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BRIAN LAMB: Lou Cannon, author of the book "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime", what's the Treptow story?

LOU CANNON: Martin Treptow was a hero in World War I. He was killed. They found a diary on him, and he expressed in it his devotion to his country. Ronald Reagan told the story about him in the first inaugural speech when he was originally inaugurated as president. He also said or implied that Treptow was buried at Arlington across the river, which you could see. The inaugural was on the west front of the Capitol. In fact, he knew that Martin Treptow had been buried in Bloomer, Wisconsin, because his aides had pointed it out to him, but Ronald Reagan thought it made a better story to say that Martin Treptow was buried in Arlington.

LAMB: How often did he do things like that?

CANNON: From time to time. I don't know the frequency, but he believed that a story should have a symbolic narrative purpose. There's a story in this book about a columnist who remembered how Ronald Reagan in the film Brother Rat had come in and sat in the drugstore in his hometown of Lexington, Virginia, and he had been telling the story for years. Ronald Reagan leaned over and told the columnist, "I was never in Lexington," and then said that he had been in Hollywood. They had shot his part of the film in Hollywood. The columnist was really mortified that he had gotten this wrong.

LAMB: Was this Charlie McDowell?

CANNON: Charlie McDowell, whom you know, who's sort of the Will Rogers of American columnists -- one of the great columnists, I think. Charlie had said, "Well, how can this be? I've told this story many, many times." Reagan asked him, "How many times did you see the movie?" He'd seen the movie a lot, and Reagan said, "Well, you wanted me to be there. You put me in that. You've seen the movie and you remember me as having been in that town. Don't feel badly about it. I do it all the time myself."

So the fact is Ronald Reagan did do that sort of thing a lot. He didn't lie. He didn't say Treptow is buried in Arlington. He gave the impression to the people who were listening that he was buried there. Really the point that Ronald Reagan was making was that this man had sacrificed for his country and should be remembered and other people have to make sacrifices for their country. The point was really valid. It's just that Ronald Reagan was a performer, an actor. He valued this part of his presidency, and he took dramatic license in his stories.

I tell the McDowell story in response to you asking me to tell the Treptow story because I think it shows that, on some level, Ronald Reagan was much brighter than people like to say he was, that he knew what he did. He understood the power of storytelling. I quote an authority on intelligence in the book as saying that Ronald Reagan made sense of the world narratively. He was not a good analyst. He didn't have a high intelligence in the way scientists and lawyers do -- analytical, logical intelligence -- but he had a great understanding of people and of the power of storytelling. Stories move us. Ronald Reagan knew that. He had the capacity to do that and on some level at least some of the time he knew what it was he did.

LAMB: Where did he get these stories?

CANNON: He got them from everywhere. He got them from newspaper clippings. You know, he had been on the road for General Electric Theater in the '50s. Ronald Reagan was afraid to fly, so he took the train. It was in his contract, in fact, that he wouldn't fly. He would clip out the papers in the little towns across America. In those days, which is 40 years ago, there was a lot more individualism among the American press than there is today. We were just at the beginning of television, and there were a lot of distinctive stories that happened in places that didn't get repeated on every wire service or in every paper in the world. He got the stories from people that he talked to. He has a terrific memory for anecdote and story. He remembered stories from his youth and refashioned them. He had been a sportscaster, and his specialty as a sports announcer was in recreating baseball games, which means describing a game that he never saw from information that had come over the telegraph. So he invented stories, he retold stories, he recast stories, he remembered stories and he read stories.

LAMB: At some point in your book, you talk about how the staff liked to keep Human Events away from him. What is it by the way?

CANNON: Well, you characterize Human Events. Human Events is an ultra-conservative Washington weekly, and there were members of Reagan's staff who felt that it brought out his doctrinaire or ideological impulses. Ronald Reagan can be extremely naive in some ways. That is to say he believes what he reads in the newspapers -- not just what he reads in Human Events. He believes what he reads in the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Des Moines Register, and he is apt to take it literally. He would sometimes repeat a statistic that either was wrong or the staff thought was wrong, so they tried to keep it from him so that he wouldn't spout some point of view that may or may not, in the staff's opinion, have been backed by fact.

LAMB: This is the third book you've written about Ronald Reagan.

CANNON: About Ronald Reagan. Well, I always said I was going to keep writing about Reagan till I got it right. I don't know whether I did, but I tried.

LAMB: You first met him in 1965. Where?

CANNON: I can't remember the small town in California. It might have been Sacramento, but I think it was a smaller town. He was going around the state giving little speeches. The speeches were the brainchild of his management team of Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts. Reagan at that time was planning on running for governor and the Democrats thought he would be such a weak opponent they wanted to get him nominated. Reagan was going around the state giving these speeches to show he that was not just an actor reciting his lines. Typically, he would give a very short speech saying what his views were -- a lot of generalities and not much of anything really -- but then he would answer questions. The purpose of these forums were to show that he, in fact, could answer questions, that he wasn't just a person who could not function without a script.

LAMB: Over the years, how many times have you been with him one-on-one, only two people in the room?

CANNON: With only people in the room is hard because sometimes there would be a press secretary. But when I've just been interviewing him? Forty, 45 times -- maybe 50 times.

LAMB: Has he changed at all during those years?

CANNON: The only change that I recognize in Ronald Reagan is in his hearing. His hearing is not good now. Even with hearing aids, he doesn't hear well, and in '65 he heard perfectly well. Has he changed in other ways? Has he changed in the core way he is? No, I think there's some way in which Ronald Reagan never changes. He has a way he makes sense of the world.

In my last book on him, I reprinted part of a speech he gave for Hubert Humphrey when Hubert Humphrey was running for the Senate. You listened to the speech or you read it -- I actually had a tape of it -- and it was the same Reagan. It had the same sort of goofy statistics. He never met a statistic he didn't like. He had a 90-year-old carpenter he was quoting, and he had this kind of nice, sort of rounded story. He liked happy endings. He liked stories that made a point. There's some way in which Ronald Reagan is always Ronald Reagan whether he was Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative.

No, I don't think he's changed. Nancy Reagan, by the way, once was at one of the national political conventions and she was asked by a publisher whether Ronald Reagan had changed at all, and she said, "He hasn't changed one bit." She turned to me and she said, "Right, Lou?" I said, "That's the way I see it." Then they asked her the question, and she said -- which I also agree with -- that she'd changed a lot.

LAMB: Lyn Nofziger, who used to work for Ronald Reagan -- I assume you know him fairly well --

CANNON: Yes.

LAMB: -- wrote a review of your book in the Washington Times. Let me just read a little bit of what he said here. He said, "Although the title and early pages of the book suggest that Mr. Reagan was merely an actor starring in the role of president, Mr. Cannon eventually and almost reluctantly finds that that is a serious oversimplification of what this complex and puzzling man is all about." Do you agree with that "reluctantly" finding that out?

CANNON: Well, there's no reluctance on it. I thought that Lyn's review, considering that he's totally devoted to Ronald Reagan and is very conservative, was very fair and very kind to me even and I appreciate it. But I had something different in mind about Reagan the performer, and I had something different in mind as a title here. "The Role of a Lifetime" is the subtitle of this book. Ronald Reagan valued acting. I understand why Lyn wrote those words because usually the jibe that Reagan was only an actor or was a B-movie actor or one of these things was said to run him down, that, as if somehow being an actor, he was not worthy of being a politician or certainly of being a president.

Reagan was portrayed in his very first campaign as a guy who couldn't hold his own with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo. The point that I was trying to make, both with the title and in the book, is that Ronald Reagan is a person who values the performance and who thinks of himself as a performer. After he was elected governor, he was asked what kind of a governor he would make. He said, "I don't know. I've never played a governor." When he left the White House, he was asked about how acting had helped him be president and he said, "I don't understand how anybody could do this job without having been an actor." So Ronald Reagan didn't run away from the fact that he was an actor. He was proud of it.

It somewhat distorted his presidency, I think, in the sense that what he did best and valued most was the performance aspect of the presidency -- what Theodore Roosevelt had referred to as the "bully pulpit" part of the presidency. I happen to think that is an important part of the presidency. Reagan believed that his immediate predecessors, President Carter and President Ford, had not been particularly skilled in that aspect of the presidency. I agree with that, too, but I don't agree with the idea that the performance aspect of the presidency is so dominant that it should drive out other parts of the presidency the way that it did during many of the Reagan years.

But in the sense that that review was discussing it, the canard that Reagan was only an actor or merely an actor, I don't see, by the way. The acting profession seems to me as respectable as the professions from which most conventional politicians are drawn -- the law, journalism, you name it. But the sense in which Reagan is run down as an actor is that he is speaking somebody else's lines, that somebody else prepares the script. As I say in there -- and it's not reluctant at all -- it was a script of his own devising. He came to the presidency wanting to do essentially three things -- cut taxes, raise the military budget spending, which he thought had gone way down since the Vietnam years, and also balance the budget.

Now, he accomplished the first two, and he didn't accomplish the third because of the first two, in my view. No economist has yet explained to me how you can cut taxes and significantly boost military spending and not come out with a huge deficit, which is what he did.

LAMB: You met him in '65. What were you doing then?

CANNON: I was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News.

LAMB: Where did you grow up?

CANNON: I grew up largely in Nevada. I grew up in Reno and Fallon, Nevada, and I spent many of my summers on a farm that's now under water from a lake in California. I've always sort of considered myself a Westerner. I went to school in Nevada and California.

LAMB: Where did you go to college?

CANNON: University of Nevada. It was then just the University of Nevada. Now it's University of Nevada, Reno, and also briefly, before I went into the service, San Francisco State.

LAMB: Where did you get interested in journalism?

CANNON: I've been interested in journalism all my life. When I was a kid, I remember we played football games on the farm. I must been all of seven or eight, and I'd go and I'd write a story of the game. I've always wanted to be a reporter. I don't know why.

LAMB: No idea where it came from?

CANNON: I have absolutely no idea. I was editor of my high school paper. I started out as a sportswriter. I used to write sports for the local paper in Reno when I was still in high school.

LAMB: Your family -- what did your mother and father do?

CANNON: My father was a nomadic character. His family had come from Ireland. They were farmers. His mother died giving birth to him. He was largely raised by his sisters, and he took off at an early age and he went all over the West. He worked in a lumbermill and did all kinds of things. His father had been a stage driver over Donner Pass. He went east and he married my mother. Her family was from Hungary, and they came back out west and they grew up in Reno. They ran a store together. My father went back later in life and farmed . He was a classic case of you could get the boy off the farm but you couldn't get the farm out of the boy. I know we don't do commercials on C-SPAN, but he was a heavy smoker and he died of emphysema far too young in life.

LAMB: I want to get back to it but there's also a lot of talk in your book about your father being an alcoholic as was Ronald Reagan's father.

CANNON: There's not a lot of talk of it. I put it in a footnote. My father was named Jack, as was Reagan's father. He was an Irish American, as was Reagan's father. I think since I pay a lot of attention to the influence that this had on Reagan, it seemed to me that a biographer owes it to his readers to say, "Hey, maybe I'm interested in this because I had a similar circumstance." Actually, I've always thought it gave me some empathy to Reagan, and maybe it did. It's sort of a truth-in-advertising label. I think that people should know where their biographers or where their reporters are coming from.

LAMB: When you got out of college, where did you go?

CANNON: I was actually drafted during the Korean War. I went into the Army. I never got to Korea, although I volunteered for it, but probably very fortunately for me I didn't get there. Then when I got out of the Army, I sort of bummed around. I drove a truck for a while. I did different things. I worked in a political campaign, but I really had this view that I ought to be a reporter and that I ought to write books. I've always wanted to do that, and I went into some little paper in Northern California. They gave a story test. Remember they used to be those things? Facts in scrambled order. I was able to put them into good order and since I didn't have much experience, they could hire me very cheaply. That was always a great premium at newspapers in those days, and so I got the job.

LAMB: When did you get to the San Jose Mercury-News?

CANNON: The story I'm telling you was in the mid-'50s. I guess I went to work for the San Jose Mercury after working for two or three other papers in the early 1960s.

LAMB: And how long did you stay there?

CANNON: Well, I stayed there really until I came to Washington in 1969. I came back to Washington for what was then Ridder publications. They merged several years later with the Knight newspaper organization. Knight-Ridder is now, as many of your viewers will know, one of the large newspapers chains in the United States.

LAMB: The three books you've written about Ronald Reagan -- the first one was what year?

CANNON: The first one was written in '68. I guess it was published in '69. It was called Ronnie and Jesse: A Political Odyssey. It was about Reagan and Jesse Unruh, this larger-than-life character, unfortunately now dead. Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh was the most powerful Democrat in California. The second book about Reagan I wrote was when I was working for the Washington Post and right after he became president. It was published in 1982. It was called Reagan, a title that a friend of mine in the White House said, "Good. It's so simple, even he'll remember it." And no subtitle. This is the last book. I've been working on it for some time.

LAMB: When did you start working on this?

CANNON: Well, in terms of the actual working on the book, the day after he left the presidency. I was one of the small cadre of correspondents who flew out with him to California, got off the plane, and spent the next two years on the book. But, actually, I had been doing interviews on this book going back into the '80s. Different groups of people, for instance, would leave the White House at the end of the first term. I tried to interview them then because I knew that after four or five years, they would remember things differently. So, I had done a lot of the interviewing before, but I actually wrote it over a two-year period. I started writing in June of '89, and I guess I finished November of last year.

LAMB: Nine hundred and forty-eight pages long, $24.95 at the bookstore, published by Simon and Schuster. What was your reaction when right in the middle of your book coming out, the Kitty Kelly book hit and got all that publicity?

CANNON: Well, since it's the same publisher and since the publisher had said they were going to publish it in May, my reaction wasn't very positive. I guess you're asking me about the production of this book. I've already done my anti-cigarette commercial. I ought to do the one positive commercial which is my wife Mary did the research for this book, which has 1,950 notes and an extensive bibliography. It was really a joint project. If she hadn't have done it, this book wouldn't be done and I wouldn't be sitting here.

LAMB: But back to the other question about Kitty Kelly. Does it irritate you? Yours is a very serious, in-depth look at Ronald Reagan. She writes this book that has a lot of the -- first of all, what was your reaction to the book?

CANNON: You know, you can only read so many books. I read the acknowledgements of Kitty Kelly's book, and it lists me as one of the sources. The implication is that she interviewed me. She thanks these people who shared stories with her. I never shared any story with her. I gave a speech to a group of journalists in which she came and she tape-recorded the speech. Now, that's not what we call an interview. So if you have that sort of fraud at the core, how do you then believe? I mean, if I were to do those sort of things, I'd be fired. Most people would be, you know. So I didn't take seriously the stories I've read and, of course, the news accounts, of the book.

When Ronald Reagan did the cigarette commercial for Chesterfield, they had to paint the cigarette in. Now, some people have criticized Ronald Reagan for taking money for a product that he didn't use and particularly a product that is as unhealthy as that one. But one thing you can be darn sure of is that Ronald Reagan didn't smoke anything -- marijuana, tobacco. Anybody who knows him, whether they like him or think he's terrible, will tell you the same thing. I just didn't take the book seriously. You have to ask yourself, over a period of time, how will that book or this book or other books be viewed? The National Enquirer attracts a lot of attention, too. That doesn't necessarily mean that it has historical validity.

LAMB: One more question on that, and we'll go back to your book. Has it helped or hurt you in talking about this man at this time and the fact that that book came out with a splash in the front pages of the papers for all the reasons that it got the splash -- how has it affected, do you think, the treatment of your book at this time?

CANNON: Well, I think it's clearly hurt me in the sense that I'm answering questions as I am now, Brian, about her book rather than my own. Most shows aren't like C-SPAN. They don't have an hour to talk about a subject. If you're talking about that subject and you have five minutes or three minutes -- 90 seconds can be a long time on television -- that's harmful. Over an extended period of time, we have to see.

LAMB: By the way, for our audience, this is a two-hour presentation separated into two different hours, and this is part one if they've just joined us. I want to make sure that they know because they're going to see your face on this network more than normal on a "Booknotes" program. Let me go back to page 97 of your book. "The source of Reagan's inspiration was less the Constitution than the movies."

CANNON: Well, I think that's right.

LAMB: What does that mean? Just kind of overall philosophy. I know it's tough to pick out a sentence in the book. But in other words, were the movies more important to him and how he, as you say here, "played his role" than the Constitution was?

CANNON: It doesn't mean that he valued Hollywood more than he valued the Constitution of the United States. It means that the stories that he told and the way he viewed America was very much based in Hollywood where he had spent, in the title of a great film, the best years of his life. He was grounded in movie stories, movie lore.

There are many stories in this book where he tells stories which he thinks happened in fact, which, in fact, happened in a movie -- the famous story about the B-17 pilot who rides the plane down with his wounded gunner, various other stories. He has this story from the Spanish Civil War -- we think it's from the Spanish Civil War, but I don't know that I ever pinned it down -- but the story where Americans come in and the fact that they're Americans is especially wonderful and he tells the story. He has these images in his mind's eye of the flags and the bands playing. I don't think there's anything particularly sinister in that. Hollywood, when Reagan was a part of it, was a reflection of American values. It was the leading exponent of American mass culture.

People went to the movies in the 1930s and the 1940s. Reagan was cast as a handsome, Midwestern hero playing the heartwarming role, to paraphrase Garry Wills, of himself. I don't think it's surprising since he was in Hollywood from the time he was 26 years old to the time he was in his mid-50s that he would draw his stories from where he lived and from the craft that he practiced.

LAMB: You write a lot about either the 3-by-5 or the 4-by-6 card.

CANNON: They started out as 3-by-5's and became 4-by-6.

LAMB: Why?

CANNON: I'm not sure exactly. I suspect it was more of a function of his eyesight. From the time of his childhood, he had a little problem with sight. He was nearsighted. I don't know how that affected him on the cards, but he also had a great developed shorthand where he could compress almost the whole of a speech, this sort of basic speech he had, that was often just called "The Speech." He would write it out. I've looked at those cards in the Hoover archives, some of his early, early cards, and you would see that he would get almost a whole speech on the card. I think he could get more on a 4-by-6, obviously, than he could get on a 3-by-5.

LAMB: Those cards made a lot of people mad.

CANNON: I don't think the cards made people mad. I think what upset people, after they got to know him -- congressmen are good examples. Congressmen who had known him for several years -- not their first meeting but who had maybe been at the White House a dozen times or the leadership many more times -- and here the President is reading to them from cards. That annoyed them because they thought he should be talking to them the way we're talking, without notes.
They also felt, I think, that he was too much a captive of those cards. I think Don Regan said that in the book, but other people have said it to me, they were a device for him. They were a comfort mechanism for him. They were like a cane is for some people or some prop that somebody uses that they feel comfortable with. They were security for him. I think he overused them, particularly in the last years of his presidency.

On the other hand, I've seen Reagan very effective without notes. I don't know if I tell the story in this book or in my last one, but I remember one time -- I think it was in Florida -- where he was speaking outdoors and the wind came up and it blew all the cards around. He has to pick them up and they're all in different order. Reagan, who had a good self-deprecating sense of humor, said, "It doesn't really matter what order these are in anyway," and essentially gave the speech without his cards.

LAMB: If you had to list the three or four main defining moments in his presidency, what would they be?

CANNON: I think one of them was clearly the assassination attempt. This occurs on March 30 [1981]. He's like 40 days into his presidency, and all at once he's wounded, and America sees this rather gallant man quipping, telling stories, using one-liners that would have seemed, I think, artificial in many circumstances, except this is a person who could have died from this wound. We found out later that it missed his aorta by this much. I mean, it was a very, very serious wound. Doctors have told me that many people never really recover fully from gunshot wounds, and here this man is well advanced in life. At this point, he's just had his 70th birthday and he bounces back in a hurry. But I think that he became a mythic figure in America when he was quipping to the doctors, "I hope you're all Republicans" and those kinds of lines. I think that was a defining moment in his presidency.

I think that another moment that was very important to him -- I don't remember what day that was -- was when Congress finally got these tax and budget bills passed in that first year of his presidency. Dick Wirthlin, who was his pollster and had done a lot of polls, showed that what people particularly liked about Reagan was that he was getting stuff through Congress. There had been a long period where Congress and the presidency had been stalemated. Most Americans are not partisans. They like to see their government work. And here, paradoxically, under a person who denounced government, the government seemed to be working.

There are a lot of other moments in the Reagan presidency that are worth something. I'll just give you two or three which are quite removed. One is him standing in Berlin in front of that wall and saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall," which is a speech that still kind of gives me a goosebump when I hear it. Another was Ronald Reagan in Red Square where it seemed to me the mere fact of him being in Red Square -- him and Gorbachev walking together, even though they both had their own propaganda impulses of this meeting -- was a signal to the world. "Hey, this Cold War is really over."

Another, and a darker one, I think, was Ronald Reagan in that speech he gave in November of '86, soon after the mid-term elections, where he's explaining what happened -- or thinks he is -- in the Iran-Contra affair, and he is so unbelievable. I mean, he's telling stories that turn out to be totally untrue, and you see a different kind of Ronald Reagan. People always believe Reagan. He's telling these stories and he's essentially unbelievable, as every poll said. People who had always trusted Reagan said, "Hey, this guy's lying to me." That was a new experience for Ronald Reagan -- not being criticized. He took many positions that a majority of Americans didn't agree with. The Contras, for one. There was never a poll that showed a majority of Americans supported the Contras. That's fine. You go through life and you're disagreed with. But people believed Reagan. There was another news conference right after that. I remember the speech. I was actually in my hometown of Reno when that speech was given, for a reason I don't remember. I remember watching that speech on television and saying, "I've never seen him look that bad."

LAMB: Let me ask you about some other incidents. I know you write about a bunch of them. Bitburg -- How did that happen?

CANNON: Bitburg was a demonstration of a lot of elements in the Reagan administration that were important to him. The story that I wrote that caused the most anxiety among the Reagan staff of any story I ever wrote about Reagan as governor, president or campaigner was the story where he had told at two different times how he had photographed Nazi death camps after World War II. Of course, he had not been out of the country during World War II. He told one of these stories to Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, and he told it again to Yitzhak Shamir.

Now, they deny, to this day -- Reagan wrote me a letter, Jim Baker called me. But the fact is you have two highly intelligent people and these two stories occurred five months apart. It took me a long time. It was well after the event when I heard about it and longer than that when I was able to prove it. I think it's statistically remote that two people who were in totally different meetings would remember these stories. I go back to that because I don't think that Ronald Reagan was consciously lying when he said those things. I think he was caught up in his story. He actually impressed Shamir, particularly, so deeply that he cared so much about the Holocaust. Now I think Reagan did care about the Holocaust. I think that there's nobody who's occupied that office who felt more deeply that the world had abandoned the Jews. He had seen newsreels -- that's what he had confused -- when he was in the what was then the Army Air Corps during World War II, the newsreels of the camps after the Allies had liberated them. That was a living memory to him if you can have a memory of something that you have not experienced. I think that most people who talked to him about the Holocaust knew how deeply he felt about it. I think for him to agree to Bitburg, in a way, cast a pall over his presidency that is particularly unfortunate for this president who felt so deeply about the sufferings of the Jewish people.

LAMB: In the event that some of our audience have never heard of the Bitburg story, could you just give us a brief summary.

CANNON: What basically happened was that Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, who had attended some French-German reconciliation ceremony with [Francois] Mitterrand at a cemetery where the World War I French and German dead were both buried, asked him to come to Germany and celebrate a similar event in a cemetery where German soldiers and American soldiers were buried from World War II. The problem was that there weren't any such cemeteries. They were buried separately, and in all of the German cemeteries, there were also not just soldiers from the German army, the Wehrmacht, there were also SS soldiers. That was done deliberately. They had scattered the SS soldiers around so there wouldn't be one cemetery that was just of the SS. So Reagan wound up sort of casually agreeing to go to Germany for a similar ceremony where there couldn't be a similar ceremony. He wound up showing up at this cemetery which had been a tank staging area for the Battle of the Bulge and in which there were SS soldiers, some of whom had murdered Americans, were being honored.

Now, Reagan could have gotten out of it. He would have gotten out of it if he had probably had a more skillful chief of staff than Don Regan, but he's a stubborn man. He had agreed to go to Bitburg. He had agreed with Kohl, and once Reagan gives you his word, he tries to keep his word. I mean, many black people in this country think Ronald Reagan signaled that he was a racist because he started his '80 campaign by going to Neshoba, Miss. It's the Mississippi state fair, but it's also where three civil rights workers were killed. Reagan went there because he had given Trent Lott, then a congressman and now senator from Mississippi, his word that he would go. He didn't go there because he wanted to advertise that he identified with the darkest elements in Mississippi's history.

He said on that occasion -- in fact to his pollster -- something about once you've made a booking, you shouldn't cancel it or something. That was the same thing that was at play in Bitburg. He had told Kohl he would go. Sometimes Ronald Reagan could see the big picture better than anybody in the world. He could see a distance, he could see across the room. Other times, he couldn't see at all and to not go back on what was a promise that he was going to visit you, he would do something that sent the wrong signal. Now, no Bitburg story, I think, should be complete without saying the same day he laid this wreath in Bitburg it was a most uncomfortable ceremony, by that time, for Ronald Reagan and everybody else; Nancy Reagan had not wanted him to go and a lot of his staff people hadn't wanted him to go -- that he also spoke at Bergen-Belsen, giving one of the most moving tributes to the victims of the Holocaust that has ever been given by any American political leader, certainly. So you often saw the worst.

As Tip O'Neill said on another day when the Challenger had gone down -- Tip had had a big quarrel with him that morning in front of a lot of other congressmen because Reagan had started in about how some of the unemployed were people who didn't want to work. Tip got angry and said, "You've been telling that story for years. I'm talking about people who were thrown out of work in the steel mills. They're not welfare cheats." Then later in the day you had the Challenger disaster and Reagan gave that speech, and Tip O'Neill wrote that he'd seen the best and worst of Ronald Reagan in one day. I think that was true. I think that was also true the day of Bitburg. I think you often did see Ronald Reagan best and worst close together, and I think that Ronald Reagan's gifts often rescued Reagan from himself, as they did on this particular day.

LAMB: Lou Cannon, the book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime is one of many books that have been written about this man, as you know, because you talk a lot in your book about other books. How come you did that so much? You mentioned the George Will books or the columns and you talked a lot about Garry Wills and Bill Niskanen and many others, Martin Anderson.

CANNON: Because I think that one of the duties of a biographer is to examine the contemporaneous record. Part of that record is in the books, the so-called kiss-and-tell books. I like Ken Adelman who wrote a very good book about that administration. I like his phrase of "kick and tell" even better. There is in books by David Stockman and by Don Regan and Niskanen, and especially I would say by Marty Anderson, a lot of rich material from people who either had felt close to Reagan and were estranged from him, as was the case in Stockman and Regan, or who remain essentially loyal to him, as is the case with Anderson. I think that Reagan did not inspire the kind of lasting loyalty from people that some presidents did.

There are obvious exceptions to that. You started this program by quoting from Lyn Nofziger and Lyn Nofziger is a conspicuous exception to that. Reagan kept himself to himself. On one level, he was always the most mannerly and courteous of men. He treated people well, the people who worked for him -- the secretaries, the people who guarded him. He was never imperious. He never threw his weight around. He was never demanding. But he also didn't give of himself. He kept apart. Different people who've worked for him have described that it was like he'd seen so many different directors, been in different casts, been in so many movies that it was like he didn't form lasting attachments.

I think Marty Anderson, among others, have said that when he left and came back -- he was sort of forced aside in a political power struggle and returned -- that it was like Reagan didn't know that he'd been gone. So unless you had a lot of self security on your own, unless you had a lot of confidence in yourself and didn't need the approval of the sun king here, you became after a while disenchanted. What you see running through these kiss-and-tell books, is sort of a disenchantment with Reagan, I think partly because the people involved never really felt that he took them to him. Somebody asked me just the other day did I like Reagan. I said, "Yes, I liked him well enough." This person knows Reagan very well and said, "I don't dislike him, but to like somebody, he has to be a person who extends to you some kind of friendship." And Reagan didn't do that. He was the friend of the American people. He had a bond with the people. But up close, if you formed an attachment to Reagan, it was often one way. That was harder for some of these personalities.

It's often said that they wrote all these books just because there's so much money, that they got such huge sums. I'm sure that has something to do with it in the case of some of the books, but I don't think that that's the real story. I think the real story is that they didn't feel the kind of loyalty that you often see. People like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter produced a kind of a personal loyalty, personal attachment of people that, with some conspicuous exceptions, didn't last in the Reagan case.

LAMB: This sounds like a leading question, but I don't think it is. Did anybody else in the United States follow Ronald Reagan as closely as you?

CANNON: I don't know the answer to that question. There are a lot of reporters who followed Reagan for a very, very long time. One that comes to mind is my friend, George Skelton at the Los Angeles Times. I don't think there's been anybody who set out to define him at different stages of his career as I did. It would be great to say that I saw all this in the late '60s, but I didn't understand Ronald Reagan. I wanted to write about him and I thought that writing about him and Jesse Unruh was a wonderful way. You could do a dual biography.

Then as he continued in public life, I still felt I didn't understand him. I call this book the third book in an unintended trilogy, and that's really right. I never set out to write three books about him, but I found that there was more to Ronald Reagan than the surface, that beneath the surface you had a rather complicated character and a guy who wasn't quite what either his fans or his critics thought. He was a little sharper than his critics thought. He knew more, he saw further. But he had great gaps in his knowledge and great lapses that his fans didn't see. My effort in these books, and particularly this book, is to try to get beyond this and get some kind of a coherent whole. I think that the reason I'm unique in this, if I am, is that once I got started, I couldn't stop because I didn't think I had really done the job, even though both of my first two books were very well reviewed and I felt good about those books. I felt there was still more to Ronald Reagan that I wanted to tell.

LAMB: Lots of people that were around him are written about in your book. Of all those people who you remember, who had the most impact on him, besides his wife?

CANNON: Probably Mike Deaver. I think Mike Deaver had much impact on Reagan because he understood him in personal terms. It was often said that Mike Deaver was like a son to Reagan. Well, Reagan was kind of distant with his sons sometimes, too, but I think Deaver was sort of dismissed in this town. It's odd that I use that word because Deaver was considered to be a media meister, it was often said. But I think he was dismissed as sort of a glorified valet to Reagan, sort of the retainer. But I think he actually had influence on him and got very close to him and understood Reagan. He certainly understood Nancy. But I think there were also issues -- we didn't know about that until Deaver wrote his own book -- like the bombing of Beirut which outraged Reagan and which outraged Deaver. I think Deaver was influential with him.

I think that a lot of different people were influential with Reagan, however, in their own specialties because Reagan tended to rely -- I would argue too much -- on experts in some areas. I think George Shultz was influential with him on some things. Cap Weinberger was certainly influential with him. Ed Meese, Jim Baker, even though Baker wasn't as close to Reagan, personally, as these other people. It's hard to just say here is one person. There is no Harry Hopkins, who was FDR's great adviser. There's no Harry Hopkins in the Reagan administration.

LAMB: Which feud was the most interesting to you? Like the Shultz-Weinberger?

CANNON: Shultz and Weinberger, by far, because these were two people of genuine accomplishment. They both had Reagan's ear and they were both distrusted by different groups of people within the Reagan administration. Reagan once quipped at a Gridiron Dinner, I think it was, that the trouble with his administration is that sometimes the right hand doesn't know what the far right hand is doing. There was a lot of truth to that jest. There were the people who considered themselves the militant guardians of the conservative flame, who thought that people like George Shultz and Jim Baker, who would by any standard of normal political measurement be considered quite conservative, were dangerously moderate or liberal.

The moderates, the pragmatists as they were often called during the Reagan administration, many of them thought that right wingers, as they called them, were sort of raving, dangerous people. So in this context you had Weinberger and Shultz who didn't like each other. It went back way back. It goes back, according to Frank Carlucci who worked with both of them, to when they were both in the Office of Budget, which it then was, in the Nixon administration. They had a personal dislike. They're just temperamentally opposite. Cap's a lawyer who is adversarial. George is an economics professor. The significance of their feud within the Reagan Administration went way beyond their personalities. They were often on opposite sides of the fence, and they were successful in blocking the advocacies of others. Reagan's great fault, I think, as a president, which goes back to his childhood of wanting harmony of this situation where he did have a home with an alcoholic father, Reagan craved harmony. He didn't like disharmony. If you and I were arguing together and we were on equal footing, which Weinberger and Shultz were, Reagan would want to give each of us something. He wouldn't want the dispute to end with you winning or me winning, and so the conflict between Shultz and Weinberger produced frequently a sort of paralysis within the Reagan administration.

LAMB: We're going to talk a lot more about people in the second part of this two-part series, but I want to show our audience the book. Our guest has been Lou Cannon, author of "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime". Thank you for joining us.

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President Reagan: A Role of a Lifetime