on now.
I've heard everything. I'm dual Thompson.