Q&A: Kiron Skinner co-wrote two books that proved the depth of Ronald Reagan's brain
Two vintage Q&As with the CMU foreign policy scholar and Trump Administration alum who's thinking of running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022
Kiron Skinner, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and Hoover Institution scholar, announced in early February that she was considering running for the U.S. Senate in 2022 as a Republican when the current Republican Sen. Pat Toomey plans to retire.
In the early 2000s, when I worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I had two interviews with Professor Skinner about the Ronald Reagan books she co-edited that proved the president was a lot smarter and nicer than his detractors thought.
“Reagan: In His Own Hand” was a collection of hand-written radio commentaries from the late 1970s and "Reagan: A Life in Letters” was a collection of Reagan’s personal letters. I also followed Skinner to Washington, D.C., where she went on a multimedia publicity tour for “Reagan: In His Own Hand.”
Q&A: Reagan: In His Own Hand
January 13, 2001
Ronald Reagan detractors still love to portray him as an air-headed ex-actor whose greatest role was playing president of the United States.
But thanks in part to a Cold War scholar now teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, it's no longer going to be so easy to dismiss 'The Great Communicator' as an 'amiable dunce' whose greatest skill was reading his speechwriters' lines from prompters.
Proof that Reagan was a lot smarter than his political enemies and liberals in the media were ever willing to believe is contained in 'Reagan, In His Own Hand,' a new book coming out Feb. 6 filled with hundreds of handwritten radio commentaries Reagan wrote in the late 1970s.
The essays, on everything from abortion and arms control to welfare reform, were 'discovered' packed in boxes among Reagan's papers in 1997 by Kiron K. Skinner, a foreign policy scholar who now teaches at CMU.
Skinner, who edited 'In His Own Hand' with former Reagan advisers Martin Anderson and his wife, Annelise Anderson, also is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
A specialist in international relations theory and international security, she is a registered Democrat. She and Condoleezza Rice, President-elect Bush's national security adviser, are co-editors of 'Turning Points in the Ending of the Cold War,' a Hoover Institution book they expect to finish this year. I talked to Skinner Thursday by phone from her office in Palo Alto, Calif.
Q: What did you think when you found these 670 radio commentaries written out in longhand?
A: I was absolutely shocked. And it wasn't just radio broadcasts that I found, but other writings. All kinds of speeches, policy pieces, letters, etc. I was surprised to see this material. Many of these things are decades old.
Q: So Ronald Reagan wasn't the 'amiable dunce' after all?
A: No, he wasn't. I didn't go into the project with that premise. I was just interested in looking into the end of the Cold War. I never intended to work on Reagan.
Q: What did these documents tell you about Ronald Reagan and what he knew and thought about?
A: What's particularly striking … is the range of issues that Reagan covered. He covered virtually every national policy issue in the late '70s, domestic and foreign. And he wrote about them. He thought about them. He read on all of these issues. It just shows a mind that in some ways could see the big picture on almost everything that was going on.
Q: Is there any position or opinion that surprised you the most? Was there anything where you said, 'Wow, this guy knew what he was doing?
A: There are a few things. The main thing, though, was his commitment to mutual cooperation with the Soviet Union and his interest in ending the Cold War peacefully, with one side shedding power voluntarily.
He believed that that could happen and should happen, and that it was the preference of the American people in the Cold War for this outcome to occur – for the Soviet Union to shed power, its military assets. … And the fact that he was much more of a peace-monger than anyone has suggested in previous writings.
Q: Why do you think Reagan deserves credit as 'the primary architect of the Cold War' when so many in the past have been so unwillingly to give him credit for that?
A: I don't think there's been much credit assigned on the American side to anyone. Much of the scholarly literature looks at the implosion in the Soviet system as a key factor, and, of course, it is central to the events of the late '80s and early 1990s. But I don't think that we've really looked as much on the American side in the last 10 years as we might have done.
Q: What did Ronald Reagan know or understand about Cold War politics that served him well?
A: When he came to the presidency, he didn't have the foreign policy experience of some presidents. But he had traveled some internationally in the late 1970s and he did some missions to Asia as governor for Nixon.
But what I think he did have that was crucial to Cold War politics was a background as a labor negotiator. He talked often during his dealings with the Soviets that it was during his period of presidency of the Screen Actors' Guild that he honed labor negotiating skills that he thought were important in any strategic interaction. I think that served him well.
Q: Have you been transformed into a Reagan Republican by your encounter with his writings?
A: No, again, I think that it has been hard maybe for people to understand, but I really approached this as a scholar and not as someone trying to make the Reagan case. Reagan's writings will speak for themselves, I think.
Q: Are there other things you and other scholars will unearth about the Cold War that will surprise people or change the way we think about what went on then?
A: This, in some ways, is just the beginning. There is a body of kind of new Cold War studies, what I like to call 'new evidence scholars,' that are doing work on Eastern Europe, on Russia and the role of the United States in the Cold War.
Much of the conventional wisdom is being overturned by new evidence. So I do think that there is a lot more there, not just in the Reagan papers, but in the American story.
An unlikely hero of the Reagan Revolution
February 11, 2001 12:00 a.m
WASHINGTON – You can't blame Kiron Skinner for trying to steal a few winks.
Slumped into a corner of the Lincoln Town Car's back seat in a black pantsuit and high heels, the Carnegie Mellon University professor has been riding a multimedia whirlwind.
In the past four days, Skinner has jet-setted from San Francisco to Pittsburgh to New York to here, promoting a book she co-edited, 'Reagan, In His Own Hand.' Today is D-Day, Tuesday, Feb. 6 – Ronald Reagan's 90th birthday.
It's only 6:40 p.m., but since dawn Skinner has been lurching along in city traffic, doing radio talk-show interviews and making network television appearances.
Her ordeal isn't close to being over.
Skinner, a foreign policy scholar and lifelong Democrat, is spending her day plugging the book about Reagan that has America's conservatives jumping for joy.
Making guest appearances with hosts such as Katie Couric on the 'Today' show, as she did this morning, is Skinner's contribution to a well-planned public relations offensive for the book, which contains Reagan's original writings.
The book, mostly reprints of radio commentaries Reagan wrote between 1976 and 1979, hit bookstores last week amid an avalanche of well-timed national publicity.
Reagan originally wrote the radio broadcasts in longhand on yellow legal tablets. The broadcasts cover domestic and foreign issues, including abortion, energy policy, education, Cold War foreign policy and the nature of communism.
Some are broad and philosophical, some highly specific and fact-filled. All of them are rough drafts and are reproduced with the changes as Reagan made them.
Now No. 12 on Amazon.com's best-selling list, the book already is in its third printing, according to its publisher, Free Press. It also includes about a dozen other examples of Reagan's writing, including a poem called 'Life' that he wrote in high school and the goodbye letter he wrote to America in 1994, when he learned he had Alzheimer's disease.
The radio commentaries have shocked and surprised Reagan's political allies and enemies.
The shock is not because 'Reagan, In His Own Hand' has received big play and generally friendly reviews in politically liberal publications such as the New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post.
As Reagan's former Secretary of State George Shultz writes in the book's foreword, the depth and scope of the written documents prove Reagan may 'have been a lot smarter than most people thought.'
In her guest spots on 'Today' and 'The Edge With Paula Zahn,' Skinner, 39, stayed on the scholarly path, stressing the central role Reagan played in toppling the communist empire.
She also described the radio commentaries as proof that Reagan was a 'peacemonger.' Well before he became president in 1980, she said, he was thinking long and hard about how America could win the Cold War, without nuclear war, through a strategy of military and moral strength.
Appearing on national TV was no sweat for Skinner, a history professor's daughter who grew up near San Francisco and graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta at 19 before getting her Ph.D. at Harvard University.
She is most happy when digging through historical archives, attending a seminar on anti-ballistic missile defense policy or writing a book on the turning points of the Cold War with her friend Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser.
But she's comfortable appearing before the public and the camera. As a teenager, she says, she was a fashion model and a regular beauty pageant contestant. At age 6, she read Langston Hughes' poetry on local television. And in 1981, after Glamour magazine picked her as one of the Top 10 College Women in the country, she appeared on the 'Today' show with Jane Pauley.
Now, however, the assistant professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon is a hero of the Reagan Revolution.
She accidentally discovered the 670 handwritten radio commentaries several years ago. They were packed in boxes among Reagan's private archives at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank on the campus of Stanford University, where Skinner also is a research fellow.
She ended up editing 'Reagan, In His Own Hand' with Hoover Institution fellows Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. Both are former advisers to Reagan, and both traveled with Skinner on a crazy two-city media merry-go-round that sometimes confused its riders.
For example, earlier in the morning, in New York City, Skinner and Martin Anderson appeared together on 'Today,' while Annelise Martin did a remote interview with C-SPAN.
Then, after flying together to Washington, Skinner went to Fox News Channel's studios for a remote interview with Paula Zahn, who was in her show's New York studio, while Martin Anderson was on 'Inside Politics' over at CNN and wife Annelise was on PBS' 'NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.'
The trio made those appointments without a hitch, but at 6:45 p.m., as Skinner still slept in the back seat, a mini-crisis occurred.
In 15 minutes they were due to speak at a fancy $90-per-person birthday party in Reagan's honor. But Martin Anderson was missing.
Driver Kent Gerber searched the plaza of CNN's building without success. Anderson eventually turned up on his own.
Minutes later, the threesome was somewhere in the underbelly of the Ronald Reagan Building, a monstrous stone-and-marble government building that seems half-cathedral, half-palace.
'It's probably a good thing Ronald Reagan is not here,' Anderson said as he stepped into the spectacular structure's cavernous interior for the first time.
At the jampacked Reagan lovefest, Skinner and the Andersons had little time to party, or even eat. Hundreds of faceless Washingtonians – and a few notable political ones, like former White House chief of staff John Sununu, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and freshman Republican Congresswoman Melissa Hart – stood shoulder to shoulder balancing small plates of fabulously expensive food.
Skinner and Annelise Anderson, however, spent most of their time on a couch in a corner, trapped by a line of people wanting them to sign their $31.50 copies of 'Reagan, In His Own Hand.'
Then they sat in front of the crowd for an hour as a series of Reagan administration alumni like former Attorney General Edwin Meese and new G.W. Bush appointees like Interior Secretary Gale Norton praised Reagan for ending the Cold War, setting off a 20-year economic expansion and resuscitating America's spirit.
Skinner and the Andersons each spoke briefly about their book, which Reagan lovers were buying by the score. During Annelise Anderson's talk, the last of Reagan's commentaries from 1979 was played over the public-address system.
Reagan's voice, young and strong, filled the room as he bade his radio listeners goodbye and prepared to run for president.
Skinner and the Andersons, who were scheduled to appear live on Jim Bohannon's national radio show at 10, tried to leave the party right away. But autograph-seekers dogged them all the way down the elevator and into the parking garage.
As Skinner signed a copy of the book, one exuberant Reaganite mentioned the favorable write-up it had received in The New York Times, telling Skinner, 'Thank God the liberals are finally changing their minds!'
'Really,' Skinner said, never letting on that she is not a fellow partisan but a scholar interested in getting to the truth.
Q&A: Reagan: A Life in Letters
September 27, 2003
For the second time in less than two years, CMU political science professor Kiron Skinner has found herself on national TV and radio talking about the mind, character and writings of Ronald Reagan.
In 2001, she was promoting "Reagan: In His Own Hand,” a best-selling and historically important compilation of radio commentaries, speeches and other writings by Reagan that she co-wrote and co-edited with former Reagan administration hands Martin and Annelise Anderson.
Now the three have teamed up on "Reagan: A Life in Letters,” a meticulously researched collection of more than 1,000 letters Reagan wrote over 70 years to friends, movie stars, world leaders, movie fans and everyday people he never met.
In its exclusive excerpt this week, Time gives big and mostly friendly play to "Reagan: A Life in Letters.”
The magazine offers two pages of mostly friendly commentary from Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy to set up six pages of excerpts and photos from "A Life in Letters,” a near-autobiography they say provides "a paper trail of the kind historians can only dream.”
Skinner, a Hoover Institution research fellow and Cold War scholar, had just finished her guest spot Wednesday on G. Gordon Liddy's radio talk show in Washington, D.C., when I talked with her by telephone:
Q: You can't get much better play than the cover of Time, can you?
A: No. That was a pleasant surprise and extremely well done.
Q: How has the TV and radio media coverage been so far, friendly or unfriendly?
A: It's been friendly for the most part, and nothing unexpected has been asked.
Q: Tell us what the book shows about Reagan's personality and character.
A: I think the book actually is Reagan's own autobiography, because it is mainly his words for more than 70 years of his life. What emerges from his letters, covering all aspects of his life — discussions with his family about personal issues, discussions with friends about politics, discussions with heads of governments and with perfect strangers — is that there is no spin in what Reagan writes about himself or his understanding of the domestic and international scene. He tells it the way he sees it.
That's what I think is going on in this book. It's Reagan's own tour through the 20th century of American history, with himself as the tour guide.
Q: Why did we know so little about Ronald Reagan's true nature when he was president or before that?
A: That's a good question, because the letters are all over the place. There are thousands of them, maybe upwards of 10,000 of them over the course of his life. There could be even more.
Reagan never talked about what he did. He just did it quietly, and a lot of people conspired with him. The recipients of these letters didn't tell that they had this ongoing correspondence with him, or they did tell and it never added up to a larger picture.
There were a few articles here and there about the White House mail during his presidency and stories that he had pen pals. But I don't think anyone saw a portrait of Reagan from a letter-writing perspective — that he was doing this all over the place, at all times. It just didn't come together before this book.
Q: Edmund Morris, Reagan's biographer ("Dutch”), reviewed your book for The Washington Post, and he pretty much declares, in a snippy, snooty way, that Ronald Reagan remains a bore, as he pretty much calls him. Is he being too tough?
A: I think there is a way in which he is unfair to Reagan. He talks about a letter to Mrs. Esther Ranes, where Reagan is giving sympathy to this woman he knew for the loss of her husband.
Morris says there is nothing new there, but when you think about it, the fact that Reagan is writing, that he takes the time, that he seeks out people, that he writes so many sympathy notes — most unsolicited — after he heard that someone has passed that he went to college with; I think it says something about his character and his nature.
Maybe it is boring to sit and write lots of thank-you notes and sympathy notes and to write checks to various charities, but that's what Reagan did. I think it takes the eye of the beholder to evaluate that. But that was important to Reagan, and he sat there and did it day after day.
Q: What do we know about Reagan now through these letters that we didn't know before?
A: One of the main things we learned about Reagan was that at every turn in his life, he was in charge. He was in charge of himself, he was in charge of whatever job he had, and he was always running the show.
That's what the book shows, because he says it. He says, for example, on the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative: "It was my idea to begin with and we will deploy when ready.” He also says in another letter, "I have a foreign policy plan. I don't believe in putting quotation marks around it and proclaiming it publicly, but I believe in quiet diplomacy.” In another letter, he says that he does have a global agenda.
When things have happened to him or to his political career, or during his administrations as governor and presidency, that were unfavorable, he typically would say, "I take responsibility.” He did during the Iran-Contra crisis. He says it in letters and he says it in speeches as well.
Q: What is the historical value of a book like this?
A: The immediate value is that it opens up for scholars — there are quite a few private letters in this book — material that would otherwise not be available to the public for a very long time on sensitive issues, like Iran-Contra, on what Reagan was saying in real time.
It allows scholars to immediately begin to mine this book for their own work.
The long-term importance of it is that I think it is going to stand as Reagan's biography for a long time.
Q: Are there any letters that were mean or nasty, that would have given us a different look at Reagan's personality?
A: No, I don't think so. Reagan was consistent and even in his approach to critics and friends: tough, firm, never disrespectful, never talked down to people, never talked up, but very even. You see that throughout his life.
Q: Did Nancy Reagan have final say on the letters?
A: Yes, she did.
Q: Did she kill any?
A: I think she asked us to remove two personal letters, but nothing else.
Q: When you three selected the letters, you weren't out to make Reagan look smarter, or nicer or more caring than he was or anything like that?
A: No. We didn't do that at all, in fact. There was no attempt to make him look any particular way. I think the research process would suggest that, because — and this was really important — I think we all felt as scholars that we shouldn't just use what was given to us in the private collection.
We went to private collections all over the country. … We also went to other archives. In every presidential library from Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush I, we looked for letters. We went around as much as we possibly could to non-Reagan facilities. I think that adds to the credibility to the work. If we had just used what was at the Reagan Library in the private papers that Mrs. Reagan controlled, I think that would have been a much more biased set.
Q: Is there other material that you know of that could be bundled up and put into another book?
A: My view is that there is a lot more out there, because Reagan wrote so much. But in terms of a kind of strict adherence to new-evidence standards, the letters book and his radio essays give a fairly complete picture of Reagan.
My 2017 history book 30 Days a Black Man retells the amazing, forgotten and true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. My 2013 true nonfiction book Dogging Steinbeck exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. Blogs, photos, a definitive 1960 Steinbeck/Charley trip timeline and more are at TruthAboutCharley.com