Never before seen documents, many of them in Ronald Reagan's own handwriting, prove definitively that Reagan himself was the intellectual architect of the prosperity of the 1980s and of the strategy that won the Cold War. During the eight years that Ronald Reagan served as president of the United States, a period of sustained economic prosperity and increased American power on the world stage, many of his advisers claimed authorship of the ideas that comprised 'the Reagan revolution.' The press, in turn, lent credence to the idea that President Reagan was merely a skilled communicator of those ideas, the consummate actor, not the director or producer. Few people realised that Reagan had left a paper trail of original writings that make clear he was the intellectual powerhouse behind his administration's landmark policies. Hidden in archives for more than twenty years, Reagan's pre-presidential writings reveal an active mind wrestling with the problems of a sluggish economy, social pathologies, welfare, reform and the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.
Selected and annotated by three leading scholars, two of whom were among Reagan's principal domestic-policy advisers, these writings unlock the puzzle of the man so many historians have tried to comprehend, with so little success. A publishing landmark, REAGAN, IN HIS OWN HAND will redefine the way we think about American history of the past quarter-century, and about the fortieth American president.