Reagan and the Rise of the Blockbuster Political Memoir

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There's a Ronald Reagan quotation that shows up in just about every newspaper or magazine story on ghostwriting. Asked about An American Life (1990), his presidential memoir, Reagan says, "I hear it's a terrific book! One of these days I'm going to read it myself" (qtd. in Korda Another 475). But what never accompanies this quotation is its context. On a late October day in 1990, at Simon & Schuster's high-rise Manhattan offices, the publishing company held a press conference for the release of Reagan's book. As a phalanx of photographers, TV cameras, and print journalists followed along, Reagan and Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Michael Korda leaned over a sheaf of blank paper, each man holding a ballpoint pen, each man pretending to jot down editorial comments or queries, both men thinking, nodding, conferring. After everyone got what they needed, Reagan stood up and headed for the door. Just before exiting, he turned and delivered his line.

In this essay, I argue that Ronald Reagan was both more and less of a writer than we might initially think. When Esquire asked him to explain his conversion from Roosevelt Democrat to Goldwater Republican, Reagan replied not with names but with a process: "Eventually what happened to me was, because I did my own speeches and did the research for them, I just woke up to the realization one day that I had been going out and helping to elect the people who had been causing the things I had been criticizing. So it wasn't any case of some mentor coming in and talking me out of it. I did it in my own speeches" (Witcover 92). There is ample historical evidence to support this claim. From 1954 to 1962, Reagan worked as television host and corporate pitchman for General Electric, developing and delivering an anti-government manifesto that came to be known as "The Speech." Reagan was still working on "The Speech" in 1976 when Esquire observed him, actor-like, "polishing the lines." But that's the wrong metaphor: he wrote the lines, just as Reagan wrote a few key speeches while president, more than a few while governor, and almost everything until he won an elected office.¹

Everything, that is, except his first book, Where's the Rest of Me? The Ronald Reagan Story. While Reagan worked with a ghostwriter, he still invested the same effort and lively intelligence in his book, and it remains an underrated political memoir. But the difference between Reagan's first book and his second, An American Life: The Autobiography, is enormous, and that difference can be explained through the shifts that occurred in publishing between 1965 (Where's the Rest of Me?) and 1990 (An American Life). This period saw the rise of blockbuster publishing, as the industry became increasingly top-heavy in both its favorite authors and its own structure. There was no better example of either trend than Reagan's publisher Simon & Schuster, which grew its sales from $70 million in 1975 to $1.42 billion in 1990. And there was no better example of a blockbuster title than An American Life. Indeed, Reagan's book stands as the first blockbuster presidential memoir—not in sales, perhaps, but certainly in conception, production, and marketing.

The Reagan-blockbuster connection can seem a little pat, as when his detractors note that the 1980s led to the elimination of tax protections for publishers' backlists.² But I'm less interested in how Reagan shaped or produced blockbuster publishing than in how he reflects it. And how he reflects it is in the difference between Where's the Rest of Me? and An American Life. It would be a mistake to place the full weight of this difference on blockbuster publishing. First, Reagan's books belong to different genres—the first a pre-election political book, the second a post-election political book.³ Second, they were shaped by a complex mix of personal and political factors—everything from the advice of his staff to what Nancy Reagan did or did not...