The Gipper Could Write Speeches Too
Ronald Reagan sure had a bright team of writers to draft his unique words, but now we've got proof that the Gipper was pretty good on his own when it came to tuning up those speeches. It's a rare hand-edited text of one of Reagan's most famous and memorable addresses: "The Great Communicator's" 1988 goodbye at the Republican National Convention. Our friend Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Autographs, the auction house of Americana and political memorabilia, says it's the first annotated Reagan speech he's ever seen, and he's including it in his June 16-17 live auction at alexautographs.com. The price could hit $8,000. It appears that some of Reagan's famous lines were among his edits, like why America is great: because it has 200 flavors of ice cream. The edits also reveal the beginnings of Reagan's Alzheimer's: misspellings, misplaced punctuation, and labored handwriting.
Tags: speeches | Ronald Reagan
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Reagan
Reagan was a much more complicated president than people perceive. He did more than merely win the "unwinable" cold war. He pushed against the development of ICBMs in favor of developing technologies that would knock them out of the sky. He called things what they were and did not "nanny-state" his vision of our possibilities. Reagan believed in America and in Americans, in what we can do and in what we should do. He then was able to tell Americans what he was thinking about and what they should think about. He talked in the language of the common man, not in jargon from a conservative textbook. Reagan made conservatism make sense. He knew societies with free enterprise grew; the others shriveled away. Reagan knew wealth was as unlimited as the human mind. He lived at least three whole lives before the Alzheimer's robbery of his final years. Reagan was the kind of guy a nation always needs. I miss him.
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