Years from now, presidential historians will still be saying a silent “Thank you” to Marty and Annelise Anderson and Kiron Skinner for editing Reagan in His Own Hand, Reagan: A Life in Letters, and Reagan’s Path to Victory. As a Reagan biographer, I have often quietly thanked these invaluable individuals. Now I wish to do so loudly and emphatically. Those three tomes will always be essential resources on the thinking and writing of Ronald Reagan. Two are massive books of his letters to thousands of people, and the third is a compilation of his hundreds of radio addresses over the years; all of it is material he wrote personally.
Reagan sometimes used help in writing his twice-a-week column, but he never allowed anybody else to draft his radio addresses. How important were his radio addresses? In 1977, CBS and Walter Cronkite offered Reagan a regular television commentary that would pay the Gipper hundreds of thousands. He turned it down, and his aides Mike Deaver and Peter Hannaford, flabbergasted, asked him why. (Deaver and Hannaford famously handled all of Reagan’s media appearances and speeches in the critical time from early 1975 until 1976, and again from 1977 to 1979.) He replied that people might get tired of seeing him on TV but they would not get tired of listening to him on the radio. Reagan may have been wrong in assessing people’s tolerance of his image, but it was still a courageous and impressive decision.
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