The diarist and the detail man

THERE is a great deal of great interest in "The Reagan Diaries," but what sets the late president's personal recollections of his eight years in the White House apart from the recent spate of tell-all, inside-Washington books is what's absent: You can scour this thick volume from back to front and find not a trace of self-righteousness, self-pity or self-justification -- all standard issue accouterments among today's office-holders and political appointees, whether their veins bleed red or blue.

Some of this has to do, of course, with the fact that the former actor and California governor experienced his eight years in office as a turbulent but successful period in his life and that the subsequent reviews of his performance have been good. There's a reason why the 2008 campaign's first debate among aspiring Republican presidential candidates was held at the Reagan Library and why the participants all strove to drape themselves in "The Great Communicator's" mantle.

Historian Douglas Brinkley, who adroitly edited what could have been "two or three fat volumes" into one substantial book, clearly came away from the experience with not only an academic regard for Reagan's written legacy but also a genuine regard for the writer. As Brinkley writes in his warm introduction:

"There is an appealing earnestness to the diaries, an unvarnished account of his days in office. The entries don't dazzle in a self-congratulatory fashion. Nor do they consciously attempt to spin history in his favor.... Nowhere in the entries did the president bask in glory, savor the misfortune of adversaries, or wallow in his own defeats. More often than not, he is self-deprecating."

It's an entirely apt characterization and, taken as a whole, "The Reagan Diaries" brings to mind nothing so much as Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous appraisal of the young Franklin Roosevelt: "second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament." (It's interesting that Reagan returns repeatedly to his admiration for the New Deal and mentions that when he hosted members of the Roosevelt family at the White House, he quipped that he was the only person in the room who had voted for FDR four times.)

To borrow Holmes' condescending appellation is not to denigrate Reagan's intelligence. The chief executive who emerges from these pages has a capacious attention to and knowledge of this country and the world. It is not, however, a self-examining or particularly reflective intelligence. On the other hand, it's hard not to feel that, if you called Central Casting and said, "Send us somebody with a presidential temperament," you couldn't have done much better than this guy.