Later Ron

‘“DEAR Maggie…”

‘Who are you and why am I here?’

It’s sounds like the opening line to a Bob Dylan song. But more likely those two words were what Ronald Regan wrote so many times.

How deep Ronald Reagan’s special relationship with Margaret Thatcher went, and perhaps still goes in his more lucid moments, we might never know.

Instead, as the Guardian reports, we have to make do with the 5,000 pieces of correspondence the former President of the US of A wrote, and which now make up the book Reagan: A Life In Letters.

Those who lived through the 1980s, when Ronnie “Rayguns” was the most powerful man on earth, may wonder what letter starts this weighty tome.

Is it a Sesame Street-style “Letter G” or a punchier missive to a dry cleaning firm?

As we’ve not read the book we’ll just see what the Guardian picks out.

And we note: “Even in marriage I’ve had a little guilty feeling about sex, as if the whole thing was tinged with evil,” he wrote to a friend.

He writes in another letter how his Star Wars programme was met with disdain by the then Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I did tell Gorbachev that if and when we had such system they would join us in eliminating nuclear missiles; we’d share such a defence with them. I don’t think he believed me.”

We can’t believe that semi-colon! Anyone who thought Reagan was an airhead can thing again. This man had style. And a pen.’

Posted: 22nd, September 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink