As Ed Rollins, who worked with Reagan for five years. concluded, "The job was whatever was on his desk."
Reagan's former campaign manager, John Sears, attributed this trait to Reagan's first career, as a movie actor in an age when the studios discouraged independent thinking. As such, Sears noted, Reagan had become professionally accustomed to learning his part and "following the prescribed rules - doing what they told you to do." If something went wrong on the set, Sears said, Reagan would most likely think. Hey, I'm just the star. I'm the performer. Others were supposed to worry about the rest of the show.
This complacency was evident in cabinet and staff meetings, where Reagan was a wonderful raconteur - frequently speaking as if he were still governor of California - as well as a good listener But he rarely made substantive points. A staff member who had also served in the Ford White House said, "Ford led the discussion; Reagan followed it." When the public began to learn of Reagan's lack of involvement in meetings, aides explained it by saying the president wanted to hide his thought process in order to avoid leaks or that he was trying to spare the feelings of those with whom he disagreed. But, as Don Regan later admitted, Reagan "sent out no strong signals. It was a rare meeting in which he made a decision or issued an order."
If the president rarely played the leading role in meetings, his aides found he was even less likely to question the paperwork they sent him. Reagan obligingly read whatever he was given - all of it - at least in the early years. One aide early on was surprised to find that the president was staying up until the early hours of the morning trying to read all the materials his staff had sent him. "He read indiscriminately," the aide marveled. "If you gave him eight hundred pages, he read every word. He used no judgment." Nancy Reagan finally stepped in and explained that her husband's workload needed to be reduced. Similarly, the staff had to monitor the amount of information they sent him to prepare for press conferences. As former communications director David Gergen recalled, "If you gave him too many pages, as good as his photographic memory is, he tries so hard to remember what he read that he sometimes gets mixed up." He was particularly susceptible to whatever arguments he had heard most recently White House spokesman Larry Speakes used to joke that "the last thing you put in is the first thing that comes out."
Unlike other presidents, Reagan seldom requested information beyond the briefings and talking points his aides gave him. He enjoyed occasional luncheons with outside experts when they were brought in, but he rarely initiated invitations. He watched what Regan later called "a lot" of television and read a number of newspapers, although he claimed, possibly for effect, that he turned first to the comics.
Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)
