The Happy President

...This is not the place to discourse on the long-term impact of these quick cashins on Presidential dignity...

...He laments: "For the first time in my life people didn't believe me...

...Indeed, the detail is fuller on that subject than on the governmental and political issues a reader might be no less eager to read about...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" Before World War II only three Presidents left memoirs...

...This was the coin of his career and he made the most of it...

...Sohisbookmust betaken for what it is : a not very revealing, swift-moving, once-over account of a remarkable life and a Presidency that awaits the historian's scalpel...

...Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan both actually preceded their husbands to the bookstores by a year...

...Alas, he stayed too long...

...Onethirsts to know, too, what kind of Presidency Reagan thinks he bequeathed to Bush...

...President Truman told me that it cost him $60,000 to get his memoirs written —and proceeded to complain that President Eisenhower, then in office, had not lifted a finger to help him avoid being taxed on the advance for the book...

...The second term began with the switch of positions between James A. Baker III, the White House chief of staff, and DonaldT...

...Davis "didn't influence Ronnie's views...

...His matching effort to strengthen the nation's military power seemed a worthy strategy for dealing with the continuing tension generated by the competition with the "evil empire...

...I sure felt frustrated that I couldn't get my message across...

...The central woman in the book is, properly, Nancy Reagan, to whom it is lovingly inscribed in a facsimile of the President's handwriting...

...Ronald Reagan was just what the doctor ordered...

...In the past generation and a half our Chief Executives have hardly waited for the dust of their time in office to settle before supplying us with an "autobiography...

...Like many historical figures, his rise almost appeared divinely arranged—witness the way he got his first job as a radio announcer, the way he became a Hollywood fixture, the way he left the silver screen to become a union leader, the way he entered politics and ascended to its apex, and, not least, the way the nation's good luck continually ornamented his Presidency...

...It is not too much to say that before he entered the White House, Americans—and the world—knew his face better than that of anyone who had previously come to the Oval Office, except perhaps Ike...

...Proposed by the two men themselves and not questioned by the President (because he thought "the enthusiasm both would bring to their new jobs would be good for the Administration"), the move had well-known consequences that laid bare the flimsiness of his performance as an executive...

...Reagan deserved and received credit for ending what threatened to be a runaway inflation at the time he took office...

...a line from his mo vie King 's Row), and I longed for the answer to the question...

...To a considerable extent they are designed to be lucrative apologias, not to elucidate the past or educate the future...

...Latterly the First Ladies have also entered the bazaar...

...That he was detached from many of the significant details of his high office only added to his acceptability...

...Reagan seems always to have been in the right place at the right time...

...Just as his was a happy Presidency, this is a generally happy book...

...But I can't resist noting that former Presidents and their wives are now in the same literary league as rock stars and other assorted entertainers, including top-rated athletes, who similarly produce self-acclaiming "as-told-to" accounts of their accomplishments that rarely make a dent on the national consciousness...

...For instance, after describing his now immortal film role as the Gipper, he declares: "The same year I made the Knute Rockne movie, I married Jane Wyman, another contract player at Warners...

...Truman was referring to the tax-free status that the 1RS during his Administration had granted General Eisenhower on the milliondollar advance he received for his War memoirs, Crusade in Europe...

...A handsome man with a splendid speaking manner honed through long professional experience, Reagan looked and sounded from afar like a President...

...Thatcher was "warm, feminine, gracious, and intelligent...

...The shortcoming of the genre it represents, however, cannot block from view Reagan's warm and winning public personality...

...What other advice did he extend...

...Jimmy Carter announced the day after his defeat in 1980 that writing his memoirs would be his next major order of business...

...The last Presidential autobiography written completely by its subject was Calvin Coolidge's, which may tell us something about the value of the more recent works...

...He tells us that he began the practice of returning the salute of uniformed military personnel, even though he himself was in civilian clothes, and that he has encouraged President Bush to continue the tradition...

...Loyal Davis...

...Thus we learn that he started to wear his neckties in a wide Windsor knot when his Hollywood handlers decided he had a short neck— like Jimmy Cagney's—and would have to disguise the fact that his chest and shoulders "appeared to be a little too wide for my head...

...Ronald Reagan candidly informs us on the first page of An American Life that he had the help of Robert Lindsey, a veteran journalist, "who was with me every step of the way...

...In fact, as I read this lengthy work, there constantly came to my mind the title of Reagan's first autobiography of years ago, Where's the Rest of Me...

...Yet one looks in vain for some mention of the conservative political outlook of her persuasive stepfather, Dr...

...They therefore readily approved the delegated management of a Chairman of the Board, RonaldReagan—who, in his second term, seemed to become the Honorary Chairman of the Board, with no one replacing him as plain Chairman...

...Unpleasantness was something our 40th President avoided...

...Nevertheless, he reports, hedid not allow the episode to depress him...

...It is not enough to say, as Reagan does, that while he was "ultimately responsible," "[a] President simply cannot monitor the day-to-day conduct of all his subordinates...

...And why the absence of meditative reflections on events Reagan participated in that affected people throughout the world...

...After a generation of troubles in the White House— beginning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and running through the agonies of Vietnam and of Watergate, not to mention the tortured Carter years —the electorate appreciated the rest...

...Still, there is more to be said than is in An American Life about the President's gradual shift from being a New Dealer to being a scourge of big government...

...It evokes effectively the world in which Reagan came to maturity, particularly the flavor of the pre-World War II motion picture industry...

...He was, in short, a comfortable old shoe...

...He conveyed the impression that by "going for the gold" we could turn back the clock to those happier days when "the American century" appeared to be in the making...

...Richard M. Nixon's Memoirs even went out of print with indecent haste...

...If Reagan had ridden his horse into the sunset after his first term, his stature as a hero would be unique...

...Reagan insists that Dr...

...There ought to be observations about the world figures with whom he interacted that go beyond saying, to cite one case, Mrs...

...Then, the Iran-contra revelation stained the Teflon President indelibly...

...The counterpoint to such trivia consists of painfully brief comments—as if someone had censored the manuscript —on personal matters where we might want to know more...

...The public welcomed his zeal, soon fulfilled, to cut taxes appreciably...

...They tend to be money-losers for the houses that publish them, whatever the prestige of obtaining one of the manuscripts in the first place...

...Our marriage produced two wonderful children, Maureen and Michael, but it didn't work out, and in 1948 we were divorced...

...Most people were overwhelmed by government red tape in one form or another, and by Jimmy Carter's overmanagement of the White House...

...In her memoir, My Turn, Mrs...

...Was it only the panoply of the office that Reagan burnished brightly during his tenure there...

...As a principal destroyer of the Berlin Wall and all it represented, as a relentless and triumphant warrior against the diabolical Communist system, as theman who helped make George Bush his successor, he owes the public more than is served up here...

...Meanwhile, the nation rolled along on unprecedented prosperity...

...These were, of course, important elements of his public appeal...

...I took care of him," he said pointing straight at Gettysburg, "and he didn't do a damn thing for me...

...Regan, the Secretary of the Treasury...

...It had been burdened so long with misery at the top that it was suffering from a chronic case of political muscle-fatigue...