Word: cannon
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...Still, Cannon refuses to join the now fashionable club of Reagan bashers. Why? Because the country needed the muscular optimism Reagan brought to the White House and, after a siege of presidential paralysis, Reagan showed that innovation at the top was still possible...
...intimate Oval Office session came from George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times. Ronald Reagan looked squarely at Skelton and started to respond: "Well, Lou . . ." The reporters present, though used to Reagan's lapses, were embarrassed for Skelton as he reintroduced himself. The President had in mind Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, who, like Skelton, had covered Reagan's trajectory from Sacramento to Washington. To Reagan, Cannon was the generic newsie of that vintage...
...fact, capital insiders viewed Cannon that way too because of his superior coverage of Reagan. Now, in his third book on the subject, Cannon caps 25 years of Reagan watching in monumental fashion. The volume's heft and density are intimidating, but President Reagan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the star of politics in the 1980s. On one level it is an exhaustive account of the Administration, with new material added to the familiar chronology...
...book's second level, an archaeological dig through Reagan's attitudes, deals with why the President was often AWOL and other puzzles. Growing up the son of an alcoholic father explains in part Reagan's aversion to conflict in the official family. Cannon, having lived with the same burden, writes of this with special sensitivity. More-opaque layers of the Reagan psyche -- his capacity for self-deception and his tendency to let myth taint important policies -- tie in to his Hollywood fixation with happy endings...
...even so dogged a digger as Cannon cannot totally excavate all the paradoxes. How a politician so adept at the techniques of public leadership and so closely in tune with Everyman's dreams could habitually divorce himself from the realities of governance remains elusive. Cannon concedes frustration and ambivalence. In one passage he reports his best sources' belief that "Reagan usually operated on the basis of sound instincts and common sense." Later, the same inner circle sees its task as "protecting the Reagan presidency from the clear and present danger of Ronald Reagan...