Poetry Is So Vital To Us Until

The American Press Has The Blues. Too Many Authorities Have Assured It That Its Days Are Numbered, Too Many Good Newspapers Are In Ruins.

Strategic Thinkers Were Naturally Rattled To Find This Outsider Fooling Around With Their Work. They Had Been Thinking Strategically When Reagan Was Just Another Movie Actor Playing Opposite A Chimpanzee, For Heaven's Sake. They Think Reagan Is Too Naive, Too Innocent, To Grasp The Intellectual Complexities Of Cold War Strategy.

Of All The People Expressing Their Mental Vacuity, None Has A Better Excuse For An Empty Head Than The Newspaperman: If He Pauses To Restock His Brain, He Invites Onrushing Deadlines To Trample Him Flat. Broadcasting The Contents Of Empty Minds Is What Most Of Us Do Most Of The Time, And Nobody More Relentlessly Than I.

Letter Writing Was Clearly Important To Reagan. Even As President He Kept Dashing Off Letters To Friends, Pen Pals, Media People, Statesmen, Critics, And The Kind Of People Who Write To Presidents Never Expecting A Reply.

Notice, For Example, That People Who Talk About "the Joys Of Childhood" Are Always Adults. Only An Adult, Utterly Remote From The Reality Of Childhood, Could Suppose It Is Time Of Joys.