The Notes
THE NOTES
THE NOTES
Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom
Edited by Douglas Brinkley
A
t the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, it’s known as the Rosetta stone—the secret collection of 4-by-6 note cards on which our fortieth U.S. president recorded his favorite aphorisms, jokes, asides, and timeless nuggets of political wisdom. Although White House speechwriters such as Peggy Noonan, Ken Khachigian, and Tony Dolan had
heard
about Reagan’s private notes collection, even occasionally witnessing him snatching an appropriate note out of his Oval Office desk drawer to insert into a speech draft, no one except Nancy Reagan had ever seen the full assemblage. Just as the fact that Reagan kept a daily diary as U.S. president from 1981 to 1989 surprised most people, the publication of
The Notes
is an equally important landmark event in Reagan studies. Anyone wondering about how Reagan—dubbed “The Great Communicator”—delivered such oratorical magic as a dinner speaker and itinerant statesman should read this compilation. These notes reveal the
real
Reagan—a fiercely patriotic, pro-democracy avatar of limited government.
It’s believed that Reagan started
The Notes
collection when he was serving as a spokesperson for General Electric, from 1954 to 1962. Compelled to deliver hundreds of upbeat speeches a year to the Fortune 500 company’s far-flung employees, Reagan devised a pragmatic method of keeping his hour-long public presentations both high-minded and lighthearted. A consummate showman, Reagan always padded salient contemporary political points with a couple of Borscht Belt one-liners followed by a wallop of engraved truth from one of the Founding Fathers. All those optimistic Eisenhower-era speeches focused on the virtues of free-market capitalism over Sovietism. Reagan listened, before and after speeches, to GE workers complain about high taxation and unnecessary regulations. He assimilated many of their sentiments into his own.
The backstory of how
The Notes
were rediscovered in 2010 is endearing. Under the direction of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, the library was getting a face-lift in time for the centennial of her husband’s birth (February 6, 2011). Fifteen million dollars was raised to renovate from top to bottom the 26,000 square feet of the original exhibit space in the museum. Reagan Foundation executive director John Heubusch issued a clear directive: Let’s find some exciting, new artifacts to put on museum display. The foundation’s chief administrative officer and former Reagan aide Joanne Drake launched a hybrid treasure hunt–inventory to uncover hidden heirlooms—no easy task, given the sheer bulk of boxes deposited at the Reagan Library.
One afternoon in the spring of 2010,
The Notes
, published here, were discovered in a cardboard box marked only in pen with “RR’s desk” on its side. There was no label on it. It was randomly stashed among boxes of assorted Reagan memorabilia. What a Eureka moment. Here were the personal belongings Reagan had kept in his office desk right up until his death in 2004. No one but Reagan himself probably ever recognized the historic value of these treasured notes, which he kept among a mass of rubber bands and paperclips. About 95 percent of the Reagan Library archive belongs to the U.S. federal government. The remaining 5 percent of material is the property of the Reagan Foundation. This amazing box of handwritten Reagan leavings—personal property owned by the former president—belongs to the foundation. A decision was soon made by the foundation to publish
The Notes
.
All of
The Notes
were handwritten. When Reagan was recopying various quotations he was especially neat. His scrawl is impeccable—seldom does he employ a cross-out or correct a mis-start. Clearly, legibility was a high priority to him. Sometimes he uses an asterisk or makes a hearty underline for emphasis. Shorthand is often the order of the day. The reader gets the impression that Reagan is a redwood tree and these are the decorations of his own philosophy, the ammunition he will need to survive the hustings ahead.
In addition to admiring the former president’s penmanship, those who analyzed
The Notes
made some preliminary historical assessment. The notes that are published in this volume under the heading “Humor” are one-liners that were maintained in a fat stack of cards with a rubber band around them. They were separate from the rest of the collection. Whenever Reagan heard or invented a joke that he deemed a “keeper,” he’d carefully write it out on a 4-by-6 note card and insert it in this stack. All the other axioms and aphorisms in this volume—all written in his own hand and found under the rubrics “On the Nation,” “On Liberty,” “On War,” “On the People,” “On Religion,” “The World,” “On Character,” and “On Political Theater”—were kept in the plastic sleeves of a black photo album. There was no categorical arrangement of the notecards under headings. I devised that method to make it easier for the reader. This album artifact, the notecards yellowed around the edges, is now on permanent display at the renovated Reagan Library, unveiled as part of the 2011 centennial celebration.
Longtime friends of Reagan’s remember that sometimes when he delivered a speech he’d throw the card of a joke that fell flat or of a nugget of political wisdom that tanked in front of an audience’s ears into a wastepaper basket. What made it into the photo album were his golden oldies, his trench-tested winners, the intellectual ideas of notable others that best reflected his own worldview. At the collection’s core is Reagan’s bedrock belief that freedom and liberty come with the cost of being an alert and well-informed citizen. The collection constitutes a love song to America, the backbone of his most cherished ideas.
Many of the one-liners, jokes, high wisdom, straight talk, and political aphorisms in
The Notes
were delivered at one time or another in a public forum. If Reagan had one artifact that he would have saved were his house on fire, it would probably have been his card-stuffed photo album. Its contents were tools of his trade as GE spokesperson, roast master, California governor, and U.S. president. There are hundreds of Thomas Jefferson quotes, for example, that are regularly offered up by U.S. politicians at rubber-chicken dinners and in stump speeches. What is interesting is why Reagan gravitated toward the handful of Jefferson in this volume. It’s his
choices
that are fascinating.
The reason the Reagan Library calls
The Notes
a Rosetta stone is that the general public can easily deconstruct from this collection Reagan’s own political philosophy. There is a gravitas to the quotes he chose to save in his private album. With the exception of the one-liners, all the collected wisdom in
The Notes
constitutes Reagan’s Greatest Hits. And there are some shockers—who ever thought Reagan would have found anything useful from Mao or Norman Thomas? Even Reagan’s political adversaries in America, like George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Pat Brown, conceded that the Gipper’s great gift was an innate ability to deliver a pitch-perfect joke, put-down, or ice-breaking one-liner on cue. When Robert F. Kennedy debated Reagan in 1967 about the Vietnam War—and Kennedy lost—Kennedy recognized that his rival had honed his gladiatorial routine to utter perfection, with an acute sense of timing, aw-shucks nods, chuckles, and eye rolls. “Reagan,” RFK concluded, “was the toughest debater I ever went up against.”
Part of Reagan’s political success was the shrewd incorporation of the
Bartlett’s Book of Quotations–
like truisms found in this volume. While others thought Reagan was a conservative revolutionary, our fortieth president knew that he was speaking in the same vein as Washington, Lincoln, Paine, and FDR. Books like John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
and Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations
infused Reagan with genuine intellectual excitement, a collected wellspring of acumen.
It’s important for readers to understand that
The Notes
is composed of raw, unedited primary source documents. Reagan, for example, quotes the historian Arnold Toynbee as having written, “Hist. is the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs & thunder of hobnail boots coming.” This quote is, in fact, a paraphrase of Voltaire. But Reagan learned it secondhand from Toynbee; therefore Toynbee receives the attribution. There are a number of examples like this in
The Notes
. Taken collectively, the notes in this book form a raw primary source document.
About 40 percent of
The Notes
published here were written on White House cards. The others were on the personal stationery cards he used as governor of California. It’s thought that others date back to his GE years in the 1950s—survivors from the lecture circuit that he brought with him to his Oval Office desk. Only a handful of the quotes and jokes weren’t handwritten on the 4-by-6 cards. A few rogue ones were penned on irregularly shaped cards, which he clearly scribbled down on the run.
Around the time
The Notes
were discovered in Simi Valley, an archivist also found boxes of handwritten and typed speeches on more cards from Reagan’s years as governor, between 1967 and 1975. An ambitious Reagan historian of the future can write a fine scholarly paper mixing and matching the roles the note cards played in these varied high-profile speeches. Over the years I got to know a lot of old Reagan hands, ranging from Martin Anderson to George Bush, James Baker to Michael Deaver and Paul Laxalt. All of them used to collect good jokes to share with Reagan, as if pursuing a hobby. As speechwriter Aram Bakshian noted, “I used to spend a lot of time writing funny lines in the President’s speeches. Then I’d see them taken out by the President in favor of better lines that he would add.” Those fresh infusions of humor came from his note card collection.
What has become clear to me since I first wrote about Reagan in
The New Yorker
back in 1999 is that the former president had a communications system all his own. He controlled his own game. He was always his own man. The photo album was how he kept his most essential reference material. Because we know Reagan discarded many cards over the decades, we should consider this collection his pruned and manicured game book. It must have been a nice feeling to have Jefferson, Hamilton, and even Thomas Wolfe in your arsenal. For if Reagan is remembered as the Great Communicator, these notes provide the most effective way of decoding how he perfected his craft. As a historical document,
The Notes
showcases Reagan as one of the wittiest residents of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address. It becomes obvious that he found solace from both predecessors and contemporaries who had something memorable to say that reinforced his own Main Street values.
N
OVEMBER 17, 2010
H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS
