Phil Brennan and NewsMax Staff
Monday, June 7, 2004

Part I follows:

Joan Sieffert had an almost mystical connection to Ronald Reagan. In 1974, she had a nightmare so startling she awoke from her sleep. Most people would have dismissed the dream, but Sieffert was moved enough by it that she wrote to her friend Ronald Reagan, then California’s governor.

As Paul Kengor reveals in his new book, “God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life,” Sieffert told Reagan that she pictured him “running for president, winning the presidency, and then being shot.”

She told Reagan the exact circumstances of the shooting; in her dream he “was shot before entering a car.”

Eerily, her dream mirrored exactly the events of March 30, 1981. John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan as he exited the Washington Hilton and was about to enter the presidential limousine.

In that prescient letter, Sieffert told Reagan that the dream “really terrified” her.

Sieffert had been president of the Pittsburgh chapter of Reagan’s fan club decades earlier, when he was a top Hollywood star. He had developed a bond with Sieffert, and though his club was long gone, he remained a close pen pal for decades. As Kengor notes, he was “characteristically candid and personal in his letters, many of which run longer than a full page.”

He read her letter with some alarm and shared it with his wife, Nancy. “A few days after sending the letter,” Kengor writes, “Sieffert received a phone call from a traumatized Nancy Reagan in California.” She revealed to Sieffert that she and her husband saw the possibility of his assassination as real.

Mrs. Reagan had good reason to worry. Ronnie, as she called him, was just finishing his second term as governor and already had been the subject of death threats. In one case, California police had unraveled an attempt by a radical group to take his life.

Sieffert remembers a worried but defiant Nancy Reagan telling her, however: “Ronnie really believes that it’s God choice that he run the country. And I feel that way, too.”

This anecdote unearthed by Kengor is just one of many in “God and Reagan” that add another dimension to what we know about the greatest living president of our times.

Kengor’s book reveals Reagan’s humanity and his fascinating spiritual side, one that has imbued his life from childhood through his final battle with Alzheimer’s disease. It is a story that has never before been told fully.

The Accidental Book

“God and Reagan” is a surprising work for Kengor. He is not a religious zealot but a political science professor and fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In his preface, he explains that he planned to write “a relatively straightforward book on Reagan’s personal role in his administration’s effort to undermine the Soviet empire.”

But while researching that book at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, Calif., Kengor had a revelation. Rummaging through Reagan’s personal papers, many of which have never been published, he discovered a degree of religious intensity that has not been publicly known.

He decided to make Reagan’s spiritual life a part of his larger work, Kengor writes, but when “I accumulated further evidence from other sources concerning Reagan’s religious beliefs, the story of the former president’s faith overtook the rest of the book.”

The finished book is a “spiritual biography,” Kengor says. It begins with Reagan’s difficult and unusual childhood, which helped shape him into the remarkable person he became.

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