Book Review: Reagan: In His Own Hand (2001: Free Press, 546 pages)
“It’s morning in America,” so claimed the original MAGA President Ronald Reagan (1980-88). He was bullish on America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Here we can discover from him the evolution of his thought.
This is quite a novel book. Ronald Reagan was a popular speaker and a regular writer of speeches. He was full of ideas. This book is 95% Reagan, written in longhand over time prior to his presidency and found at Reagan Library. Then they were transcribed and produced for publication in this book with Reagan’s original corrections and edits! Additionally, there are a few facsimiles with edits in his own hand.
While travelling thousands of miles by plane, train, or car, especially in years of 1975-79, years between his governorship of California and his presidential terms, Reagan wrote many of these. His wife Nancy said she never knew him just to spend an evening watching television. He would always be writing at his desk. This is a treasure trove of materials which future scholars may study for decades to ponder and on the substance of which to write masters theses and Ph.D. dissertations to debate Reagan’s ideas. Almost all are cataloged by subject, place, and date.
Reagan’s method was to write, always in longhand, a maximum of 2 yellow legal pad pages for his maximum 5-minute length for radio messages. He was always writing in the backseat when traveling by car while campaigning or after meal service on a plane. He would then pull out his briefcase to retrieve his legal pad and pen. He sometimes submitted several columns to his secretary who would transcribe and hand it back to him for delivery. These often formed longer addresses when re-edited later. After an introduction of two or three sentences, he would write/say, “I’ll be right back,” to make a time for a commercial break, and then continue on the other side.
Once Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz sat amazed at the conference table as President Reagan spoke boldly and persuasively at length in a session with Premier Mikhail Gorbachev using sheets from one of these speeches on the so-called “Star Wars” missile system. Gorbachev yielded the point and later the world soon changed. The USSR imploded. In time, the Cold War was won without a shot!
The topics are almost unlimited and almost all generally relevant, in a certain sense, today. There is one about NATO and détente featuring words of Soviet Premier Leonoid Brezhnev in a speech to his fellow Communist leaders said, “Trust us comrades, for by1985, as a result of what we have achieved with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe.” Reagan clearly was attuned, and in his league, when discussing these issues and was up to date with the latest events.
These speeches should place him slightly below the Founding Fathers, with their classical education, as a thinker for his day, while the Founders had never reached such international audiences. There was never a more popular speaker than the “Great Communicator.” These form a great body of political science unlike any president in the 20th Century, with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, but no one more popular with the American people. Others may have had a more voluminous body of material, but these reached the popular mind and serve as what actually became policy or legislation to govern America. No one can deny that, by the force of his personality and articulated policy ideas, he led our nation to break up the most sinister international foe of the 20th century.
There never should have been a question of Reagan doing his own thinking, as some State Department elites otherwise claimed, and considered him only an Illinois back-country cornpone or just a B-movie actor. The trajectory and velocity of his policies would go down, especially in foreign affairs and military policy, but also on countless other domestic issues, welfare, immigration, Social Security, etc. He never really needed a speech writer. He wrote as many as 1000 different radio messages and other speeches. No other president has matched him since. Nor is any likely to match his popularity and impact on foreign and military affairs.
Robert Penny lives in Old Agency Village in Ridgeland.
