Ronald Reagan Remembered [With DVD]

In the wake of Reagan's death, many people jumped at the opportunity to define the former president and his impact on the 20th century. Among the commentators in this collection of editorials, obituaries and speeches by and about ""the great communicator"" are CBS correspondents Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace and Bob Schieffer. While eloquent, they often echo dispassionately what has been said many times over about Reagan. Stahl muses that Reagan's appeal to the American people was as inexplicable as a love affair, and Rather notes that, in the 1980s, ""the nation... bore the unmistakable imprimatur of Ronald Reagan."" Schieffer, meanwhile, suggests Reagan as a model for elevating present-day political discourse. What rescues this book from the ubiquitous editorial condescension and abstraction of these essays are daughter Patti's farewell to her father, written for People days before his death, and the eulogy offered at the National Cathedral by Reagan's more plain-spoken vice-president, George H. W. Bush. Most extraordinary, however, are Reagan's speeches, which serve as historical markers of his political career and as primers for nascent political speechwriters. Reagan's 1964 endorsement of Barry Goldwater emerges as the book's centerpiece. The speech, both ideological and prescient, leaps off the page as the blueprint for Reagan's political philosophy and future presidential agenda, as he turns up the rhetoric on communism and what he perceived as ""the welfare state."" The book succeeds as a scrapbook of these legendary moments, which are captured both in text, in the color photos interspersed throughout and in the accompanying DVD.