Reagan as pundit.(Reagan's Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan's Vision: Selected Writings)(Book Review)

Reagan's Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan's Vision: Selected Writings, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (Free Press, 538 pp., $35)

IT has been said that history is too important to be left to historians, and proof of this remark is given by the fact that the most significant work done on Ronald Reagan has come not from historians, but from two economists and a political scientist, Martin and Annelise Anderson, and Kiron Skinner. The trio's publication in 2001 of Reagan in His Own Hand, a collection of Reagan's handwritten radio addresses and speeches, marked a watershed in the public's knowledge and estimation of Reagan. It proved that Reagan was no mere creature of speechwriters and handlers, as his detractors had long alleged, but was in fact the prime mover of his public career.

Skinner and the Andersons followed up last year with a collection of Reagan's personal letters (he may have written as many as 10,000), and now complete the cycle with a fresh batch of Reagan's handwritten radio commentaries from the last half of the 1970s, which reflect Reagan working out his views on the full spectrum of domestic and foreign issues. Thanks to the Andersons and Skinner, the slur that Reagan was lazy, uninformed, and ignorant of the details of federal policy should have been consigned once and for all to the ash heap of history.

This prominent aspect of the Reagan story is surprisingly little known. When he left the California governorship in 1975, Reagan began a twice-weekly newspaper column and a five-day-a-week syndicated radio commentary that was carried on more than 300 stations, reaching an estimated 20 to 30 million listeners. It was a way of making a good living as well as keeping his views in front of the public, but it was also a way of making himself the rallying point for the conservative movement that was readying itself for a drive to power. In this respect, Reagan's media career during his "wilderness years" in the late 1970s resembles Winston Churchill's "wilderness years" in the 1930s, when he too used his writing to make himself the rallying point against his government's weakness.

Most of Reagan's newspaper columns were ghostwritten for him by Peter Hannaford, and it was always assumed that the radio commentaries were ghosted as well. But Reagan, an ex-radio broadcaster, took a keen interest in his radio portfolio and wrote the bulk of those commentaries himself. Over five years, Reagan broadcast 1,027 commentaries; the Andersons and Skinner discovered Reagan's handwritten drafts of 682 of them. It is likely that Reagan wrote even more than this, but the handwritten drafts were lost or discarded.

The Reagan that emerges from this enormous corpus of writings is full of curiosity: He cast a wide net for information, and went far beyond generalities to discuss the inner workings of obscure government programs and regulations. Reagan displayed a talent for explaining complicated regulations, such as how the Clean Air Act's "prevention of significant deterioration" policy works, in just three minutes, along with a critique and alternative ideas for achieving the same goals. (On another occasion, he took after the Consumer Product Safety Commission for its regulation of lawn mowers.) Often Reagan would devote three or four commentaries to the same subject over the course of consecutive broadcasts. Stitched together, these serial commentaries offer a complete teaching on issues such as inflation, tax policy, welfare reform, the environment, and foreign policy.

The remarkable range and depth of Reagan's writings suggests that he was arguably the best-prepared person to enter ...