Reagan in Full. - Review - book review

National Review, Feb 19, 2001 by Jay Nordlinger

Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (Free Press, 549 pp., $30)

We were awfully excited when we first heard about it-"we" being Reaganauts (to use the original term), and "it" being a cache of documents in the former president's own hand. We had always known he was an inveterate writer, and a formidable one. And now we would be able to prove it to the world.

And that is a problem we Reagan champions have: always trying to prove that our man-undeniably a politician and leader of great skill-was an intellectual force as well. This has become an exhausting, sometimes pathetic mission. The strength of Reagan's mind has long been obvious to anyone who has given the man two seconds' thought; but, of course, many people-many influential people-are unwilling to put in a good two seconds. To them, Reagan will always be, if not quite a boob, a lightweight all the same-a lucky innocent, who stumbled onto some success as president.

About that cache of documents: Not long ago, a scholar from Carnegie Mellon, Kiron K. Skinner, was poking around Reagan's private papers for a study of the Cold War. And among those papers she found a treasure-trove of manuscripts-true manuscripts, which is to say, documents written by hand. These were radio addresses that Reagan had given between the years 1975 and 1979 (after he left the governorship of California and before he became president of the United States). There were almost 700 of them, and they showed Reagan in something close to his fullness. Together with the Hoover Institution's Martin and Annelise Anderson-veteran Reaganauts-Skinner assembled the manuscripts into this present, extraordinary volume: Reagan, In His Own Hand. And these writings really do, as the subtitle proclaims, "reveal" our 40th president's "revolutionary vision for America."

He was one of the great proselytizers of recent history, Reagan. He was a pamphleteer, an arguer, a persuader, a propagandist, at times an evangelist-restless and relentless. He was a shy, remote man, as we all know, but he had what must have been a compulsion to take the public by the arm and say, "See? This is the way it is. Did you hear about this? Did you ever consider that?"

And he was always writing. He seemed not only to like to write, but to need to do so. He wrote from childhood, and he always wrote well-solidly and often stylishly. Over nine decades, he wrote thousands of letters, including 276 to a pen pal who was president of a Reagan (movie) fan club. He wrote for his school newspapers, he wrote a sports column for the Des Moines Dispatch, he wrote speeches and statements as a union leader, he wrote as a corporate spokesman, he wrote as a political candidate, he wrote as a governor and as a president-he never stopped, at least until the day in 1994 when he wrote a stunning, heartbreaking letter to his fellow Americans, explaining why he had to withdraw from public life. In 1947, when Reagan was 36, a reporter profiling him observed, "In private life, Reagan is most interested in writing." Reagan lived a life of words. Constant, well-chosen, in the end, world-changing words.

The mid-'70s radio addresses were five minutes long, and they were to be delivered five days a week. Along with his newspaper column (which, unlike the radio speeches, was largely ghosted), they were Reagan's principal means of keeping in touch with the public between campaigns. The editors reproduce the manuscripts exactly as they are, with crossings-out and additions and marginal notes and misspellings and mispunctuation and instructions to the typist-everything. Now, I myself do not see the point of retaining misspellings and mispunctuation. Anyone can appreciate the drive for authenticity, but these oddities are distracting, and contribute little. Also, Reagan did not intend for the public to see his scribbles; he wrote privately and probably hurriedly, and he wrote in a kind of shorthand. The spelling and punctuation, in my view, should have been regularized, if only as a courtesy to the author.

For these addresses, Reagan wrote to a precise length, and he did so with no evident struggle-his revisions are relatively few (and they are almost invariably improvements). He took a break from the broadcasts to wage his 1976 campaign against President Ford for the Republican nomination. (In the interim, Sen. Barry Goldwater took over the radio job.) He resumed two weeks after the party's convention. And he never lost the bug to communicate by radio: As president, he instituted a weekly radio address, a practice copied by his successors.

These writings are Reagan in essence. They are profound and simple. They are folksy and informed. They are gutsy and gentle, meek and bold, indignant and relaxed. They have a little poetry, and a lot of prose (Reagan was addicted to facts and figures, and to logic; he indulges in almost no platitudes or flights of rhetoric). They are utterly natural, never contrived (professional showman though Reagan may have been). They always respect the dignity and intelligence of the audience. They show a basic sympathy for people-especially for those bent under tyranny-and they show a love of life. They show religious faith. And they show a strange, almost unbelievable patriotism.