New Papers Redefine Reagan

Sunday, January 23, 2005 - SIMI VALLEY -- Law school student Jason Ebin has already spent hundreds of hours poring over Ronald Reagan's official documents at the late president's hilltop library.

But when curators released the largest collection of Reagan's pre-presidential papers earlier this month, Ebin and other researchers felt like a new treasure hunt had started.

"You never know from day to day what you're going to find," said Ebin of Pacific Palisades, who is doing research for presidential historian Richard Reeves.

"The Reagan Library is an invaluable resource. There are few institutions that give you such an ability to look back into history, to see what the president was thinking and what his advisers were thinking and how it all came together to form U.S. policy."

The library recently made available nearly 25,000 additional pages of Reagan's personal papers, including speeches, radio scripts and articles he wrote in the 1960s and '70s.

These documents include Reagan's handwritten drafts of about 1,000 scripts for "Viewpoint," his nationally syndicated radio commentary program, which aired from 1975 to 1979.

"The radio speeches are crucial in my view," said Robert G. Kaufman, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, who is researching a biography on Reagan's goals and his early presidential years.

"It was during those years, from 1975 to 1979, that his thoughts crystalized into a coherent national philosophy that served as a template for his presidency.

"All this dispels the myth that Ronald Reagan was somehow a creature of his advisers," Kaufman said. "The radio addresses prove the contrary. They show that Ronald Reagan was the driving force of his administration and the key policies emanating from it."

The Reagan Library contains about 50 million pages of presidential records, of which roughly 10 percent have been released for public research.

It also has 10 million additional pages of gubernatorial and personal documents, of which about a third have now been released for public research, including the radio addresses.

The 25,000 pages made available in January represent the library's largest portion of Reagan's pre-presidential collection.

The radio show drafts, portions of which were never aired, offer "a good time capsule of what was going on during that period of the 1970s, because Ronald Reagan talked about everything that was going on," said Michael Duggan, supervisory archivist at the library.

"We've released a small collection of (the Reagans) love letters, but this is by far the largest personal collection we have opened."

Before the release of the new collection, said researchers Martin and Annelise Anderson, who edited "Reagan, In His Own Hand: Writings of Ronald Reagan Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America," most scholars believed Reagan was an "amicable dunce" who relied heavily on his advisers.

But Martin Anderson said the documents being made available at the library are giving scholars a different picture.

"We are just beginning to understand how much Reagan was in charge," he said. "That's why the library is so critically important.

"So far we've found 6,500 drafts of Ronald Reagan's handwritten letters, and they are mostly in the library. When you hold up a handwritten document to a historian, it's like holding up a cross to the devil.

"When Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, he wrote the inaugural address himself, the entire thing. It's amazing the things he mastered, the things he knew about and the philosophy he put together."

Robert C. Smith, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, researched Reagan's race and civil rights record this month at the library. Smith said that, on these issues, the former president was heavily influenced by his advisers, especially on the question of affirmative action.

"I get the sense that Ronald Reagan was disengaged from the decision-making process and relied heavily on his staff" on affirmative action, Smith said. "His staff was divided, and he said he was waiting on his staff to reach a consensus."

Despite the new material, there are a number of documents that can only be seen by filing a Freedom Of Information Act request. Even then, it could take years before they are approved by the administration of the sitting president.

"I've been told it might take three years to process some of the Martin Luther King holiday material. That delays the completion of my work. ... I've looked at the entire file on South African policy, but a good bit of it is still classified."

Local universities are taking advantage of the library's proximity. For his course on 1980s U.S. history, professor Thomas Maddux at California State University, Northridge, asks students to do research at the library.

The resource has also drawn scholars from across the nation and abroad. Jeremy Kuzmarov of Massachusetts is researching counterterrorism and narcotics for a doctoral dissertation in history and international relations at Brandeis University near Boston.

At the Reagan Library, he was looking at papers from Carton Turner, Reagan's drug czar, and said he had also done extensive research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., looking at the administration of Richard Nixon.

"The bulk of my research was on the drug crisis and its effects in Vietnam," said Kuzmarov, who has found Reagan to be an intelligent and effective president. "He was very influential, probably because of his communication skills."

Reagan was known as the "The Great Communicator" and there are hundreds of topics in his radio addresses, including sex education, inflation, crime prevention, abortion, welfare, unemployment, terrorism, endangered species, pensions and bilingualism.

"Those radio addresses are informative because that was the raw Ronald Reagan, unfiltered by his staff," said John W. Sloan, political scientist from the University of Houston. Sloan is working on a book comparing Reagan to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

That's called POLITICS. Get a clue.

most scholars believed Reagan was an "amicable dunce" who relied heavily on his advisers.
Sounds like the liberal intellectia still. Nope, no one can be smart unless they are a member of the hippie clan...

2 posted on 01/23/2005 2:01:38 PM PST by Brian328i (Skimmed Oil for Food money is used to kill innocent Iraqis, where's the "No Blood for Oil" outrage?)

I can recall Reagan's run for the presidency when he lost in the primaries to Ford who went on to lose to Carter. Reagan was a force that was not going to be denied. He had a sense of mission that can only come from him and not his advisers, IMHO.

Methinks that the "Scholars" are finally going to catch on to what the voters knew all along.

For example, Smith said, he was looking for documents covering the Reagan administration's position on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and papers from Melvin Bradley, an African-American adviser to Reagan. "I've been told it might take three years to process some of the Martin Luther King holiday material. That delays the completion of my work. ... I've looked at the entire file on South African policy, but a good bit of it is still classified."

Even though the article isn`t openly hostile to President Reagan this is an issue someone is researching.
All that was Reagan ,the cold war,the defeat of communism and all they can do is attempt to imply and find racism.
What no one investigating AIDS?

Will it be 20+ years before the intellectuals start realizing that Bush is also a brilliant political mastermind who is shaping his age and the age that follows him?

Republicans are always misunderestimated.

Those who haven't read Peter Schweizer's "Reagan's War", available at Amazon in paperback for around $11.00, I think, are missing an excellent work.

It is better than Reagan's autobiography, An American Life, which is a much too modest sefl-assessment.

It would have been a real blow to the left, if they had to face the fact that when he was the President of the Screen Actors Guild, when he was Governor of California and when he was President of the United States, Ronald Reagan was his own man. But then, they knew it all along.

8 posted on 01/23/2005 2:18:27 PM PST by DoughtyOne (US socialist liberalism would be dead without the help of politicians who claim to be conservative.)

Even though the article isn`t openly hostile to President Reagan this is an issue someone is researching.

It's a good article. Daily News is usually fair & balanced, so I was just wondering how the LA Times would have written of this subject.

Methinks that the "Scholars" are finally going to catch on to what the voters knew all along.

Bump that.

10 posted on 01/23/2005 2:31:16 PM PST by BykrBayb (5 minutes of prayer for Terri, every day at 11 am EDT, until she's safe. http://www.terrisfight.org)

Yes I agree it shows Reagan as an active,intelligent,thoughtful man much in contradiction to the way he(and President Bush)has been portrayed.
I just thought it strange to interject what is implied that Reagan may not have supported MLKs holiday.
I presume this is to insinuate that he was a racist.

I wasn`t trying to cast a pall over the article you posted just reflecting on what I perceive as the continuing agenda of some to discredit Republicans.It just seemed that they had to try to sneak it into the article.
I may be overreacting being used to the bias in the press and not terribly trusting of them to get a story right.

Many people had influence on the public and political career of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan himself was clearly the driving force behind advancing big ideas like tax reform, limited government, US military superiority and support for pro-life issues. Reagan took a back seat to no one.

"When you hold up a handwritten document to a historian, it's like holding up a cross to the devil. "

ROFLMAO How true. In this day of every political group revising history in their own image, we need more crosses.

..."you hold up a handwritten document to a historian, it's like holding up a cross to the devil."

My favorite line of the whole article. Just think, 10 or 20 years from now, we'll see the same light-bulbs turning on above the heads of researchers in the Dubya Presidential Library.

Methinks that the "Scholars" are finally going to catch on to what the voters knew all along.

I was in my late teens/ early twenties when Reagan was president. This entire article reads like "gosh--who knew?" when it was so apparent even to a teenager.

Think about it. Nixon antagonized the media and paid for it. Ford was a caretaker and Carter was the president installed by the media kingmakers. Carter had the first media consultant named Gerald Rafshoon. If that doesn't tell you the score, nothing will.

Reagan changed the course of history by his election. If he had lost, Carter would have given us to the Soviets. And I remember that Carter was surprised by a Soviet buildup in Cuba. They tested him and found him useful.

Those "scholars" should consult us at Freerepublic for the real story, IMHO.

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