Those who were competing against Reagan admitted that he could speak with ease even in improvised situations. This was clear, despite an effort by some of his opponents to paint him either as a shallow Hollywood movie star or as an incompetent grandfather. Reagan was able to discuss policy at a fairly sophisticated level without focused preparation. He retrieved facts and concepts on the fly from his memory.
How did Reagan become so well versed?
It happened during a four-and-a-half year period, during which Reagan was not in office and was not seeking any office. He spent that time writing and speaking, and most importantly, preparing his own texts for these written and spoken engagements.
He wrote the texts for more than one thousand three-minute radio speeches. They were broadcast daily, Monday through Friday, from early 1975 until late 1979. He also wrote newspaper columns. Like any content creator, he was actively seeking new material. He read in large quantities, from daily newspapers to centuries-old classics. He was continually on the lookout for new ideas, new facts, and new perspectives on old ideas and on old facts. As historian Kiron Skinner said, “Reagan really was doing his own work.”
In the course of researching and writing, Reagan became familiar with dozens of policy topics, and with multiple interpretations of each of those topics. His grasp on the issues was both broader and deeper than many of his competitors when he ran in the 1980 election.
“The scripts deal with every issue of the day, from stagflation to Soviet duplicity,” writes Peter Robinson. “We now know that he produced more original writing than any president since Woodrow Wilson.”
Among broadcasters, Reagan’s radio audience was considered to be among the largest, explains Kiron Skinner:
So, in January 1975, he steps down as governor of California, and three days later he’s writing radio essays, giving radio broadcasts five days a week, three minutes a day, to about 20 million listeners. He did this before talk-radio, when no one else in the country was doing what he was doing. He had a bigger listening audience probably than any politician in the United States, including the president, and no one in the establishment — the liberal establishment — paid attention. He was on more than 300 radio stations across the country, nationally syndicated. He would go into a studio in Hollywood and record 15 [broadcasts] at a time, covering three weeks at a time, and with doing only one recording, never making a mistake, having written most of them by hand. He delivered more than a thousand in the late 70s, and when he competed in the 1980 Republican primary, his challengers said that everywhere they went the audience knew Reagan’s message and they knew him. Well, [the reason] was the radio essays that he’d been giving all of those years.
By the time Reagan began his daily radio speeches in 1975, he’d already been governor of California and a Hollywood actor. He already had experience as a radio broadcaster, a job which he held from 1932 to 1936.
He was already an accomplished public speaker by 1975. The additional years on the radio only made him better. He preferred speaking to writing, because he understood better how to connect with his audience using his voice instead of his pen, as Kiron Skinner notes:
He also wrote a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column with King Syndicate, but he really focused on radio, because he understood the medium, having been a sportscaster in Iowa after college.
Approximately 600, or a few more, of his original radio scripts have survived. They are almost all handwritten. Reagan would give the handwritten copies to a secretary to be typed. They offer insights into both the methods and the circumstances of their composition.
More than his immediate predecessors — Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter — Reagan had polished skills in public speaking, and an instinct for broadcast media, both radio and television.
He had an amazing audience. He was talking to Americans, he was receiving letters back, refining his message, honing his skills, developing arguments, so that by 1980, when he was running against Jimmy Carter, he was functioning as a one-man think-tank. The radio essays [covered] every issue. He wrote most of them entirely by himself. He was writing them on planes, from the back of cars. He was even citing his sources in the margins of the handwritten drafts.
Although Reagan certainly earned his nickname — ‘The Great Communicator’ — that was only half the story. The other half was his vast mental library of issues and policies, and his ability to deftly explain, apply, critique, or support them. In the vocabulary of a much later era, he was The Great Content Generator.
