Ronald Reagan Changed My Life

By Michael Ellis | Monday, November 3, 2003

In the spring of 1982, Peter Robinson was a young man in need of direction and focus. After drinking his way through Dartmouth (and occasionally contributing to The Dartmouth Review), he took classes at Oxford for two years and tried to write a novel for one year. He soon found himself back in the States, without a job or the necessary connections to get one.

Up to that point, his path was probably the same one that many of today's Review staffers will follow—intense binge drinking, followed by aimless graduate study and attempts to make it big as a writer. But, at that point, Robinson's Dartmouth writings paid off for him. Robinson sent letters to everyone he knew who might possibly give him a job; he received a response from William F. Buckley, advising him to get in touch with his son, Chris Buckley, then the chief speechwriter for Vice President Bush.

Arriving in Washington two days later, Robinson learned that Chris Buckley had engineered a scheme practically guaranteeing him a job as one of the vice president's speechwriters. Instead of settling the sort of menial job he'd expected to find, Robinson, by 1983, became a full-fledged presidential speechwriter. He served the next six years under President Reagan. By all accounts, it was a remarkable experience. His position provided a first-hand look not only at the achievements of America's fortieth President, but also at Reagan the man; from that look, Robinson learned a great from Reagan—and what we all can learn from him.

Now, Robinson is an established writer and commentator; President Reagan is sadly diminished by the effects of Alzheimer's disease, and political tell-alls have become the norm for former White House staffers. Robinson's latest book is How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, a slim volume packed with his experiences from the White House. The book strikes a skillful balance between biography, anthology of political anecdotes, and self-help book—a combination that works surprisingly well.

His writing style is often self-effacing: Robinson never pretends that he was close to the President and recognizes that much of his success was due to luck. Few people out there would admit that after penning the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," line, in the first draft of Reagan's 1987 Berlin speech; he tried to re-write it as "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf."

The behind-the-scenes details of how the "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," line was created are some of the richest and most satisfying in the book. On the advance trip to Berlin, Robinson met with ordinary West Berliners and heard their disgust with the partition of the city before he formulated Reagan's clarion call. Despite numerous objections from the State Department, the National Security Council, and other White House senior staff, Robinson managed to defend his speech. One of his better anecdotes is his account of arguing against then-Deputy National Security Advisor Colin Powell, who thought the line was too provocative, but found he was "taken aback" by the idealistic bombast of the "thirty-year-old who had never held a full-time job outside of speechwriting."

From the time that Robinson spent in the Reagan White House and the host of issues that he both wrote about and saw President Reagan act on, he derives simple maxims that are peppered throughout the book. Drawn from Reagan's own personal conduct, they are a set of rules to live life by, such as "Easy Does It" and "Say Your Prayers." In Reagan, Peter Robinson discovers a man who is completely at ease in his own skin, able to persevere through rough times, keeps a strong faith in the Divine, has a good head on his shoulders rather than expert knowledge, and is "lost in time and space" without his wife to support him. Robinson did not glean these lessons from Reagan quickly or all at once—some of them he realized while in the presence of the man himself, others he did not even realize until he reflected long after the fact on his White House days.

One of the key aspects of Reagan's success that Robinson identifies is directly applicable to many college students today. What made the Reagan White House so efficient and effective was the management style of Reagan himself. Whereas President Carter, and, to a lesser extent, Clinton, tried to become an expert in every field of government and routinely burnt the midnight oil trying to micromanage every aspect of their administrations, Reagan was content to delegate and let the staff do the grunt work. Keeping relatively short hours, President Reagan was always ready to make the big decisions with a clear mind and fresh constitution.

In today's technocracy, many "experts" and quite a few in the ivory tower of academia are dismissive of the opinion of the common man and are haughty enough to believe that it is only those with learned pedigrees whose opinions matter. But Reagan personified the opposite of that idea—as Lionel Trilling wrote about George Orwell, sometimes the best virtue is "that of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have." He might as well have been writing about Reagan, however, for one of Reagan's best qualities was that he approached issues not from the perspective of the arrogant and stubborn expert, but instead a "good head" that he used to find common sense solutions to the day's problems. The way in which he used his layman's sense of the world can teach a lesson to all of us in academia who tend to write off the opinions of those without formal training.

All in all, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life occupies a peculiar place within the canon of literature about Reagan. It is certainly not a book for those who dislike President Reagan or his legacy. Explaining that, "I myself was never able to get worked up over deficits," Robinson glosses over the criticisms of the Reagan administration and focuses on its achievements rather than its shortfalls.

For those who are aficionados of Reagan and books about him, Robinson's book is hard to figure out. There are certainly far better biographies of Reagan that exist, namely Peggy Noonan's or even Edmund Morris's. Robinson was neither as close to the President for the book to be effective as a memoir nor has he done the copious research necessary for the book to be a true biography. But at the same time, anyone hoping to gain a full understanding of what it was like to work for Reagan and how the man operated would be foolhardy not to add this book to their collection.

Its straddling of the line between biography, memoir, and self-help book, while unconventional and slightly unsettling at first, turns out to be an excellent method for making the unique qualities of Reagan accessible. For those who are looking to learn more about Reagan and what his administration was like but don't have the time to build a library about it, this is your book.

Ronald Reagan Changed My Life

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