7 ms·

Letter from Ronald Reagan to his son

brucejaywallace 14y ago
Great, unconventional advice on marriage to his son. This is time-proof advice for any generation too.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
As an armchair history buff, I love famous historical people who were also prolific letter-writers. It gives a great insight into the person, especially when the letter was between family members or close friends and never intended for public consumption. (Reagan was one of these people) As much as I like Letters of Note for the great letters, for me having a stream of letters makes the person much more three-dimensional. The book on the Adams-Jefferson letters has been on my reading list for a year now. Can't wait to get time to read it. http://amzn.to/MudjlA http://amzn.to/MudjlA I believe there is a similar book for Reagan, but I haven't researched it. Enough stuff on the list already.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  One of the great things about writing a letter is that it takes enough time and energy that you invest a bit of thought before you send it. I worry about 21st century thinkers who will be judged not only by the things they chose to write well, but the one-offs they sent out in the heat of the moment over email.
  - brucejaywallace 14y ago
    I totally agree.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I wonder if some of that impression isn't anachronistic projection, though. Today you think of a letter as something that takes time/energy/thought investment. But it was not at all uncommon for frequent letter-writers of previous eras to write many letters in a day, closer to the way we write emails than the way we write letters. Probably not quite as routine as the average email, but people who wrote thousands of letters during their life treated it as just as normal way of communicating. It wasn't that strange for letters to be dashed off in short periods of time, and like with email, the amount of agonizing/revision/thought that was put into a particular letter varied greatly. On your latter worry, it seems like there's some of that with earlier eras' figures as well. For example, some people's opinion of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre has shifted for the worse since their correspondence was published, since much of it is more like a sordid chatroom log, full of offhanded gossip about other people and such, than like the philosophical works they intended for public consumption.
    - Retric 14y ago
      The time spent writing them my be similar to email. But, you could generally change your mind about sending them for much longer than email.
  - pacaro 14y ago
    You can choose not to send heat-of-the-moment emails. a) You can be intentional about all your public writing - and I think that we have learned by now that email always has the potential to become public. b) You can set up a delay-sending rule in your email client so that you have a grace period between pressing send and the message actually being sent - this has saved me embarrassment on any number of occasions.
  - ibisum 14y ago
    Come now.. research your own deep track of historical data, all you've ever posted on the Internet for 'eternity' for 'all to see', and you do indeed get a broader picture of the person behind the posts. Indeed we all have a common blithe ability to write a rotten sentence. But if you look at, say, jwz's broad swatches of data, or some other such figure, you can see that the bad emails are par for the course. I'd be worried if the figures of the 21st Century couldn't write an e-mail, at any position of the scale of troll to hero.
  - primitur 14y ago
    Come now.. research your own deep track of historical data, all you've ever posted on the Internet for 'eternity' for 'all to see', and you do indeed get a broader picture of the person behind the posts. Indeed we all have a common blithe ability to write a rotten sentence. But if you look at, say, jwz's broad swatches of data, or some other such figure, you can see that the bad emails are par for the course. I'd be worried if the figures of the 21st Century couldn't write an e-mail, at any position of the scale of troll to hero.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Oh I knew I was in trouble when AltaVista first hit and I realized that I would never get away from being 'that guy who used to post a lot of stuff on comp.sys.amiga.' :-)
- soupboy 14y ago
  You may be interested in reading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_a_Father_to_His_Daughter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_a_Father_to_His_Da...] - letters from India's first prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru to his daughter Indira who later became India's first female prime-minister and the only one to have imposed a state of emergency.
  - brucejaywallace 14y ago
    I'll definitely check this out, thank you!
- sethbannon 14y ago
  You'll likely appreciate one of my favorite books, called "My Dearest Friend". It's a collection of letters between John and Abigail Adams and it's truly enlightening. Link: http://www.amazon.com/My-Dearest-Friend-Letters-Abigail/dp/0674026063 http://www.amazon.com/My-Dearest-Friend-Letters-Abigail/dp/0...
- ojosilva 14y ago
  My favorite epistolary book ever is Kafka's letters to Milena. Very profound and intense as Kafka, troubled and kafkian himself, collapses slowly -- into his tuberculosis and the realization of this platonic love affair. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Milena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Milena
- protomyth 14y ago
  President Reagan also has a book of speeches. His early speeches were self-written and pretty refined from multiple tellings. The advantage today is that you can listen to how he gave them as opposed to having an actor read it. Of the modern Presidents, he probably wrote the most words and he did learn his style from radio and Hollywood. Not bad teachers in his day. I do wonder in a hundred years what the historians will think of the writings of the first President to grow up with social media or maybe even USENET.
nickpp 14y ago
How qualified was Reagan to give marriage advice? How many marriages did he have? Was he a marriage counsellor? Did he study marriages? Statistics on couple behaviors? Or is this like listening to the Kardashian's opinion on... child rearing or something?
- bstewartnyc 14y ago
  Ronald Reagan was a wise man and great president.
  - myko 14y ago
    Great by whose measure? As far as I'm concerned he is an embarrassment (as a President). I do think these letters are of historical interest though, glad to see them available.
    - ambertch 14y ago
      You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
      - myko 14y ago
        Talk highly of him all you want, his rhetoric has hurt the US far more than it has helped. Between his voodoo economics and ignoring of the AIDs crisis, Iran Contra, the 'Moral Majority', I think you are embarrassing yourself here, not me. He is the epitome of style over substance.
makhanko 14y ago
Regardless of the fact that this was written by a former US president, what’s truly amazing is that somebody could take a subject old as the world – love and marriage and write such a simple, genuine, straight to the point message, without a hint of bullshit that happens to reads like a novel.
- cynthiaherald 14y ago
  If you think about it, it may be much harder to do so in a hand written letter too....compared to typing 75 words per minutes. Writing is slower, makes you more purposeful with every word, etc.
rekoros 14y ago
I wonder why Michael got a divorce a year later. Maybe he didn't read the letter?
- toemetoch 14y ago
  Maybe that was his father's motivation to write the letter in the first place, he might have seen a predictable path in this relationship or how his son deals with things.
- jfoutz 14y ago
  pretty much followed in pop's footsteps.
theorique 14y ago
Very wise words. And a very interesting look at the personal, family world of a very public figure of the late 20th century.
alexscheelmeyer 14y ago
I would be more inclined to accept his message if it could not be boiled down to "If it is not working for you, you are not trying hard enough". Also, more marriages have probably failed due to the husband being a wimpy "I love you every day no matter what"-kind of guy than due to adultery. Adultery is the consequence of a failing marriage, not the cause. When you are the president with power over a nation it can counteract the wimpyness. For a software developer? Not so much.
- mattgreenrocks 14y ago
  That's just status anxiety. It's easier (and more fulfilling) to fix the wimp factor. You'd have to do that, eventually. The wife is just acting as the canary in the coal mine.
- Retric 14y ago
  Adultery is rather common. Estimates vary widely, but 2-4% of children are not biologically related to their 'fathers'. Which only measures female adultery leading to a child add in male adultery it's farm more common than generally acknowledged.
nessus42 14y ago
I'm not as impressed by this letter as others seem to be. Reagan's only advice is don't cheat and say "I love you" every day? Who goes into a marriage expecting to cheat? And if you even have the slightest inkling of wanting to cheat at the start, you're almost certainly marrying the wrong person. The letter provides no insight that I didn't already have by the time I was ten. The true challenges of marriage come when the other person doesn't support your ambitions in life, or you don't support theirs. When you feel that they are constantly critical of you, or you of them. When they gain 100 pounds, or when you do. When for no particularly good reason you become engulfed with jealousy. Or they do. When infatuation gives way to whatever deeper feelings lie beneath. Or maybe you discover that the deeper feelings aren't there and you need to cultivate them if the marriage is to survive. The challenges and joys of marriage are so much deeper than this letter conveys. This letter is like the "Just say no" to drugs campaign. Everything is boiled down to meaningless simplicity.
- jonstjohn 14y ago
  I was moved by the simplicity of the letter, even if it was from a different era. I felt there was more to it than just 'go through the motions' and you'll be fine.
- aggronn 14y ago
  I think you glossed over the deeper meaning of the letter, which addresses exactly what you're describing. Its not a how-to on the various problems you may or may not face, written during a time when the only problem with marriage was male infidelity--its a overarching philosophy where he only used one example for illustration. You get what you put in. The context implies that there is another side the coin, and that this isn't a scientific destruction of the institution of marriage. It, and I think this is implied, assumes that the other person is also putting in what they hope to get out, and that you're marrying the right person.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    I didn't gloss over any deeper meaning to the letter--it's not there. It's a very focussed and on-point sermon on remaining faithful. He barely even touches on why men sometimes cheat, other than to prove their manhood. But without addressing the real reasons, the message is just a lot of hot air. The real reason that most people cheat is because they don't feel loved, not because they just need another notch on their belt. They feel like they've already given 110% and their efforts are not appreciated, and the other person doesn't love them for their true selves, only for whatever tangible benefits they provide to the other person. If I got such a letter from my father, I'd think, Pappa don't preach, throw the letter into the trash, and mark it down to yet another way in which my father didn't bother to get to know me or understand me at all.

Great, unconventional advice on marriage to his son. This is time-proof advice for any generation too.

As an armchair history buff, I love famous historical people who were also prolific letter-writers. It gives a great insight into the person, especially when the letter was between family members or close friends and never intended for public consumption. (Reagan was one of these people) As much as I like Letters of Note for the great letters, for me having a stream of letters makes the person much more three-dimensional. The book on the Adams-Jefferson letters has been on my reading list for a year now. Can't wait to get time to read it. http://amzn.to/MudjlA http://amzn.to/MudjlA I believe there is a similar book for Reagan, but I haven't researched it. Enough stuff on the list already.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
One of the great things about writing a letter is that it takes enough time and energy that you invest a bit of thought before you send it. I worry about 21st century thinkers who will be judged not only by the things they chose to write well, but the one-offs they sent out in the heat of the moment over email.
- brucejaywallace 14y ago
  I totally agree.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I wonder if some of that impression isn't anachronistic projection, though. Today you think of a letter as something that takes time/energy/thought investment. But it was not at all uncommon for frequent letter-writers of previous eras to write many letters in a day, closer to the way we write emails than the way we write letters. Probably not quite as routine as the average email, but people who wrote thousands of letters during their life treated it as just as normal way of communicating. It wasn't that strange for letters to be dashed off in short periods of time, and like with email, the amount of agonizing/revision/thought that was put into a particular letter varied greatly. On your latter worry, it seems like there's some of that with earlier eras' figures as well. For example, some people's opinion of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre has shifted for the worse since their correspondence was published, since much of it is more like a sordid chatroom log, full of offhanded gossip about other people and such, than like the philosophical works they intended for public consumption.
  - Retric 14y ago
    The time spent writing them my be similar to email. But, you could generally change your mind about sending them for much longer than email.
- pacaro 14y ago
  You can choose not to send heat-of-the-moment emails. a) You can be intentional about all your public writing - and I think that we have learned by now that email always has the potential to become public. b) You can set up a delay-sending rule in your email client so that you have a grace period between pressing send and the message actually being sent - this has saved me embarrassment on any number of occasions.
- ibisum 14y ago
  Come now.. research your own deep track of historical data, all you've ever posted on the Internet for 'eternity' for 'all to see', and you do indeed get a broader picture of the person behind the posts. Indeed we all have a common blithe ability to write a rotten sentence. But if you look at, say, jwz's broad swatches of data, or some other such figure, you can see that the bad emails are par for the course. I'd be worried if the figures of the 21st Century couldn't write an e-mail, at any position of the scale of troll to hero.
- primitur 14y ago
  Come now.. research your own deep track of historical data, all you've ever posted on the Internet for 'eternity' for 'all to see', and you do indeed get a broader picture of the person behind the posts. Indeed we all have a common blithe ability to write a rotten sentence. But if you look at, say, jwz's broad swatches of data, or some other such figure, you can see that the bad emails are par for the course. I'd be worried if the figures of the 21st Century couldn't write an e-mail, at any position of the scale of troll to hero.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Oh I knew I was in trouble when AltaVista first hit and I realized that I would never get away from being 'that guy who used to post a lot of stuff on comp.sys.amiga.' :-)
soupboy 14y ago
You may be interested in reading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_a_Father_to_His_Daughter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_a_Father_to_His_Da...] - letters from India's first prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru to his daughter Indira who later became India's first female prime-minister and the only one to have imposed a state of emergency.
- brucejaywallace 14y ago
  I'll definitely check this out, thank you!
sethbannon 14y ago
You'll likely appreciate one of my favorite books, called "My Dearest Friend". It's a collection of letters between John and Abigail Adams and it's truly enlightening. Link: http://www.amazon.com/My-Dearest-Friend-Letters-Abigail/dp/0674026063 http://www.amazon.com/My-Dearest-Friend-Letters-Abigail/dp/0...
ojosilva 14y ago
My favorite epistolary book ever is Kafka's letters to Milena. Very profound and intense as Kafka, troubled and kafkian himself, collapses slowly -- into his tuberculosis and the realization of this platonic love affair. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Milena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Milena
protomyth 14y ago
President Reagan also has a book of speeches. His early speeches were self-written and pretty refined from multiple tellings. The advantage today is that you can listen to how he gave them as opposed to having an actor read it. Of the modern Presidents, he probably wrote the most words and he did learn his style from radio and Hollywood. Not bad teachers in his day. I do wonder in a hundred years what the historians will think of the writings of the first President to grow up with social media or maybe even USENET.

nickpp 14y ago

How qualified was Reagan to give marriage advice? How many marriages did he have? Was he a marriage counsellor? Did he study marriages? Statistics on couple behaviors? Or is this like listening to the Kardashian's opinion on... child rearing or something?

bstewartnyc 14y ago
Ronald Reagan was a wise man and great president.
- myko 14y ago
  Great by whose measure? As far as I'm concerned he is an embarrassment (as a President). I do think these letters are of historical interest though, glad to see them available.
  - ambertch 14y ago
    You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
    - myko 14y ago
      Talk highly of him all you want, his rhetoric has hurt the US far more than it has helped. Between his voodoo economics and ignoring of the AIDs crisis, Iran Contra, the 'Moral Majority', I think you are embarrassing yourself here, not me. He is the epitome of style over substance.

makhanko 14y ago

Regardless of the fact that this was written by a former US president, what’s truly amazing is that somebody could take a subject old as the world – love and marriage and write such a simple, genuine, straight to the point message, without a hint of bullshit that happens to reads like a novel.

cynthiaherald 14y ago
If you think about it, it may be much harder to do so in a hand written letter too....compared to typing 75 words per minutes. Writing is slower, makes you more purposeful with every word, etc.

rekoros 14y ago

I wonder why Michael got a divorce a year later. Maybe he didn't read the letter?

toemetoch 14y ago
Maybe that was his father's motivation to write the letter in the first place, he might have seen a predictable path in this relationship or how his son deals with things.
jfoutz 14y ago
pretty much followed in pop's footsteps.

theorique 14y ago

Very wise words. And a very interesting look at the personal, family world of a very public figure of the late 20th century.

alexscheelmeyer 14y ago

I would be more inclined to accept his message if it could not be boiled down to "If it is not working for you, you are not trying hard enough". Also, more marriages have probably failed due to the husband being a wimpy "I love you every day no matter what"-kind of guy than due to adultery. Adultery is the consequence of a failing marriage, not the cause. When you are the president with power over a nation it can counteract the wimpyness. For a software developer? Not so much.

mattgreenrocks 14y ago
That's just status anxiety. It's easier (and more fulfilling) to fix the wimp factor. You'd have to do that, eventually. The wife is just acting as the canary in the coal mine.
Retric 14y ago
Adultery is rather common. Estimates vary widely, but 2-4% of children are not biologically related to their 'fathers'. Which only measures female adultery leading to a child add in male adultery it's farm more common than generally acknowledged.

nessus42 14y ago

I'm not as impressed by this letter as others seem to be. Reagan's only advice is don't cheat and say "I love you" every day? Who goes into a marriage expecting to cheat? And if you even have the slightest inkling of wanting to cheat at the start, you're almost certainly marrying the wrong person. The letter provides no insight that I didn't already have by the time I was ten. The true challenges of marriage come when the other person doesn't support your ambitions in life, or you don't support theirs. When you feel that they are constantly critical of you, or you of them. When they gain 100 pounds, or when you do. When for no particularly good reason you become engulfed with jealousy. Or they do. When infatuation gives way to whatever deeper feelings lie beneath. Or maybe you discover that the deeper feelings aren't there and you need to cultivate them if the marriage is to survive. The challenges and joys of marriage are so much deeper than this letter conveys. This letter is like the "Just say no" to drugs campaign. Everything is boiled down to meaningless simplicity.

jonstjohn 14y ago
I was moved by the simplicity of the letter, even if it was from a different era. I felt there was more to it than just 'go through the motions' and you'll be fine.
aggronn 14y ago
I think you glossed over the deeper meaning of the letter, which addresses exactly what you're describing. Its not a how-to on the various problems you may or may not face, written during a time when the only problem with marriage was male infidelity--its a overarching philosophy where he only used one example for illustration. You get what you put in. The context implies that there is another side the coin, and that this isn't a scientific destruction of the institution of marriage. It, and I think this is implied, assumes that the other person is also putting in what they hope to get out, and that you're marrying the right person.
- nessus42 14y ago
  I didn't gloss over any deeper meaning to the letter--it's not there. It's a very focussed and on-point sermon on remaining faithful. He barely even touches on why men sometimes cheat, other than to prove their manhood. But without addressing the real reasons, the message is just a lot of hot air. The real reason that most people cheat is because they don't feel loved, not because they just need another notch on their belt. They feel like they've already given 110% and their efforts are not appreciated, and the other person doesn't love them for their true selves, only for whatever tangible benefits they provide to the other person. If I got such a letter from my father, I'd think, Pappa don't preach, throw the letter into the trash, and mark it down to yet another way in which my father didn't bother to get to know me or understand me at all.