The Reagan Diaries

The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Reagan (Edited by Douglas Brinkley)

When anyone (myself, anyway) first buys one of those Amazon Kindles, it’s very tempting to spend hours each day browsing through all of the free and/or bargains that are available.  For a brief time, this book was advertised at only $1.99.  How can you pass up a deal like that?  Especially when the regular price was about 8 or 9 times that amount.  And, unlike a real book, Kindles purchases that you decide you didn’t need are much easier to be disposed of after your initial disappointment.

Apparently, Ronald Reagan kept a diary when he was President from 1981 through 1989.  He did a pretty good job of keeping his entries consistent.  There are some noticeable gaps (like, you know, when he was shot), but he was pretty faithful in journaling his daily activities.  And this is just what this is, daily entries in a personal diary.  Most deal with the presidency, but there’s a lot of personal stuff here as well.  As lengthy as this volume is, it's also heavily edited, which is probably a good thing.  I must say that, while I can’t say that I’m disappointed in this book, it’s definitely not something I would want to read again, nor would I recommend this to others.  It’s, well, a diary.

When President Reagan does mention his day to day work schedule, there are so many different world leaders, cabinet officers, and members of congress that flow in and out of his office, that you simply can’t keep up with all of the names unless you’re a devout study of history and you have a sharp enough memory to retain such minor players in world politics 33 years after the fact (yes, it has been that long).  When political leaders are mentioned, there’s never much thought nor detail around the major events of Reagan’s presidency here.  Some of the most auspicious occasions of his tenure are barely glazed over, or even talked about at all.  Example, there’s nothing in here about his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech, but there might have been a flighty reference to him “going to Berlin to make a speech”.  So you may feel cheated, but again, it is what it says: a diary.

You do, however, get to see many of his idiosyncrasies which can be quite interesting.  The man definitely had a big heart, and regardless of your politics, his journals dictate that he only wanted what was best for his country, and put up with a lot of left-leaning journalistic flak.  There are a lot of entries that go something like: “Delivered a great speech to the Working Women of Tomorrow and received four standing ovations during my talk.  Of course, none of the three major networks mentioned any of that”.  He also loved his wife tremendously, loved his kids as well even though he felt they were a bit flakey, got a lot of haircuts, and ate a lot of lunches with his Vice President.  He also, as you may recall, had a lot of medical issues.  He goes through these in quite nauseating detail, but I suppose that if I were keeping a diary, I might write about such things as well.  He never curses beyond “damn” or “hell”, and when he does, he enters the words in his diary as “d_ _ n” or “h _ _ l”.  He also misspells Quayle (“Quaale”) and AIDS (“AIDES”) several times as well.

As I read this book, I found the first couple of years enjoyable, so I decided to plow through once I had reached that point even though I had lost interest.  I found myself reading this diary as one might write a diary (i.e. I would spend a few minutes a day going through maybe one month’s entries at a time).  Again, I imagine a diehard admirer or astute historian would deeply enjoy this book, but I can’t see many other people finding that much to enjoy.  I imagine that there are many other detailed retrospectives that give a much better perspective of the presidency.  I can’t be too critical, though, because the book is essentially exactly what it says it is (again) a diary.