 | Ronald Reagan wrote a candid handwritten diary during his two terms in office. The diaries are, according to his editor, extraordinarily revealing and not at all self-serving. As so often in the past, those who would mock the man as shallow or un-self-critical are shown to be mistaken given this evidence in his own hand. Not the tool of the religious right that some would have had us believe, he was annoyed by ideologues who wished his Supreme Court and other judicial appointments to be made according to anti-abortion litmus tests. Alexander Haig famously said that the two had policy differences. Reagan wrote that there was only one disagreement, that Reagan was head of policy. He made a point to call the parents of servicemen killed during his term, even those who died in accidents. Douglas Brinkley, an independent and the editor of his diaries, says of all the Cold War presidents he can be seen as a great "anti-communist hawk and also an anti-nuclear pacifist." The complete diaries will be released in two years. Until then, this work makes public the essence of this great man.
Brinkley is interviewed on Book TV Monday, May 28 at 3:55PM Eastern.
Ted Keer |
The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Wilson Reagan
