Lou Cannon, who explored the enigmas of Ronald Reagan in biographies that portrayed the 40th president as an intellectually lazy dreamer who got his worldview in part from movies but who, with intuition, charm and a principled patriotism, led the nation to relative peace and prosperity, died Friday in Santa Barbara. He was 92.
His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his son, Carl Cannon, who said the cause was complications of a stroke.
A celebrated journalist and author, Lou Cannon covered Reagan for decades, first in California during the first of Reagan’s two terms as governor, and then as the senior White House correspondent for The Washington Post during Reagan’s two-term presidency in the 1980s, an era of rising American confidence that set the stage for nuclear detente and the end of the Cold War.
In a crowded publishing niche — the number of books on Reagan easily exceeds 1,000 — Cannon was widely regarded as a foremost authority on the president. He had extraordinary access, traveled with Reagan, interviewed him some 100 times and admired and respected him. Yet his half-dozen books on the president were never adoring. Indeed, reviewers generally found them to be models of objective reporting whose assessments of Reagan tended toward the negative.
In the biography “Reagan” (1982), Cannon portrayed his subject, a former Hollywood actor and television pitchman, as largely ignorant, unanalytical, passive and childishly simplistic, oblivious to the contradictions in his own beliefs and unable to separate complex realities from fantasies rooted in his attachments to movies, daily astrology readings and his own idealized small-town America origins.
“He was better off than presidents with too many doubts, but Reagan had too few,” Cannon wrote. “His mind and metaphors were locked in the past where energy was abundant, American industrial and military supremacy was axiomatic, and personal charity was the basic channel of social welfare.”
Cannon asserted that Reagan’s mind had “never been exposed to rigorous challenge,” and that while he possessed “common sense” and “integrity,” he relied on his boyish charm, his extraordinary communication skills and his trusted aides to further his presidency, delegating too much authority to those subordinates in the process.
Reagan, a 9-to-5 president who took afternoon naps, frequent trips to California and weekend visits to Camp David, and who watched hundreds of Westerns, war movies and television dramas while he was in the White House, “may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest,” Cannon said.
Yet Cannon also found Reagan “patriotic and idealistic” and “intuitively keen” — a man of boundless optimism whose initiatives for tax and budget cuts came not from proposals by his aides but from his own experience. Reagan had developed an aversion to taxes when he became rich and had a distrust of government that began in the 1950s, when he was General Electric’s conservative corporate spokesperson on television, a role that contrasted with his earlier, more liberal politics as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952.
Cannon’s biography “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” (1991), his top-selling book, examined Reagan’s entire political career and amplified upon his enigmas. While weak on logic and analysis, Reagan was strong on “interpersonal intelligence,” Cannon wrote, although he distanced himself from those around him, including his wife, Nancy.
After the disclosures of the Iran-Contra affair in his second term, in which White House aides secretly sold arms to Iran and used the cash to illegally fund Nicaragua’s right-wing rebels, many Americans came to accept Reagan’s failure to grasp facts and operational details.
Cannon called Reagan inattentive and indifferent, saying that he largely followed “scripts” prepared by handlers who protected him from himself and the press in a stage-managed administration. Yet Reagan’s strength, the author said, was his belief in America and his ability to sell that vision, using it to give new respectability to a conservative movement and to achieve a historic rapprochement with Moscow.
“His greatest service,” Cannon wrote, “was in restoring the respect of Americans for themselves and their own government after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, the frustration of the Iran hostage crisis and a succession of seemingly failed presidencies.”
Louis Simeon Cannon was born in New York City on June 3, 1933, to Jack and Irene (Kohn) Cannon. He grew up in Reno, Nevada, graduated from Reno High School in 1950 and attended the University of Nevada, Reno, from 1950 to 1951, and San Francisco State College, from 1951 to 1952. He was in the Army from 1953 to 1954.
In 1953, he married Virginia Oprian. They had four children, Carl, David, Judith and Jackson, and were divorced in 1983. In 1985, he married Mary L. Shinkwin. Virginia and David died in 2016. Cannon’s survivors include his wife, Mary, his three other children, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Cannon went into journalism in 1957, finding work as an editor and reporter for several small California newspapers. He was managing editor of The Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek from 1960 to 1961. He then joined The San Jose Mercury News as a copy editor before becoming a reporter. He rose to be the state bureau chief in Sacramento from 1965 to 1969, when he covered much of Reagan’s first term as governor of the state.
His first book, “Ronnie and Jesse: A Political Odyssey” (1969), was a biography of Reagan and Jesse M. Unruh, the Democratic speaker of the California Assembly, who as his party’s gubernatorial nominee in 1970 lost his bid to deny Reagan reelection.
Cannon went to Washington in 1969 as a congressional correspondent for Ridder Publications and joined the Post in 1972 as a political reporter. Over the next 26 years, he was the Post’s White House correspondent during the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Reagan. He was later a syndicated columnist and a special correspondent for the Post based in Los Angeles.
One of the nation’s most explosive racial incidents — the savage beating of a motorist, Rodney King, by Los Angeles police officers in 1991 that led to riots and criminal and civil trials of the officers — was explored by Cannon in “Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD” (1998).
After leaving the Post in 1999, he wrote “Ronald Reagan: The Presidential Portfolio,” (2001), “Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power” (2003) and, with his son, Carl, “Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy” (2008). Carl Cannon is a Washington reporter and executive editor of the political news website RealClearPolitics.
Lou Cannon, who lived in Summerland, California, taught at UC Santa Barbara and USC, wrote for national periodicals and in recent years was a columnist for State Net Capitol Journal, focusing on state legislation and politics.
But he never completely stopped writing about Reagan. In an opinion piece for the Post in 2016, he scoffed at comparisons of Reagan and Donald Trump, who was then making his first bid for the White House. “Reagan had an in-bred distaste for the politics of derogation that have become a Trump hallmark,” he wrote, adding: “I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he engaged in personal put-downs. When he did, he regretted it and sought to make amends.”
In his later years, Cannon also wrote Nancy Reagan’s obituary for The New York Times, preparing it in 2007, well before her death in 2016. His byline on it drew considerable notice in journalism circles, given his long association with the Post.
For the obituary, Cannon drew on his own long association with the Reagans, painting a rounded portrait of the former first lady with the authority of someone who had closely observed her and her husband for decades. He ended it on a poignant note:
“At Mr. Reagan’s funeral, at the National Cathedral in Washington,” Cannon wrote, “she remained in tight control of her emotions. Then she flew west with the coffin for a burial service at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., where Mrs. Reagan will also be buried. At the conclusion of the ceremony, at sunset, soldiers and sailors handed Mrs. Reagan a folded American flag. She held it close to her heart, put it down on the coffin, and at last began to cry.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.