Volume 44, Number 20 · December 18, 1997
The Lion King
By Joan Didion
Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
by Dinesh D'Souza
Free Press, 292 pp., $25.00
The aides gave us the details, retold now like runes. Promptly at nine o'clock on most mornings of the eight years he spent as President of the United States, Ronald Reagan arrived in the Oval Office to find on his desk his personal schedule, printed on green stationery and embossed in gold with the presidential seal. Between nine and ten he was briefed, first by his chief of staff and the vice president and then by his national security adviser. At ten, in the absence of a pressing conflict, he was scheduled for downtime, an hour in which he answered selected letters from citizens and clipped items that caught his eye in Human Events and National Review. Other meetings followed, for example with the congressional leadership. 'I soon learned that those meetings lasted just one hour, no more, no less,' Tony Coelho, at the time majority whip in the House, tells us in Recollections of Reagan: A Portrait of Ronald Reagan.[1] 'If the agenda—which he had written out on cards—wasn't completed at the end of the hour, he would excuse himself and leave. If it was finished short of an hour, he would fill the rest of the time with jokes (and he tells a good one).' During some meetings, according to his press secretary, Larry Speakes, the President filled the time by reciting Robert Service's 'The Cremation of Sam McGee.'
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