Ronald Reagan's Family ValuesWhat the diaries show.

(Continued from page 2)

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Another beautiful day. Called Bill Bennet [Secretary of Education William Bennett]—just back from Europe. Told him I was sure some one had apprised him of our son Ron's article on aids in People mag.

Actually, this was an article about Ron Jr.'s participation in an AIDS education film.

Ron gave both of us h—l.

That's "hell" (Reagan couldn't bring himself to write the full word), and it's true. "I can call my dad up anytime and say whatever I want to him—and I do," Ron Jr. had told People. "He's gotten a lot of flak from me on this issue." The president's son had also been somewhat condescending, though probably accurate, in describing his father's reaction to his friend Rock Hudson's death from AIDS two years earlier. "My father has the sort of psychology where he grasps on to the single anecdote better than the broad wash of a problem," he'd said. "So when it's a particular name he knows, suddenly the problem crystallizes." Toward Bennett, who at the time favored restricting AIDS education in schools, Ron Jr. had been less polite: "Those who exploit this issue for their own personal ideological agendas lack all conscience." (He may have had in mind Bennett's quote six months earlier in the New York Times: ''With AIDS, harsh nature becomes the unwitting ally of responsible morality.'')

He can be stubborn on a couple of issues & won't listen to anyone's argument. Bill volunteered to have a talk with him. I hope it can be worked out.

Why Bennett? Probably because, having been a Democrat when Reagan first appointed him (to run the National Endowment for the Humanities), and now harboring visible ambitions to rise higher within the GOP, Bennett is exceptionally eager to please. The more immediate question, though, is: Why not Reagan himself?

We have just reviewed every statement in the Vanity Fair excerpt touching on Ronald Reagan's children. There is no mention of his grandson Cameron or granddaughter Ashley, both children of Michael Reagan, even though Ashley was born during his presidency and Cameron three years before it began. (In a 1983 letter to Cameron, then nearly 5, thanking him for sending a birthday card, the president wrote, "Would you please tell your mother and father I received their card. …[i]t will save me having to write another letter.") Perhaps there is more in the book, or in the unabridged diaries, to be published sometime in the future. Obviously Ronald Reagan had troubled relationships with his adult children, as parents often do. To some extent they defined their lives in opposition to his. Patti Davis published a family roman a clef and posed for Playboy; Ron Reagan Jr. gave a speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. But when Ronald Reagan died, his children had a lot more to say about him than the evidence we have now suggests he ever had to say about them.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

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