How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life | Peter Robinson

How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life | Peter Robinson | inspiring

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How Ronald Reagan ...

	How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life Peter Robinson Harper, 2003 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 51 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On February 6, 2001, my nine-year-old daughter happened to wander into the room during a television segment marking Ronald Reagan's ninetieth birthday. She watched for a moment. Then she turned to me and asked, "Dad, is that the President you worked for?"

What answer could I give her? How could I make her see? I wanted my daughter to recognize that the world she inhabited was freer and more prosperous because of that old, old man on television. But I also wanted her to grasp my personal debt to him, to understand all that he taught me-how to work and how to relax, how to think and how to use words, how to be a good husband, how to approach life itself...

I needed to tell my children how Ronald Reagan changed my life.

In 1982, as a young man, Peter Robinson was hired as a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. During the six years that followed, he was one of a core group of writers who became informal experts on Reagan, absorbing not just his political positions but his personality, manner, and way of carrying himself And the example Reagan set-as a confident, passionate, principled, generous-spirited older man-molded Robinson's outlook just as he was coming into his own. "Hard work. A good marriage. A certain lightness of touch," he writes. "The longer I studied Ronald Reagan, the more lessons I learned."

At the core of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life are ten of the life lessons Robinson learned from the fortieth President-principles that have guided his own life ever since. But it also offers a warm and unforgettable portrait of a great yet ordinary man who touched the individuals around him as surely as he did his millions of admirers around the world.

Drawing on journal entries from his days at the White House, as well as interviews with those who knew the President best, Robinson etches his portrait with fresh observations, telling detail, and that "certain lightness of touch" that recalls the master himself The result is nothing less than a love story-an account of the profound respect and affection that one young man came to feel for the President who changed his life forever.

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MSchuerer

Superior insight into the mind of Reagan and the lessons he is still teaching all of us.

inspiring

Inspirational words from the Reagan White House speechwriter who wrote the "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech, which was the ammo by which Ronald Reagan defeated Communism without a shot.
In addition to being inspiring, this book paints a good picture of what it's like if your first real job out of college is putting words in the mouth of the leader of the free world.

Outstanding Insight

Wonderfully written book with great insight into one of the greatest men of all time. Insightful look in to the inner workings of the presidency.

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Reagan and Robinson - Model Characters for Lives

Before Christmas of the year Peter Robinson's book on Reagan was published, I bought seven copies to give as gifts to my two sons, as well as to each male member of my extended family. The day before Christmas, while I was at our local bookstore hurriedly acquiring yet another copy for someone I had forgotten, a man beside me was ordering a dozen of Robinson's books to give for Christmas presents. Now, years later, I am back again, buying yet another book for a college-bound student.
Oh, that all our children could have not only Reagan as a role model for living all of life, but also Peter Robinson, whose life, work, and character up to the present time has become even more outstanding over these last few years since he decided to use Reagan as a role model. What a positive impact people like these could have on our heavily sensate, self-absorbed culture.

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Fun but flawed

This is a fun book. Robinson's snapshot of Reagan brings back a lot of the things that many of us, including Democrats, admired about Reagan. Reagan's personality which was charming and opptumistic was such a refreshing change from Carter, Ford, Nixon and Johnson. Here was a President who knew what he thought, and seemed completely genuine when he smiled at his detractors.

Robinson says up front that this book is not a memoir, but an analysis of the many things he learned from Reagan. The book is a memoir however, and you can't help but notice who makes it in the book and who does not.

Robininson's lists four of the "most important speaches of the Reagan presidency," Why four? Maybe because these are the four that he and his friends wrote! Amazing. Robinson manages to leave out Peggy Noonan's contribution to the Reagan speechwriting team entirely. In fact her name does not even appear in the book. Think the Challenger speach and the Normandy speach might have been worth mentioning in lessons learned from Reagan? Apparently Robinson didn't learn a thing from them. Given the fact that Robinson was fresh out of college when he went to work for Reagan, its more than a little strange that more experienced writers were left out of the book.

This book is fun and very readable but if you don't know a thing about Reagan's speeches, don't start with this book.

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