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Ronald Reagan's Family ValuesWhat the diaries show.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, May 3, 2007, at 9:01 PM ET

In 1987, Ronald Reagan explained to Hugh Sidey of Time magazine why he kept a White House diary:

I've kept a diary from the first day here. And actually, Hugh, the reason for that was one thing I learned after the eight years as governor—that the schedules are such and the succession of things and the meetings—that getting out of that eight-year experience as governor, I suddenly realized that memory—well, there were things that I could remember, but I couldn't tell you whether they were in the first or the second term. And then I realized there were a lot of things that I just could not, if I had to, recall, and it was a very busy eight years there. And so, when faced with this job, Nancy and I both said this time … let's keep a record so that won't happen.

Later this month HarperCollins will publish those diaries, as edited and abridged by Douglas Brinkley. Excerpts published by Vanity Fair are disappointingly sketchy. No wonder they were such little use to the Iran-contra special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, when he tried to determine President Reagan's involvement in his own White House's illegal activities. Reagan was a president whose level of engagement with the world was a mystery even to his own diary.

But sometimes we can glean useful information just by observing what isn't there. In Reagan's case, what's missing is even the smallest expression of affection for his four children. (A fifth died in childbirth.) This is, of course, no great surprise. In his 2003 book, Governor Reagan, Lou Cannon writes,

All felt he cared for them, but they did not think of him as a person in whom they could confide. Maureen Reagan, in some respects the child closest to Ronald Reagan, endured a physically abusive and terrifying first marriage to a police officer without ever telling her father about it even though they were carrying on a lively correspondence about politics. Michael Reagan considered his father "the only adult male I ever trusted" but could not tell him (or his mother [Jane Wyman]) about the oppressive trauma of boyhood molestation by a camp counselor. In 1987, he confided his experience to a sympathetic Nancy Reagan while his father "gazed into the distance." Patti Reagan was unable to tell her father much of anything or to listen to anything he told her. She thought him mysterious. "It was like he came in smoke, and disappeared in smoke," she said.

Judging from what we see in Reagan's diaries—and especially what we don't see—Cannon understated Reagan's detachment from his offspring.

It's not as though Reagan was a reticent man unable to express love. His devotion to his wife Nancy, evident to all in those years, is expressed again and again in the diaries. "Our wedding anniversary," he writes on March 4, 1981. "29 years of more happiness than any man could rightly deserve." The following month, recalling the trauma of being shot and nearly killed by John W. Hinckley Jr., Reagan writes,

I opened my eyes to find Nancy there. I pray I'll never face a day when she isn't there. Of all the ways God has blessed me giving her to me is the greatest and beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.

And his children? "All the kids arrived," Reagan continues, "and the hours ran together in a blur...."

On May 15, 1982, Reagan records a "Long call to Ron" (his son):

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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