Message to Lou Cannon

Lou,

Thanks so much for your comments, both on and off the record. I was out of town last week, fishing with my dad. Thanks for your follow-up message this week, even though you had no response to your first message.

Thank you for your advice about notes and sources. The book needs an index, and I wish it had one. As for the notes and bibliography, the existing documentation does accurately reflect the research I did for the book. I started the book while I was an academic, but I wrote it in reaction to my academic training. I never cared much for the scholarly style of writing and documentation, though I'm very good at it. Knowing that this book on Reagan would not be of much interest to my fellow scholars, and not wanting to write a scholarly book anyway, I stayed away from heavy documentation from the start. I felt that it would put off the audience that I did want to reach. Mark Burson's comment on the back cover, that the book "translates the essence of Ronald Reagan for the rest of us," accurately captures what I wanted to do.

I did a lot of background reading for the book, and those sources are listed in the bibliography. The main primary source for the book is Reagan's volume of speeches, Speaking My Mind. My references to Reagan's speeches and other sources used to be collected at the end of the book, but I changed the citations to footnotes. I know that's not the style these days, but footnotes are easier to see and, if short, not obtrusive.

So, I did give some thought to documentation, but your comments indicate I probably erred on the side of sparseness. I had an opportunity to publish an earlier version of the book with a scholarly press several years ago, but I turned it down. They wanted me to cast the argument in the usual academic framework. Perhaps someday scholars and experts will actually be interested in what I wrote, and then I'll know that I erred on the side of too little documentation rather than too much!

Thanks again for writing. I'm grateful to you for your quotation, and I'll keep your advice in mind. If I ever do write a regular biography, I expect I'll follow it.

Please stay in touch. If you need someone to read preliminary versions of your current work, I'm a fast and enthusiastic editor, of course.

Sincerely,

Steve