Word: letters
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...letters counsel humility to journalists and scholars alike, by revealing how little we know in real time about what goes on in the White House. Reagan emerges as a much more hands-on President than many of his aides--and their sometimes self-promoting memoirs--suggested. While recuperating from a gunshot wound in 1981, Reagan sat down in the White House solarium and drafted a four-page letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, appealing to the their common humanity to reduce tensions between the two countries. The letter is genuine, heartfelt--and sublimely idealistic. When he showed...
Since Reagan left office, there has been an abiding frustration among his most loyal supporters that he was seen, as Democratic power broker Clark Clifford described him, as "an amiable dunce." These letters, compiled with the help of two of his aides and approved by his wife, are published in part to polish Reagan's image in the twilight of his life. (Reagan, 92, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and made his last public statement in a farewell letter in 1994.) That helps explain why this Life in Letters has its gaps. There is little here about his mother Nelle...
Historians and political scholars will peruse and analyze his letters on policy, ideology, the cold war and the Middle East. I want you to see the man who wrote to friends, to his children, his brother--as well as to people he had never met, simply because they had written to him. Notice how many times he opened a letter with an apology for having taken a while to respond. He came from humble beginnings--an eager, determined, dream-filled boy in the flat endless miles of the Midwest. He was taught to be polite, and he never forgot that...
...vividly remember my father's letter to me in 1968 when I had turned myself in for smoking at my boarding school. He praised my honesty while not shirking his parental duty to admonish the crime. A group of us had been huddled in a closet smoking cigarettes. I had actually just exited the closet when the teacher came and busted everyone else. I'd got away with it, but my classmates' glaring looks shamed me into confessing my sin. Of course, I didn't tell my father those details. I made myself out to be a budding George Washington...
...letter to my brother when Ron was a teenager fascinated me. Within families, each individual relationship has its own fingerprint and, like a fingerprint, is unique. I got to see in this letter how my father spoke to his son, a male-to-male moment. He used words like uptight and cop out, which he never used with me. It's as if he were looking ahead, past the need to be a disciplinarian, to a future when he and Ron could have the camaraderie of two guys hanging...