A MAN IN FULL:

I also went to Lou's book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. He spends several pages on Reagan and race, treating the subject with nuance and depth. Cannon begins as follows, speaking personally:

I do not believe that Reagan was racially prejudiced in the normal meaning of the term. He had been taught by his parents that racial intolerance was abhorrent, and the many people I interviewed who knew him as a young man were unanimous in believing that he absorbed these lessons. In his autobiography Reagan tells how he volunteered to take Eureka College's two black football players into his home in Dixon after they were refused admission at a hotel. . . . The players were welcomed by Reagan's parents, as Reagan had known they would be. One of these players was William Franklin Burghardt, who had played center on the line next to Reagan. The two became friends and corresponded regularly until Burghardt's death in 1981.

Yes. I next went to a collection of correspondence: Reagan: A Life in Letters. "Dear Burgie," Reagan would begin his letters to his old teammate, and he would sign himself "Dutch."

Throughout his career, or careers, Reagan corresponded with movie fans, constituents, et al. Here is a note to Mr. Freddie Washington of Moss Point, Miss., published in A Life in Letters. The date of the note is November 23, 1983 (during Reagan's first term as president).

I've been frustrated and angered by the attempts to paint me as a racist and as lacking in compassion for the poor. On the one subject I was raised by a mother and father who instilled in me and my brother a hatred for bigotry and prejudice, long before there was such a thing as a civil rights movement. As for the poor, we were poor in an era when there were no government programs to turn to. I'm well aware of how lucky I've been since and how good the Lord has been to me.

In many of his letters, Reagan defends his record as governor of California -- this is particularly true of letters written between his governorship and his presidency. In August 1979, he sent a long, detailed letter to Mr. Lennie Pickard. Here is just a taste:

I realize there is a great lack of information about what I did as governor of California and it increases the farther east you go. As a result of this, I know that the minority community has an impression that I have little or no interest in their problems. When I became governor I discovered that after eight years of liberal Democratic rule in Sacramento, very little outside of rhetoric had been done for the minorities. The civil service regulations were such that it was virtually impossible for a black employee of state government to rise above the very lowest job levels. We got those rules changed.

Etc., etc. One more taste, from this letter:

My first few years as governor were during the period when people talked of long hot summers to come. We had had the Watts riots just prior to my taking office and racial tensions were very high. Without informing the press, I traveled up and down the state meeting with minority groups and leaders, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in headquarters they had in various community projects. I wanted to know firsthand what their problems were, what was on their minds, and what we could do to change things.

In quoting these things, am I excusing Reagan's remark to Nixon in 1971? No, no. I am saying: For chrissakes, there is a bigger picture. Life is often messy, and Reagan had a long one, not without messiness -- personal, professional, political, and so on. He was a man.

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