Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
Life at Court
By Joan Didion
What I Saw At the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era Magazine on October 12)
by Peggy Noonan
Random House
Jean Howard's Hollywood: A Photo Memoir
photographs by Jean Howard, text by James Watters
Abrams, 248 pp., $39.95
My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan
by Nancy Reagan, with William Novak
Random House, 384 pp., $21.95
At Reagan's Side
by Helene von Damm
Doubleday, 341 pp., $18.95
Behind the Scenes
by Michael K. Deaver, with Mickey Herskowitz
William Morrow, 272 pp., $17.95
Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches
by Ronald Reagan
Simon and Schuster, 432 pp., $24.95
Ronald Reagan, we are told by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, spent his time off-camera answering some fifty letters a week, selected by the people in charge of his mail operation, from citizens. He put the family pictures these citizens sent him in his pockets and desk drawers. When he did not have the zip code he apologized to his secretary for not looking it up himself. He sharpened his own pencils, we are told by Helene von Damm, his secretary first in Sacramento and then in Washington, and he also got his own coffee.
Review, 5618 words
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