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Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.

I'm not a social friend of the Reagans. That's by their choice and by mine. They don't drink enough.

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.