From Publishers Weekly
In the wake of Reagan’s death, many people jumped at the opportunity to define the former president and his impact on the 20th century. Among the commentators in this collection of editorials, obituaries and speeches by and about "the great communicator" are CBS correspondents Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace and Bob Schieffer. While eloquent, they often echo dispassionately what has been said many times over about Reagan. Stahl muses that Reagan’s appeal to the American people was as inexplicable as a love affair, and Rather notes that, in the 1980s, "the nation… bore the unmistakable imprimatur of Ronald Reagan." Schieffer, meanwhile, suggests Reagan as a model for elevating present-day political discourse. What rescues this book from the ubiquitous editorial condescension and abstraction of these essays are daughter Patti’s farewell to her father, written for People days before his death, and the eulogy offered at the National Cathedral by Reagan’s more plain-spoken vice-president, George H. W. Bush. Most extraordinary, however, are Reagan’s speeches, which serve as historical markers of his political career and as primers for nascent political speechwriters. Reagan’s 1964 endorsement of Barry Goldwater emerges as the book’s centerpiece. The speech, both ideological and prescient, leaps off the page as the blueprint for Reagan’s political philosophy and future presidential agenda, as he turns up the rhetoric on communism and what he perceived as "the welfare state." The book succeeds as a scrapbook of these legendary moments, which are captured both in text, in the color photos interspersed throughout and in the accompanying DVD.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Reagan's death in June, after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease that removed him from the public stage, provoked a national outpouring of affection and reexamination of the century he seemed to embody. Reagan grew up in small-town America, came of age during the Depression, served in the military during World War II, and later embarked on careers, as actor, governor, and president, that put him front and center for much of the drama and events of the twentieth century. CBS News examines the life of an engaging man but a disengaged president. This book traces Reagan's childhood as the emotionally distant son of an alcoholic father and a theatrical mother, who, by virtue of his temperament and disposition, was able to look beyond the complexities of his personal life and the life of the nation to focus on those things that would evoke optimism. The book and an accompanying DVD pull together the record and images of Reagan's life and presidency, with photographs, speeches, and articles about Reagan's presidency. Reagan's accomplishments and disgraces are chronicled, including his role in the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Iran-Contra scandal, his inability to quell the contentiousness of Congress and his detractors, and the adoration of his wife, Nancy. Whether fans or critics, readers will appreciate this remembrance of a popular president whose influence continues to be felt. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
A portrait of a president whose eternally optimistic spirit guided his life and leadership, Ronald Reagan Remembered captures in words, pictures, and video the private world and public presidency of a beloved national icon. When former President Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004, at the age of ninety-three, the nation paid its respects and, over the next days, recalled the life of the fortieth president and anticipated his legacy. Using the resources of CBS News, Ronald Reagan Remembered provides a full record of Reagan's life and assesses his place in American history. Three of CBS News's most respected journalists -- Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, and Mike Wallace -- offer original essays drawing on their personal experience of Reagan in action. Many of the speeches of the president known as The Great Communicator are collected on the special full-length DVD -- including the address to the nation after the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin -- along with classic interviews with Reagan and his family. Ronald Reagan Remembered also includes Bob Schieffer's insightful Face the Nation commentary "Lessons from Ronald Reagan," a touching tribute by Reagan's daughter Patti Davis, and obituaries and analysis from the best of the print media, including the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Time and Newsweek magazines. Illustrated with more than 80 photographs, Ronald Reagan Remembered is a comprehensive and thoughtful keepsake of one of the most remarkable of all American lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction by Dan Rather Though the twenty-first century is not yet a decade old, the twentieth century already seems a distant memory. Because of this sense of remove, we may now be able to appreciate, in a way that we could not at the end of his second term, just how completely Ronald Reagan embodied what is called "the American century." Born in 1911, he held memories that few alive today can claim. The small-town America about which President Reagan would often wax nostalgic was not a rhetorical fabrication; it was the reality that young Ronald Reagan knew as a boy. He came of age during the Great Depression and served with the Army Air Force Motion Picture Unit during World War II. He acted on the silver screen during Hollywood's golden age. Amid the strife of the 1960s, he was the governor of California known for locking horns with antiwar protestors. Ronald Reagan was a man who was fully a part of the era in which he lived, an era that left an indelible stamp on the American culture and psyche. By the time Reagan was elected president, his understanding of this country and its major currents of thought and feeling was innate. Even if one discounts all his considerable rhetorical skill, President Reagan did not have to reach to connect with his fellow Americans: if the times really do make the man, President Reagan was as American as they come. This quality may well have been at the heart of President Reagan's political success, the substance that informed his considerable blessings of easy communication. Many have called President Reagan the Great Communicator, and the label sometimes grates on his partisans, who see in it a reluctance to credit the Reagan ideology. But to Reagan detractors and defenders alike, one might ask: Just what is leadership, in a democracy, but the harnessing of policy to the horse of persuasion? In a successful presidency, these realms are inseparable, and this was something that President Reagan always seemed to grasp. In the public role of the presidency, Ronald Reagan knew how to personify the American spirit of the times, and reflect it back to an American public that generally liked what it saw. He spoke to an elevated sense of the American self, and he did so convincingly, in language that carried neither a self-conscious populist pose nor a high academic gloss. To recall President Reagan's speeches -- his first inaugural, his eulogizing of the Challenger crew, his farewell address -- is to remember a time not so long ago when words still reached out to the American imagination. Today's focus group-tested soundbites pale by comparison. For many Americans, for many Republicans and Democrats alike, Ronald Reagan holds a privileged place in America's recent historical landscape. And in this presidential election year, no sooner had President Reagan left us than each major-party candidate sought to lay claim to his legacy: one through ideological and policy affinities, the other on the issue of federal funding for stem-cell research for treating Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. On June 11, 2004, as the sun set over the American continent, a nation said its last good-byes to Ronald Wilson Reagan, fortieth president of the United States. On a California hillside facing the Pacific Ocean, a site rich in symbolism for a onetime movie star and two-term governor of the Golden State, President Reagan's remarkable journey came to its end, with history trailing in its wake. In the preceding days, America had witnessed a state funeral in the nation's capital, a rite this country had not seen in a generation. As the caisson bearing President Reagan's casket made its way past the many thousands who lined Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues, a certain air of triumph mingled with the solemnity of the occasion. As President Bush would say in the eulogy he delivered at the National Cathedral, America had lost Ronald Reagan only days before, but we had "missed him for a long time." Those who lined the streets had come not only to pay their respects but also to celebrate a life long lived, and one released at last from the terrible hold of Alzheimer's disease. Those of us in the news media who had come to Washington to cover the funeral of a president tried, with the help of historians, biographers, and President Reagan's political contemporaries, to come to terms with his legacy. Much was said, of course, about Reagan's role in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. Ubiquitous, too, was the word "optimism," used to describe the trait that, for so many, defined Reagan's personality and presidential vision. We heard about the Reagan wit and gift for oratory, and his easy way of connecting with his -- as we can still hear him say in that trademark, mellifluous voice -- "fellow Americans." But it was an observation made by Edmund Morris, President Reagan's official biographer, that may have best made sense of Ronald Reagan the man and the president, and best encapsulated what he had meant to his country and to the world. Mr. Morris recalled that former French president Francois Mitterrand had once said, roughly translated, that Reagan "Truly had a notion of the state." Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who eulogized President Reagan, also picked up on Mitterrand's words, elaborating that Reagan understood "that there is a vast difference between the job of president and the role of president." The journalist Lou Cannon, who had covered the Reagan White House for The Washington Post, expressed a parallel thought: "The greatness of Reagan was not that he was in America, but that America was inside of him," he said, recasting something that Walter Lippmann had once said of Mitterrand's predecessor, de Gaulle. Given the current international climate, it may seem odd verging on blasphemous to use one French leader or the words of another as a yardstick for evaluating one of our own. But in the post-World War II years, General de Gaulle was, like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt during the war, a man whose name had become virtually synonymous with that of his nation. In the 1980s, at the late height of the cold war, Ronald Reagan achieved a similar level of identification with the United States of America. This was true for those who watched the United States from afar, from Western and Eastern Europe and from South America; and it was true, also, for political observers and everyday Americans here at home. It was true for those who admired President Reagan's willingness to confront the Soviet Union and it was true for those dismayed by his administration's interventions in Latin America. It was true for those who approved of the deregulation and tax-cutting that marked his economic policies, and it was true, too, for those who saw in the 1980s a decade of rapaciousness and greed. No matter where you stood, the nation and the time bore the unmistakable imprimatur of Ronald Reagan. The public makes its opinions known instantly. American voters made their judgments on President Reagan known in the landslide election result of 1984, and the American heart did so again with a resounding outpouring upon Ronald Reagan's death earlier this year. History, however, is slower to register its verdicts. In these politically charged times, pundits and prognosticators of all stripes would have us believe that we can know how the future will treat our shared past, and that we can know it now. But real historians, schooled as they are in the shifting tides of fortune, tell us that true historical assessments can take generations to render. In these pages and in the accompanying DVD, CBS News has brought together writings about and images of Ronald Reagan's life and presidency. This will by no means be the last word on President Reagan and on what he meant to the United States and the world, but it is meant to provide an enduring remembrance of an important American, of the times in which he lived and of the history he helped to shape. Here is a record of presidential triumphs and trials, of a public career that spanned much of the twentieth century. Here are pictures and events that you may remember well, or that the younger among you may be encountering for the first time. From small-town Illinois to Hollywood, from the White House and, now, back to his beloved California, Ronald Wilson Reagan's journey was indeed remarkable, and uniquely American. We at CBS News hope that you will enjoy and learn from this collection of snapshots from the long road he traveled. Dan Rather New York, 2004 Copyright © 2004 by CBS Worldwide Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER