Exactly, Rich. Over and over again, people would leave Ronald Reagan’s Oval Office wondering what the old man thought he was doing–only to marvel, a few months later, that he’d gotten something big right once again. (My own favorite instance: When the Gipper told us speechwriters that he was convinced Gorbachev would get out of Afghanistan. This was months before anyone else was making such a prediction, and even though we walked out shaking our heads. Ronald Reagan himself seemed to have gone soft on Communism.)

It is indeed fair to say that Reagan was intuitive–but only in the way that Thomas Hoving is intuitive in the opening segment of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink. Hoving, as you may recall, is able to tell at a single glance that an ancient Greek statue, purchased not long before by the Getty museum, is actually a fake. But what lay behind that single glance? Hoving had spent a lifetime spent studying medieval and ancient art.

Likewise the Gipper. After devoting virtually his entire adult life to the struggle against Communism, he was able to grasp certain things more quickly than the rest of us. Intuition of a kind, certainly. But intution informed by longer study and a finer mind that is generally acknowledged, even today.