The Reagan Diaries

Reagan's 1981-89 presidential diaries — daily presidential record

Tradition: American conservatism

Reagan's 1981-89 presidential diaries

The Reagan Diaries (2007), edited by Douglas Brinkley, are Ronald Reagan's (1911-2004) daily presidential diary entries across his entire 1981-89 presidency — the single most complete contemporaneous record of an American presidency from the president's own hand. Reagan kept the diary by hand in five 8.5x11-inch leather-bound journals, writing nearly every evening throughout his eight years in office and occasionally during travel; the entries are typically short — a paragraph or two — and run from the inauguration on January 20, 1981 through his last presidential day on January 20, 1989. The diaries record the daily texture of the Reagan presidency: the 1981 assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. (and Reagan's later recovery and reflection); economic-policy decisions (Reaganomics, the tax cuts, the 1982-83 recession, the recovery); Cold-War-strategic decisions (the SDI announcement, the Pershing-II and Soviet-INF crisis, the 1983 Korean Airlines downing, the 1983 Beirut Marine-barracks bombing, the four summits with Gorbachev culminating in the INF Treaty of 1987); domestic-political decisions (Supreme Court appointments, the air-traffic-controllers strike, the Iran-Contra crisis); and personal-family-religious dimensions (the relationship with Nancy Reagan, his children, his Disciples-of-Christ Christian faith, the death of close associates). The publication of the diaries — by edition of Douglas Brinkley, with the cooperation of Nancy Reagan and the Reagan Presidential Library — significantly altered the historical-scholarly assessment of Reagan. The diaries showed a Reagan more substantively engaged with policy detail, more thoughtful in his decision-making process, and more theologically-philosophically reflective than the 'amiable dunce' caricature of his hostile critics had supposed. The diaries are now among the most-consulted primary sources for late-Cold-War-American political history and constitute, alongside Reagan's earlier An American Life (1990) autobiography, the essential Reagan-source-corpus.