Shelf Life: The Reagan Way.(How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life)(Book Review)

Of the making of books about Ronald Reagan there is indeed no end, but the very newest one offers genuinely surprising delights. How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (ReganBooks, 263 pp., $24.95) offers reflections on Reagan by Peter Robinson, who is an engaging and candid writer. He was a White House speechwriter for Reagan, and will be fondly remembered by history for his authorship of the famous line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall"-and probably even more fondly for his perseverance in defense of that line, in the face of ferocious opposition from powerful elements within Reagan's own administration.

Robinson's book provides plenty of detail about that controversy, and readers in search of inside vignettes from the White House will not be disappointed. But the book avoids the usual self-aggrandizing pitfalls of the White House memoir ("and then I told the President .") because it is truly sui generis: a remarkable combination of insider memoir, personal confession, and self-help manual. What integrates this book is an artful yet transparently honest attempt to find life lessons in Reagan's biography and character. For this task, it would be hard to find someone more qualified than Robinson. Early in the book, he describes how he and his fellow speechwriters would read speech drafts aloud, imitating Reagan's voice and mannerisms to see whether the draft sounded authentically Reaganesque or needed more work. This is just one of the ways in which Robinson became a devoted and creative student of Reagan. (This channeling even has a parallel in the Gipper's own life: Acting a role in a play or a film is an effort at sympathetic understanding of another person, and this dramatic work surely helped Reagan develop his legendary skill at relating to people.) One important lesson Robinson learned from Reagan was that realism and optimism are not mutually contradictory; rather, both are essential. Here Robinson quotes helpfully from a Catholic priest, Rev. Lorenzo Albacete:

We all have to take reality as it comes to us. [The question is] what you choose to do with reality. Reagan never permitted his misfortunes to interfere with his development as a human person. Instead he used them. All his life Reagan exercised his free will by choosing to seek the good in reality as it came to him. Bringing good from bad. Why should that be possible? Because of the deep structure of creation. Because of the way God himself ordered the ...