According to a story in the Washington Times:
Nearly 700 handwritten policy essays – long-overlooked daily radio commentaries he delivered to tens of millions of listeners between 1975 and 1979 as governor of California, before his 1981-1989 service as president – have been discovered tucked away in storage boxes.
After reviewing the neglected drafts written out on yellow note pads, a Hoover Institution fellow, Arnold Beichman, called them an "astounding revelation" about a man assumed by scornful news media, and even some on his staff, to be a "great communicator" but a lightweight thinker.
"He was called an 'amiable dunce,' and the media made him out to be a half-wit surrounded by a bunch of geniuses," Beichman said. [These essays will] "force academics to revise their scholarship."
Martin Anderson, domestic-policy adviser to President Reagan and co-editor of an anthology of more than 200 essays and other works, said:
"We kept marveling at the clarity of his writing, but also the breadth of issues.
"It's extraordinary to see these written out in hand. You see his corrections. You see his mind at work.
"I know a lot of intelligent people who can't write. But I don't know any person who writes this well who is not intelligent.
"Very few people were around him when he was writing, except the state troopers [who traveled and stayed with him while he was governor of California]. They said, 'All the guy did was work. He read all the time. Wrote all the time.' "
Critics began attacking Reagan's intellect in earnest during the close of his presidency, when he suffered the onset of the Alzheimer's disease that now cripples him.
In 1994, the former president, knowing he would die with Alzheimer's, penned a final letter to Americans that Reagan biographer Edmund Morris says was touched with "genius."
Gracious and upbeat, Reagan wrote of his "journey ... into the sunset of my life."
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