As a rule, Lou Cannon is the interviewer, not the interviewee. He’s one of the premier political journalists in America. But he has sat for his share of interviews, as he is now. “As long as you don’t defame my wife or my children, I’m happy.”
Cannon has been reporting for more than 70 years — since high school. He is best known as a Reagan biographer. “Reagan’s Boswell” is a moniker long attached to him. He also wrote a splendid book on Los Angeles and the 1992 riots. Back in 1977, he wrote a book called “Reporting: An Inside View.” A good 20 years ago, I asked him some basic questions: “What’s ‘on background,’ exactly? How about ‘off the record’?” He e-mailed me some excerpts from his 1977 book.
“Full disclosure,” as people say today: We are old friends.
I have come to see him at his home in Summerland, Calif., just south of Santa Barbara. He and his wife, Mary, are on a hilltop, overlooking the Pacific. You can hear the trains blow their whistle down below. On the patio, the Cannons’ wind chimes do their thing.
Lou and Mary Cannon
Summerland started out as a Spiritualist colony, Lou tells me. That’s why the lots are small: You pitched a tent on them. Summerland is also an oil town, historically. In 1969, there was a huge spill, befouling the Pacific, which led to the first Earth Day in 1970.
The spill was one of the causes, Lou cautions. “Things tend to be more complicated when you look into them.”
He came to this area when he was a roving California reporter. And when he was Western correspondent of the Washington Post. He came here quite a bit when he was covering Reagan’s presidency — the Reagan ranch is not far away, in the Santa Ynez Mountains.
I am curious about Cannon’s media diet. What does the veteran reporter read, to keep up with the news? Plenty. He subscribes to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times — in print. He subscribes to his old paper, the Post, online. He also reads The Economist, faithfully. (“I like The Economist.”) And then there’s a slew of other publications, including Opera News. (“I’m starved for opera and classical music generally.”)
From 2005 until the end of last year, Cannon wrote a column for State Net Capitol Journal, based in Sacramento. He retired from the column in order to work full tilt on his memoirs. One of Cannon’s children, Carl, is a veteran journalist himself. He is the Washington bureau chief of RealClear Politics. Lou tells me that Carl has forbidden him to write for RCP until he finishes his memoirs. But Carl is not super-strict about it. He allows his father one here or there.
Carl and Lou Cannon
At Lou Cannon’s memoirs, I have had a sneak peek. They are superb: both memoiristic, in a traditional sense, and reportorial. Cannon is ever the reporter. He even fact-checks his mother’s age! (His brother, Bob, discovered that she had lopped six years off it, unbeknownst to her husband and the rest of the family.)
Lou’s own birthday is not in doubt: June 3, 1933. He was born in New York City. His mother was an Easterner, his father a Westerner. The family moved to Nevada when Lou was about three.
The Cannons lived in Reno, and, for three years during the war, Fallon, about 60 miles to the east. (After Lou tells me this, he says, “When you’re my age and you say ‘the war,’ you mean World War II.”) The senior Cannons ran a thrift shop. And managed an auto-court motel. And did other things. “The term ‘latchkey kid’ did not exist when I was a child,” says Lou, “but that’s what I was. I never particularly minded that. I’ve always been able to find something to do.”
Lou’s dad, Jack, was Irish Catholic. Lou’s mother, Irene, came from a Hungarian Jewish family. She was “a little bitty thing,” says Lou, and very smart. She was denied a college education, unfortunately. She wanted Lou to become a lawyer — and “lawyer,” as Cannon explains, was a byword for an educated, professional man.
Jack Cannon was a “roustabout,” as Lou puts it, and a “nomadic character.” He worked all over the West, and beyond. He could build anything with his hands, Lou says. He was also “the most colorblind person — most colorblind white person — I ever knew.” One day, Jack picked up a black hitchhiker in Arkansas. A cop pulled them over, and Jack spent the night in jail. What happened to the hitchhiker, Lou doesn’t know.
Jack had an affliction, namely alcoholism. “That was very difficult for me,” Lou says, with understatement. “He was fine when he wasn’t drinking, and when he was drinking, he wasn’t fine.”
Now and then, after an interview, Ronald Reagan and Lou Cannon would have a personal conversation. Often, these touched on their mothers. One time, however, when he was president, Reagan asked Cannon about his father. Cannon explained that his father was an Irish American named Jack who moved around a lot and suffered from alcoholism. Reagan commented, “Maybe that’s why you’re interested in me.” (All of those things were true of Reagan’s father, too.)
In Reno, the Cannons had a friend who was Finnish. In November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Lou was six. And owing to the family friend, he was very interested in the war, which would be known as the “Winter War.” He is reminded of that war by today’s war. “I follow the twists and turns of the invasion of Ukraine obsessively,” he says. “Normal people are going to work, and then their houses are destroyed or their children are killed. That gets you pretty damn concerned, if you’re a small-d democrat.”
He adds, “I think it’s quite clear that Putin won’t stop in Ukraine.” Putin himself will tell you as much. Dictators, Cannon continues, often spell out clearly what their intentions are, “and we in free countries seem to have an unlimited capacity for disbelieving what they say.”
Elaborating, Cannon says, “It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that China has suppressed and imprisoned the Uyghurs, because, in China’s eyes — the eyes of the ruler, Xi Jinping, and the eyes of Han Chinese in general — they’re inferior beings, you know?”
In 1949, when he was 16, Lou was one of two Nevadans who went to Washington, D.C., for Boys Nation. Afterward, he traveled to New York, ostensibly to see some of his mother’s relatives — but mainly to see Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson. He saw them both, at Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field.
DiMaggio was known for effortless grace, Cannon points out. People said, “He makes it look easy.” DiMaggio was indeed very graceful, Cannon remembers. But he also saw, sitting in the center-field bleachers, that DiMaggio “ran like crazy to get to the ball.” Yes, “he made it look easy. But it wasn’t easy.”
Before he was a political reporter, Cannon was a sports reporter — working for the Nevada State Journal, when he was a high-schooler. The sports editor was Ty Cobb — not the Ty Cobb, of course, but a Nevadan named after the great ballplayer. Lou covered football, stock-car racing, and other pastimes.
He graduated from Reno High in 1950 — the youngest member of his class. He attended the University of Nevada and San Francisco State College, but then Uncle Sam called: Cannon was drafted. He spent two years in the Army, stateside, at Ford Ord, in California. When he got out, he had two kids (out of an eventual four). Rather than go back to college, he went to work. And newspaper ink was in his blood.
He worked for little California papers, and then bigger ones. He had a variety of assignments, a variety of responsibilities. In his spare time, he wrote a novel (unpublished). (“The publisher did me a favor by not publishing it,” says Cannon.) Eventually, he landed at the San Jose Mercury.
In 1964, he was at the Mercury, and the GOP presidential contest was hot. Exciting. Goldwater versus Rockefeller. Naturally, Cannon wanted to cover the convention in San Francisco. But the Mercury was not able to send him. So he used his vacation time to go cover the convention for another paper — the Pine Bluff Commercial, in Arkansas.
When Rocky gave his speech, the Goldwater delegates were booing him, roundly, but there was one man near the Arkansas delegation who was cheering Rocky on. It was a familiar figure, to Lou Cannon and most every other American: Jackie Robinson.
No one around Robinson was booing, Cannon recalls. And the convention at large was not very friendly to the press (as you can imagine). So, to a reporter, the space around Robinson seemed pretty safe.
And, yes, Cannon was able to tell the ex-ballplayer that he had seen him play in Brooklyn.
The year after the convention, in 1965, another familiar American figure, Ronald Reagan, experimented with running for governor of California. The election was not until 1966, but Reagan was doing “out-of-town tryouts,” as the veteran actor would say. Cannon covered him in ’65 and never stopped.
Reagan had “a phenomenal rote memory,” as Cannon says, and had a large repertoire of stories and answers. Reagan interviews could be uninteresting — actually, “great bores,” Cannon says — if you knew the repertoire. The trick, for an interviewer, was to get his subject to go beyond the repertoire.
In 1968, Governor Reagan made a play for the Republican presidential nomination, but lost out to Nixon (as did Rockefeller). In the general election, Reagan flew around the country, stumping for Republican candidates. On a long trip from California to the East Coast, Cannon interviewed Reagan about his early life and Hollywood career. This was in preparation for a book to be called “Ronnie & Jesse: A Political Odyssey.” (Jesse M. Unruh was the speaker of the California Assembly, a Democrat.) With Cannon’s tape recorder running, Reagan answered questions and told stories.
Cannon had a funny feeling. The answers and stories seemed very familiar. When he got to his hotel room, he checked the tape against Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? (published in 1965, as a boost to the ’66 campaign). What Cannon discovered “gave me the chills,” he says. Not only had Reagan told him the same stories that appeared in the book. “He had repeated what he’d said three or four years earlier in dictating his book word for word!”
You can imagine the position that Cannon was in. He could hardly put in his book the same material that Reagan had used in his own book — verbatim. So, candidly, he told the governor of his predicament. Said the governor, “You want something new, Lou?” “Yes, sir,” said Cannon. Reagan understood entirely.
Cannon interviewed Reagan many, many times thereafter. And Reagan always took care to give Cannon “something new.”
Mind you, Cannon does not blame a politician, at all, for sticking to tried-and-true answers and illustrations. Why should he depart? Why should he improvise or expand? It is the interviewer’s job to get fresh material, if he can, not the interviewee’s to provide it.
Reagan’s aides were happy for Cannon to keep Reagan company on that 1968 flight, and on other flights, in that campaign season. Reagan was afraid of flying. This stemmed from a scare he had on a trip way back in 1937. For many years, Reagan’s contracts stipulated that he travel by car or train. On one of those 1968 flights, Cannon asked Reagan, “Are you still afraid of flying?” Looking out the window, Reagan answered, “No, Lou, but it’s still an awful long way down.”
With Nancy Reagan, Cannon’s relationship was tense in the early years, warm in the later ones. In Ronnie & Jesse, Cannon reported something not widely known: Mrs. Reagan’s father, Loyal Davis, was her adoptive father, not her biological one. Born Anne Frances Robbins, the future first lady had a complicated upbringing. Dr. Davis adopted her at some point in her teens. Mrs. Reagan was furious — furious — at Cannon.
Cannon is not unsympathetic. On the contrary, he says that Mrs. Reagan “showed a fierce devotion” to Dr. Davis, “who was her father in every way but the biological.”
Flash way forward. When Edmund Morris published his authorized biography of Reagan in 1999, Nancy Reagan was furious at the outcome. “I’m so mad,” she said to Cannon, complaining about the book at length. Cannon pointed out that she herself had arranged for Morris to write the book. “I know,” she admitted, “and I’m so mad at myself.”
Nancy Reagan “was brighter and more broad-gauged than anyone gave her credit for being,” says Cannon. “She came to realize that I care about Reagan — that’s the present tense, because I still care about Reagan — yet I was never going to write about him worshipfully.” Mrs. Reagan, says Cannon, understood that someone who wrote worshipfully about Reagan was not going to do him or his legacy any good.
And when Cannon says this, he is not passing judgment on Morris, or anyone else. He is talking about Reagan biographies and Reagan writing in general. Nor does he think he is the last word on Reagan. There is always more to learn, he says, more to be perceived.
About his relationship with Nancy Reagan, he says, “We came to value each other, I think, and I know I valued her, and I still do. And I grieved when she died.”
One afternoon, in about 1990, Cannon had a conversation with Mrs. Reagan as she was in her blue jeans doing the wash. (Those who observed her during the presidential years may have trouble envisioning this scene.) Cannon said there were some things he just didn’t get about her husband. She said, in essence, “Same with me.” She said something like, “There are times when I can get just so far, and I can’t go beyond a barrier with him.” Reflecting on this, Mrs. Reagan suggested it might have to do with an alcoholic father and a nomadic childhood.
That was a “liberating” conversation, says Cannon. If even Nancy ran up against a barrier — who wouldn’t?
Cannon has a lot to say about Ronald Reagan in his forthcoming memoirs. He is engrossing, and penetrating, on his longtime subject. Over the years, many Reagan fans have found him too critical; many Reagan non-fans have found him too admiring. The memoirs “will be seen by some people as too kind about Reagan,” says the author, “but I don’t care.” He then clarifies: He very much cares about getting Reagan right — or any other subject right. And then people respond as they do, pro and con.
Here is some more, from Cannon: “In a career as long and significant as Reagan’s, there was bound to be information that cut both ways. Not even a Reagan aficionado can make the Lebanon deployment look good. Even Reagan’s most severe critics cannot honestly deny that he restored the self-confidence of America when it was very low.”
All his life, Cannon has been a hard worker (in addition to a very successful one). “I don’t believe in writer’s block,” he says. “I believe you write every day, and you don’t know beforehand what will be a good day or a bad day. Or an average day. But if you write every day, you don’t have to worry about it.” You just beaver away.
If he needs an excuse for writing his memoirs, he has one, he says. “I’ve got seven great-grandchildren, and maybe one of them will be interested.” But so will many other people. Lou Cannon is a journalist’s journalist and a classic American. He appreciates and loves his country — and chronicles it — while being mindful of the big broad world. He is also a helluva colleague and friend.
