Ronald Reagan had a childhood out of a heartland rock song. His family moved from rental to rental in a series of small Illinois towns — Tampico, Galesburg, Monmouth — before settling in Dixon, a Twainish town on the Rock River, when he was ten. You can hear a cloudless movie version of this life in a small-town ditty by John Mellencamp; a haunted, rain-lashed rendition on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

As a child, Ronald was anxious and lonely and small. He squinted a lot and looked in photographs like he wanted to disappear, fade into the wall or cornfield or whatever backdrop might allow him to flee a family that one critic called “a surreal Norman Rockwell portrait.” His father was an alcoholic who leaped from one sad, shady business scheme to another. His mother spent her days in church, performing in the choir as if it were cabaret and taking home a stream of stray boarders, whose souls she dreamed of saving.

What saved her son was the power of positive thinking. As Rick Perlstein frames it in The Invisible Bridge, Reagan “worked out in the psychic gymnasium of boyhood fantasy with ten times the furious determination of an ordinary boy.” He checked out library books on self-made men, became entranced by the heroic simplicity of sports, and character-acted his way through high-school theater. He reimagined “the morass in front of him as a tableau of simple moral clarity” and superimposed it atop his family’s white, clapboard, American Gothic–looking balloon-frame house in the heart of America.