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Personal Perspectives on Ronald ReaganBy Frank Donatelli, Ken Khachigian, Steven Hayward and Fred Barnes

Frank Donatelli is executive vice president and director of Federal Public Affairs for McGuireWoods

Consulting. He is also chairman of the Reagan Ranch Board of Governors of the Young America’s Foundation.

Frank DOnaTELLI: Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to do a panel with differing perspectives on President Reagan, his legacy, and his continuing political and policy relevance today.

We have three terrific speakers: Ken Khachigian, who was a speechwriter for Reagan; Fred Barnes who covered Reagan as a journalist; and Steve Hayward, who has written The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution. First let’s begin with Ken Khachigian.

kEn kHaCHIGIan: Charles Krauthammer, whom many of you have probably seen on television or read his column, called speechwriting a classic burnout profession. And he said he doesn’t ever meet any old speechwriters because they all die young. So I am glad I made it to this point.

I want to start with Reagan, the man, because usually the first question I get asked is, what was he like to work with? What was President Reagan like?

I spent eight years with him, twice full‑time: in 1980 and 1984. And then for the entire eight years I bicycled back and forth to Washington on special assignment in several speeches.

From the very first time I got put on the plane in 1980 towards the last 6 weeks of the

campaign, I learned quickly about what a nice man he was.

My first few efforts at speeches were a learning experience because he had a particular voice and a particular way of making a presentation that was very unique. And I didn’t quite capture that the first few times around.

So he would come back to the back of the plane and say, “Now, Ken, I really think this is very good.” And then he would say “but ...” and he was more like a great help to me, always collegial.

I worked and collaborated with him on a draft of the first inaugural speech. I knew I was in trouble when he came back after looking at a draft of the speech and said, “Ken, that was very eloquent, but ...” And he said, “I’ve got to put it in my own words.”

And, of course, he did. He took it with him to Washington and on the way back basically rewrote the whole speech in his own handwriting. And that was a great experience for me.

He never liked committees to work with. He liked to work one‑on‑one. I certainly had no problem with that. I didn’t like to work with committees either.

There was one occasion in 1987, when the speech had gone through all its final checkpoints for the National Security Council

The Reagan Centennial year is underway, leading up to the 100th anniversary of his birth on

Feb. 6, 2011. Last Fall, TFAS supporters traveled to Santa Barbara to visit the Reagan Library

and Ranch. At the Library, a distinguished panel shared their personal insights about Ronald

Reagan. Panelists were Fred Barnes, who covered Reagan as a journalist; Ken Khachigian, who

was chief speechwriter for Reagan, and Steve Hayward, who has written a two volume history

of the Reagan era. The panel was moderated by Frank Donatelli, who served as an Assistant to

President Ronald Reagan for Political and Intergovernmental Affairs.Ken Khachigian is a senior partner in the Orange County and Los Angeles offices of Brownstein/Hyatt/Farber/

Schreck and a member of the government relations and natural resources groups.

Steven Hayward is the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics at the American

Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco.

Fred Barnes is the co-founder and executive editor of The Weekly Standard. In addition, Barnes is

the host of two weekly radio shows, ‘Issues in the News’ on Voice of America and ‘What’s the Story,’ a syndicate show on the media.

FREEDOMTeachingTeachinga series of speeches and lectures honoring the virtues of a free and democratic society

staff and the Domestic Council and then all the lawyers (and everybody else who thought they were a speechwriter in the White House would take their crack) I presented to him as a final copy. If there were any changes after that, he was very unhappy.

One time I had to take a change in to him because the Chief of Staff, Don Regan, offered a change. And he looked at it. It’s the only time he ever cursed. He said, “Did the damn committee get a hold of this?” And that was the worst he ever said.

He had a great number of speech tools. He was used to scripts, coming from Hollywood. So he wasn’t bothered by speech texts or speech scripts, but he said that in Hollywood, he was not known as a good script writer but as a good script doctor, which meant he was very good at editing and tightening and simplifying.

In order to illustrate this to me, he said, “I want to give you an example of why this is important.” His second job in radio was with WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa. The first one was in Davenport.

And those of you who are close to my age remember Ed Reimers, who did the Allstate ads. Well, Ed Reimers was a colleague of Reagan’s at WHO radio station.

And so the stations were owned by somebody named Dr. Palmer, who is famous, they say, of chiropractic fame. He also had a series of chiropractic offices.

And so Ed Reimers did the sign‑off, “Ed Reimers. This is WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa.”

Dr. Palmer happened to be there. And he knocked on the door and came into the

studio and said, “Ed,” he said, “you know, you don’t have to say ‘this is Ed.’ It is pretty self‑evident, isn’t it?” And he walked out.

He used a contact lens for distance. He was short and nearsighted. So he could read from his script. What he was doing, he was actually focusing in on people in the audience and getting their reaction. He took energy from that. That was another one of his tricks.

His philosophy played a great part in his speech delivery. Here’s another story he told me, which gives you a sense of why he thought income taxes were antithetical to creativity in America and why he was in favor of tax cuts.

He used to be on what he called the mashed potato circuit; he did a lot of hosting at events. One of them was a Pillsbury bake‑off. They had a competition. It was in the Midwest. And a woman had toiled hard, made this recipe, won the contest, and got $10,000 for it. But before she got off the stage, there was somebody from the IRS waiting to collect the federal government’s share of that check.

He used that as an example of government stifling that poor person’s creativity.

He was his own man. We never put words in his mouth that he wasn’t prepared to defend or say himself. And on one occasion I found out clearly — several occasions, but one was a very important occasion: the United Nations General Assembly speech in 1985.

And I was brought in to help work on parts of that speech. I probably toughened it up thinking that that is the message that he wanted to deliver.

But he was in the midst of new negotiations with the Soviets. And we came back. We had a big meeting. And he said he had scratched out all the tough lines. I was crestfallen. Basically he said, “You know, Ken, if we are going to have a different relationship with the Soviet Union, we had better start with some different language.”

That was to me the first time he had opened up and made a decision on wanting to start with a new series of discussions with the Soviet Union.

There was a sense of integrity in his speeches. You know, people are saying how Obama keeps blaming previous administrations. And they now say, “Well, Bush did” that and “Reagan did” that.

But you should go back and read the CPAC speech in 1981, in March. There was a part in there when he actually said, “You know, if we are going to make progress, we can’t keep just blaming the past for our ills.”

He used the baseball illustration in the speech of Frankie Frisch, the great player‑manager. There was a game going on and he had a rookie center fielder. And the ball went to the center fielder. He dropped the ball.

And on the next hit, the ball went to the center fielder. And he flubbed. He tripped. He threw it to the wrong base. And so Frankie Frisch runs out and says, “I’ll show you how to play this position.”

So he grabs his mitt. The first ball to Frankie Frisch in center field, basically he comes in on it, rolls between his legs. When he gets it, he throws it to the wrong base himself.

And then he throws the mitt down, and he says, “You’ve got center field so screwed up nobody can play.”

That was his way of saying you can’t always put the blame on someone else.

I want to talk briefly about Reagan’s humor. In the 1984 campaign he would use his age as a foil against himself.

We were at the Oktoberfest celebration in Old Heidelberg Park. And he said, naturally, “It’s great to be here in Wisconsin at this Oktoberfest.” And he sighed. And then he said “I can remember when they used to just call this Heidelberg Park.” So he was always cracking humor about himself and his age, and it helped lighten things.

Then there was a time in Nashville when he was using humor as an arrow against Walter Mondale. He said Mondale’s tax plan had had more price tags than Minnie Pearl’s hat. So it

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Former Attorney General Ed Meese, Liz Colosimo and Sue Understein listen to the panelists share insights about Reagan’s life.

was a way of making a point without it being mean.

So he used humor all the time. And probably one of my favorites was in a speech. He returned back from being shot. And it was a joint session of Congress speech. And he had a letter from a young second grader in Pennsylvania. And nobody knew about this except me. And he took it out of his pocket during the speech, saying how many cards and letters he had gotten from people and he got this one from young Peter Sweeney.

And Peter Sweeney said, “Dear Mr. President. Please get well quick so you don’t have to give a speech in your pajamas.”

Reagan had that wonderful stage pause. And he said, “P.S. If you have to give a speech in your pajamas, remember I warned you.”

That broke down the whole audience. And then he went on to talk about the economy.

So I have one more story about Nancy Reagan. And I don’t tell too many stories about Mrs. Reagan, but this is a fun one because I once asked the President, “What was your first screen kiss like?”

And the first thing he did was say, “Where is Nancy?” He didn’t want her anywhere around when he tried to remember it. But he did tell me the story. It was with June Travis in the movie “Love is on the Air.” And he said, “I laid a lip to her,” as he put it, “because that is the way I learned how to kiss when I was a kid. And the director yelled, ‘Cut. Cut!’ because he was messing up all of her makeup.

DOnaTELLI: I guess everybody has their favorite Reagan humor story. You know, my favorite is he was accused of not putting in the hours sometimes at the office. And in his speech once, he said, “You know, they say that hard work never hurt anyone, but I say why take the chance?”

Politicians might learn a little about self‑deprecation, don’t you think? I think that was maybe one of his secrets for success. Our next speaker is Professor Steve Hayward.

STEVEn HaYWarD: As has been suggested already, I come at Ronald Reagan from something of an academic perspective, though don’t let that frighten you. What I will do is put my brief remarks in the context of the work The Fund for American Studies does with students.

I think it was Thucydides who was credited with suggesting that history is philosophy taught by example. I would start with the

students in The Fund’s programs by saying that political science is best understood through biography and that students who really want to understand life seriously ought to throw out all their dry and dusty textbooks and read biography instead.

I think, actually, today that the real tragedy in political education in most of our universities is not so much a relentless leftism, although there is plenty of that. It is that most political science instruction today renders the subject boring.

In fact, it is possible to take an entire curriculum of political science at a leading university and learn nothing useful, important, or interesting in the process of doing so. And so we are boring students to death and choking the life out of the subject of the political studies.

Of the things I think The Fund does right is, rather than assigning bland textbooks, most of the courses assign primary sources. Students don’t read about the Federalist Papers. They read the texts themselves. And then we make students confront truly fundamental questions.

For one of the courses I have taught for The Fund, I assign every student to read a biography of a leading political figure. I sort of hint that it would be good if they did Reagan or Churchill or Lincoln, but I have a long list that they can pick from, including nonpolitical figures or non‑office holders. A study of Martin Luther King can show you how to wield political power without holding political office.

And I assign students a set of questions to answer in a review essay to sharpen their thinking to see if they can make out what are the essential central purposes or central ideas of political figures. Students who do this will then have a baseline from which they can begin to make sense of political life a lot more clearly.

I asked students to try and find a central insight that people have. You know, Lincoln’s central insight was the idea that the preservation of the Union was necessary to the preservation of the Constitution and liberty itself.

Churchill’s central insight might be said to have been that the distinction between liberty and tyranny is real and substantial. That is a distinction modern social science obfuscates and pusillanimous politicians willfully avoid.

I say that Reagan’s central idea is similar to Churchill’s. I think it can be summarized in one sentence as the view that unlimited

government is hostile to individual liberty, both in its vicious forms, like communist totalitarianism, but also in its supposedly benign forms, like bureaucracy.

And Reagan actually put it in almost exactly those terms several times in his long career, most notably I think in his speech to the British Parliament at Westminster in 1982.

Now, I set out to write what ended up being two volumes about Reagan, partially because I was certain when he left office in 1989, that he would end up Coolidgized. That is to say Calvin Coolidge left office in 1929 a very popular president with the American people, but his reputation plummeted after a generation of hostile partisan historians worked him over, quite unfairly. I thought this was likely to happen to Reagan. In the early innings after he left office, it looked like it would proceed that way.

Over the last decade, the most surprising and unexpected thing has happened. A great many liberals have started to like Reagan.

I committed the same mistake that a lot of people did throughout Reagan’s career of underestimating him. I have to say it is a delicious spectacle that 20 years after Reagan has left office, he is still confounding his political enemies on the left.

However, a lot of the liberals now offer some extraordinary praise for Reagan, including people like John Diggins; Richard Reeves, who always hated Reagan when he was in office; Princeton’s Sean Wilentz; and Douglas Brinkley.

They don’t like all of him. They only like part of him. Mostly they focus on the Cold War story, admire his role in how that came out and are also impressed by the evidence that has sort of arisen of his personal writings, his radio addresses, and so forth.

However, one is tempted to paraphrase that famous line of Reagan’s, “Where is the rest of him?” Apart from the Cold War story, all of these accounts of Reagan still say that the rest of his presidency was either a fiasco, such as his economic policy — that is the theme of every other Paul Krugman column in The New York Times — or if not a fiasco, a disaster, like the Iran‑Contra business, for example.

Another thing that the liberals say is, “Well, there was the first term Reagan who was the hard line Cold Warrior. And there was the second term Reagan who was a doveish détente‑ist.” I think that that is mistaken.

I think, above all, trying to separate the domestic policy Reagan and the foreign

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policy Reagan is a major interpretive mistake.

And, above all, so many of these books try and abstract Reagan from his conservative principles, which, to borrow a great phrase from G. K. Chesterton, is like trying to tell a story of a saint without mentioning God.

So what I am trying to do in my book is restore the unity of Reagan’s state craft, understand why he saw his domestic policy principles and his foreign policy principles together as the same central idea.

Now, his domestic policy story is harder to tell than the foreign policy story. It is a bigger report card, for one thing. There are more wins. There are more losses. There are more ties. And, above all, it lacks the human drama of the Cold War. You know, it was the face‑to‑face meetings with Gorbachev that capture our imagination.

Above all, Reagan never stood in front of the Federal Trade Commission and said, “Mr. Regulator, tear down this rule.”

He had that attitude, though.

I think I will just draw to a close quickly this way and say just a little bit about the two sides of Reagan. One is that if you look at him closely, this distinction in foreign policy between the first term Reagan and the second term Reagan really doesn’t hold up.

Early in his first term, there were lots of indications. Although, on the one hand, he had the famous first press conference, where he said the Soviet Union lies, cheats, steals, and so forth, he is also we know writing very sentimental letters to Brezhnev after his shooting. So maybe we let ideology get in our way.

And we also know that very early on Reagan would say to his aides, friends, and advisers, “You know, if I could just sit down with the Russians and talk sense with them, it seems to me we could reach a solution to this.” And most of the aides thought that he was being naive or overly sentimental.

It turns out that this is a trait of almost everyone who reaches a high point in political office. The same self‑confidence that gets you to that place makes you overconfident in the power of personal diplomacy.

Winston Churchill late in World War II as he saw the trouble coming of the first World War used to say, “If I could just dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all after the war,” which is surely completely wrong but, nonetheless, shows you the kind of confidence that people have

in their personal diplomacy.

It explains why Obama thinks he can talk with the Iranians. I remember Obama mentioned Reagan talked to the Russians. Reagan had very tough preconditions for talking to the Russians. Pay attention, Professor Obama.

However, the interesting thing is that in Gorbachev, Reagan did find someone he actually could talk to. It wasn’t easy, but he could talk to him for real.

In my book, I give Gorbachev credit for being a genuine liberal reformer, although a deeply confused one. He thought the problems of socialism required more socialism. So my summary of him was that he was less Machiavelli than he was Inspector Clouseau.

Nonetheless, it worked out well for us in the end. And, to his credit, Gorbachev has said more than once, “I’m not sure what happened would have happened if Ronald Reagan hadn’t been there.”

And something I was maybe not astonished to find out, but late in 1988, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were saying, “Gosh, Mr. President, Secretary Shultz, we wish you were staying on.” They were a little nervous about George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, who actually had more conventional Nixonian views about how to get along, which I think is really fascinating.

Now a brief meditation on domestic policy. As I said, with domestic policy you can run the numbers all kinds of way to say Reagan was successful here, less successful there.

And the question I think for conservatives who consider themselves Reagan’s heirs today is to ask them, “Why wasn’t Reagan

more successful in preventing, for instance, what we’re seeing today, the spectrum of big government?”

Reagan, I concluded at the end of my book, was more successful in rolling back the Soviet empire than he was at rolling back the domestic government empire because the latter is a harder problem. And it’s the challenge for all of Reagan’s would‑be successors.

I remember the comment from Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who was in Reagan’s political operation in the ‘80s. He said this, “The Reagan years will be for conservatives what the Kennedy years remain for liberals, the reference point, the breakthrough experience, a conservative Camelot. At the same time, no lesson is plainer than that the damage of decades cannot be repaired by any one administration.”

DOnaTELLI: Steve, thank you for those great remarks. You could argue that maybe the very strong role that Reagan took vis‑a‑vis the Soviet Union in the first term actually led to the success in the second term of actually negotiating with Gorbachev.

Our final guest is journalist Fred Barnes.

FrED BarnES: Before I tell you just some of my stories about Reagan, I am struck by what Ken Khachigian said about how Reagan could be so succinct in getting across a message.

I remember so vividly a speech that Reagan gave. It was supposedly a routine campaign speech in 1980, Jerry Falwell’s school, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.

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Hayward answers an audience question as fellow panelists Khachigian and Barnes look on.

Reagan is delivering this speech. And then he tells a World War II story about an American bomber over Germany that had been hit. And the plane was going to go down.

The young tail gunner was stuck and he couldn’t pry himself out. He was going to go down with the plane.

So the pilot starts to get out. And he sees the young man there stuck. And he says basically, “Don’t be afraid. I am going to stay here with you.” And he went down with him. And they both died as a result.

Reagan tells this story. And at the end of it, he says, “Medal of Honor awarded posthumously.” And the crowd — and this is a college crowd, thousands of people who are completely silent. They were just completely stunned by it. So was I. It was just completely amazing.

This story, of course, is one that is very hard to fact check — since the people who were involved died, but it had to have been a story that was written.

I have never seen someone silence a crowd like that in a campaign speech.

You know, it is different if you are somebody in the media who covers a president. Now, presidents don’t have friends in the media. You know, this drives reporters crazy because they always want to be regarded as individual and distinctive and differentiated from the rest of this crowd. And I guess I felt that, too, but somehow I got over it.

The first time I really had gotten close to Reagan I was merely a political reporter for the The Baltimore Sun.

I got invited to a background session with Reagan and about four other reporters, famous people like David Broder, sometime in the campaign of 1984.

It must have been early in the campaign. It was August or it was something like that. The four of us came in and met with Reagan and we all asked him questions.

It was off the record. But obviously Ronald Reagan knew that nothing is really off the record in Washington. If some reporter hears it, he may not write it, but he will tell all of his friends. And some of it will get out.

We learned zilch from Ronald Reagan. And he always had a great way of not answering questions by telling Hollywood stories.

He told some Errol Flynn stories. And he told a story which I heard later, actually, from him, the story about the director — I think his name is Ernst Lubitsch, who had a very coy way of dealing with sex in movies, where

he would have the couple go in their hotel room or something. And they would hang out on the door, “Do Not Disturb.” Reagan thought that was brilliant, and I agree.

Later in 1994, I was one of the panelists on the first Reagan‑Mondale debate. Remember, this was the one where Reagan was terrible. He was a zombie in dealing with questions there. It was a great night for Mondale, the best night of Mondale’s entire career and probably the worst of Reagan’s because Reagan was always a pretty good debater.

I always like to ask questions I’d like to know the answer to. So I asked President Reagan, “Why don’t you go to church or if you can’t get to church, why don’t you invite the minister or priest into the White House or up at Camp David?”

And the President didn’t give a very good answer. He basically said, “Well, I can’t go to church because for security reasons, somebody might attack the church if I am there” or something like that. It wasn’t a very good answer. It was a good question. But sitting behind me — you know, my back was to the audience — there was hissing. It’s the only time I had been hissed. And they hissed pretty loudly, too. I mean, I turned around and kind of looked to see who was hissing.

So afterwards when Reagan comes down and we walk up and shake hands with him, I asked the President. I said, “Did you think the questions were softballs?”

And he said, “No, not really.” I mean, he knew that he had had a terrible debate. And this was the one where he had been filled with a lot of details. You know, when Ronald Reagan was talking about details, he wasn’t at his best. And he wasn’t in that debate.

Well, then obviously he recovered in that next debate. There were all the stories after that first debate, “He’s too old.” “He’s in trouble.”

In 1986, when Pat Buchanan became the Communications Director — and I knew Pat — I was invited to a lunch at the White House in the study next to the Oval Office. It was myself, the President, I think Don Regan was there because he was the Chief of Staff, my friend Mort Kondracke, and Paul Harvey, who sounded just like he did on radio.

I sat right next to President Reagan. I thought this time it’s off the record, but I am going to learn so much stuff. So I can’t write it, but I can leverage it into stories, because I can call people and mention it and learn more. You know, they will think I know more than I do, and they will have to tell me more.

So I learned nothing. I learned more Errol Flynn stories. I learned stories about putting the “Do Not Disturb” sign up again. Boy, I remembered it. I heard it twice.

And I learned practically nothing.

In 1987, I was writing the White House Watch column for the New Republic. It had been a famous column. Mort Kondracke had done it and John Osborne had done it before. It was very fun to write.

And obviously I wrote about the White House. I was writing about President Reagan. And I was invited to an interview with the President. This was after Iran‑Contra.

But, in any case, when I went in, I took a picture with me of Reagan in a movie that was made in the Presidio of Monterey in 1937. It was 1938 when it came out. There was a picture of Ronald Reagan with a whole lot of ladies from the post, including my

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Conference guests enjoy a private tour of Reagan’s “Rancho del Cielo.”

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Teaching Freedom is a series of remarks on freedom published by The Fund for American Studies, a nonprofit educational organization in Washington, D.C. The speakers featured in each issue of Teaching Freedom delivered their remarks at a TFAS institute or conference or serve as faculty members in our institutes.

The speakers who participate in our educational programs contribute greatly to the purpose and mission of our programs. We publish these speeches to share the words and lessons of our speakers with our friends, alumni, supporters and others throughout the country and world who are unable to attend our events.

grandmother, who was the wife of the post commander.

So I took this picture in because I was going to get President Reagan to autograph it. I took it in. And I showed it to him and said, “Mr. President, do you know what movie was being done there?”

He knew exactly: “Sergeant Murphy,” a movie that was sort of a B movie, not a great movie. It’s not a famous movie.

Ronald Reagan remembered the entire plot, outlined it for me, remembered an incident that had happened shortly after that. He said somebody had tricked him into riding a wild horse afterwards. What a memory, knew the whole movie, and he autographed it. I’ve certainly saved it.

Then we had the interview. And I asked the President about the whole Iran‑Contra affair. And he said, “It was not guns for hostages.” Well, of course, six months earlier, he had been cajoled into saying that it was arms for hostages, we’re sorry about that, and the press was going to be satisfied and was going to put that whole Iran‑Contra issue behind them.

And obviously the President didn’t believe that. He didn’t think it was arms for hostages. The press people there were Marlin Fitzwater, a lovely guy; and Tommy Griscom, who was I think the communications director.

When the President was saying this, I looked at them. They were panicking because he wasn’t supposed to say this.

That is why I wrote it up later.

Normally when you do an interview, the White House later will put out a transcript after your story comes out. They didn’t put a transcript out on this one.

And the President said, you know, if the arms hadn’t been sent there — he was really trying to have some good influence on the government that would succeed the government of not Ayatollah Khomeini but the Khomeini. That’s what the President called him: the Khomeini. I thought that was a good way of saying it.

Nineteen eighty‑eight, there is a Christmas party at the White House the presidents have every year. And you go through the line. And you shake hands with them, and they take a picture. And they send you the picture later. I have a lot of these.

And I have gone there with all three of my daughters and, of course, my wife. I haven’t done my son yet, but it isn’t happening in this administration.

So we went through the line in Christmas of ‘88, President Reagan’s last Christmas party. And I’m sure he didn’t know who I was. I had interviewed him. I was at the debate in ‘84.

Since I was a great admirer of President Reagan, I finally concluded that this was so empowering on his part. And I always thought this was a guy who didn’t worry about all of the stuff that the reporters were writing and so on, and he shouldn’t have.

So many people in Washington are paralyzed by what may be on the front page of The Washington Post. And he certainly wasn’t and didn’t know who the reporters were

anyway and didn’t know who I was, I thought anyway. Maybe he did.

In 1990 — and this is the last connection I had with President Reagan — I wrote a piece for Reader’s Digest on the fall of communism and what caused it. And, oh, a month or so after it came out, I got the nicest note from President Reagan, a lovely note.

Actually, I am going to quote from it. The note was saying how much he had liked the story. I had obviously given him some credit. I think as the years have worn on, we are realizing he gets more and more credit for winning the Cold War.

And the President said that he enjoyed the article and believed that his policy had played a role. And he said, “I must admit that I was surprised by the speed with which things have been happening, but I never doubted communism would eventually fall. In fact, it never really worked.”

I wish I had this letter — I must have it somewhere in my house because I certainly want to keep it. It was a letter that not only did he make a point, but there was a certain sweetness to it, you know, writing it.

You know, he appreciated what I had written and it was a short letter, a lovely letter. And he said at the end, “You know, if you come to Los Angeles, make sure you come by and look me up.”

And I wish I had.

““We’ve neglected to teach economics in our schools and a

whole generation of our sons and daughters are growing

up with little understanding of how our system works. and

that is what the Charles Edison Memorial Youth Fund (now

TFaS) is working so diligently to correct.”

~President ronald reagan