Remarks by Bob Felton

(First published November 18, 2003)

Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson have edited and published their second collection of Reagan's work, Reagan: A Life in Letters. (Their first book brought together transcripts of Reagan's radio addresses from the 1970s.) The community of people who appreciate Reagan's contributions to American life owe them some thanks for their work. The collection of Reagan's letters provoked the usual discussion about whether the products of Reagan's pen are worth paying attention to. This issue's commentary by Bob Felton is an intelligent response to Reagan's critics.

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Remarks by Bob Felton
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It's almost eerie, at times, how criticism of George Bush is so often a reprise of the things the Left once said about Ronald Reagan. "He's stupid," "He's a dangerous, belligerent cowboy," and "He's a tool of his advisors." Let us hope that the supposed likeness to The Gipper doesn't end there, for the Reagan revealed in Reagan: A Life in Letters is a great man.

Biographies of Reagan tend to insist he's impossible to know, but it turns out that the difficulty is a reflection of the odd world and values of mainstream literary types, not any defect in Reagan. The letters reveal a man at once recognizable as any of us regular folk.

This is from a letter he wrote to his son Ron, in 1972, while governor of California and dismayed that he wasn't working so hard at school as he should have:

Six months ago in the graduating class of the California Highway Patrol Academy there was a young man who led the class. He really wanted a career in the patrol and being top man in that class took a lot of doing, both in the brain and the muscle departments.

A couple of weeks ago on the San Bernardino Freeway a drunk driver hit him and sheared his right leg off below the knee. Can you imagine what life looked like to him and his young wife? Oh sure, he'd get a pension, he wouldn't starve, but what would he do with his life besides sit on the front porch?

Well, it won't be that way. He bought more than that with his willingness to put out at the academy. We are going to break the old rules and when he's up and on an artificial leg we are putting him back on duty as a patrolman. Now he has a double job - he has a chance if he makes it to open the door for others who suffer disabling injuries so they won't wind up in a rocker on the front porch. Think of the price he might be paying now if he'd decided to be just another kid "getting by" when he was in the academy.

There's a lot in that letter: compassion, a foreshadowing of Reagan's willingness to bang on the bureaucracy to get the result he wanted, and the long-view with which every father drives his children nuts.

Here, in a 1971 letter to Samuel Hayakawa, then President of San Francisco State, a campus struck particularly hard by student violence, Reagan displays once again his indifference to the near-term and the iron that would be on display when he was ready for the last epic showdown with the Soviet Union.

I know I shouldn't do this but can't resist being an "I told you so." Do you remember our phone conversation one morning during those dark days of battle? You were tired and understandably so and you asked, "When will it end?" I said, "It is ending, and you are winning and while you can't see it now, one of these days it will be gone. It will just fade away." Well it has. But it faded away because you faced them down. Do you know where we can get another dozen like you?

As able and willing as Reagan was to be firm when the times demanded it, he was always acutely aware of human cost. In 1981 he received a letter from a woman whose son had just enlisted. She wrote asking "Please, will you be especially careful with the country just now?" His reply was a masterpiece of decency and public relations:

I can't tell you how much your letter of August 6 has meant to me. Let me apologize for being so late in answering, but it does take some time for mail to reach my desk through all the wheels of the bureaucracy.

I shared your letter with Nancy. She cried, and I had quite a lump in my throat. We're parents, too, and we understand what you expressed so eloquently.

You must have done a fine job of raising that young man, and I agree with you - the government is getting a good deal.

That's not where the story ends, though. Two years later, he wrote again:

I've often thought about him and you and wondered how he's getting along and if he's happy with the choice he made. I hope he is. I don't know which branch he chose. ...I don't mean to impose but if you could find the time to write and let me know about your son I'd be most grateful.

The President of the United States, a man who doesn't even have to tie his own shoelaces if he doesn't want to, finds time two years later to hand-write a note asking for an update? If it's not too much of an imposition?

And on it goes, page after page after revealing page of correspondence, all of it originally hand-written, all of it rich with keen observation, humanity, and a vision of America as, literally, God's gift to the world - the fulfillment of what He set in motion with Abraham.

There's plenty of wit, too, an air of joy at confounding his enemies with the very stereotype they so relentlessly flayed him with. When William F. Buckley wrote to tweak him about a photograph, Reagan wrote back:

Dear Bill:

Don't worry about the photographer, I've had him shot.

Now that's a self-confident man who's having a good time.

The New York Times recently published a brief commentary about this book which complained that it revealed Reagan is ordinary, and left no mistake that ordinary-ness is, well, just so ... so ... disappointing. (It doesn't hurt, when reading the Times' faint-praise take, to remember that they thought of Jayson Blair as an exceptional, going-places young man.) Why, they complained, there's no angst! No tortured instrospection!

No, there's not. Ronald Reagan was just a genuine-article man (hardly ordinary in over-feminized America), and in being unembarassedly himself he re-shaped the world - for the better. Not a bad act at all, and as another election bears down on us, with its promise of ugliness, a book that stands to repay the reading many times over.