Sorry - my eyes are playing up again.

Here's the link again:

http://hoover.org/research/secrets-statecraft-peter-robinson-art-writing-ronald-reagans-speeches

david f,
Those who are best at making political decisions aren't always the best at communicating their ideas to the public. I don't think imposing arbitrary restrictions on the jobs people can do would be a good thing.

On a less serious note, did you ever see In The Red? The final episode includes the best fictional political speech ever!

Well SR, as I said, competing stories for which we'll never know the answer. Those who think little of Reagan will believe one thing and those who know he was The Great Communicator will think the opposite.

There's as much point arguing over it as there is arguing over which is the best colour.

mhaze,

Gaslighting again.

There's evidence and then there's bulldust.

And no one but you is inferring anything negative
about the former US President. As a matter of fact
he was very popular - especially in California - his
home state. I know. I lived there for close to ten
years.

Dear mhaze,

There aren't competing stories at all. There is the account of the person who wrote the draft of the speech for the president and there is a president who never claimed to have written the words himself.

And I seem to recall you lauding Peter Robinson as a 'conservative intellectual'.

Are you now claiming he is a lying sack of ...

Therefore the only way there is two sides to the story is if you are conceding conservative intellectuals can be out and out liars.

Which is it?

Foxy,

Why are you so upset about this? Its been argued back and forth within the Reagan fraternity for thirty years, with no resolution. IIRC there was an exchange of views within the pages of the Wall Street Journal about the provenance of its most iconic line.

It was an iconic speech with an iconic line (even though you got it wrong twice here) and who came up with it is of secondary importance and will never be known for certain.

Why so overwrought?

Next you'll be telling me Churchill didn't write the Chamberlain eulogy and if you think I keep trying to get the conversation back to that speech, its only because I'm so fond of it.

Just on speech-writers, the first and one of the greatest was Thucydides who wrote in the final decades of the 5th century BC. His books are replete with speeches from all sorts of politicians and he wrote every one of them based on his recollection of what he or his informers recalled and what he considered the speaker would have said in the circumstances.

Pericles' Funeral Oration, widely considered one of the great speeches of history, is almost certainly primarily Thucydides' work.