Journalist and author Lou Cannon, who was widely considered the country’s leading authority on President Reagan’s life and career, died Friday at a nursing home in Santa Barbara. He was 92 years old.
His son, Carl M. Cannon, told The Washington Post, where his father worked for years as a White House correspondent, that his death was the result of complications from a stroke.
Cannon Sr. covered Reagan’s two-term presidency in the 1980s, but his relationship with the enigmatic Republican leader goes back to the 1960s, when Reagan moved from acting to politics.
Cannon has interviewed Reagan more than 50 times and written five books about him, but he still finds it difficult to understand what made Reagan who he was.
“The more I wrote, the more I felt like I didn’t know,” Cannon told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001.
Cannon was born in New York City and grew up in Reno, Nevada, where he attended the University of Nevada at Reno and later San Francisco State College.
After serving in the U.S. Army, he became a reporter covering Reagan’s first years as governor of California for the San Jose Mercury News. In 1972, Cannon began working at The Washington Post as a political correspondent.
Cannon recalls his first meeting with Reagan in 1965 while assigned to cover a luncheon event for reporters and lobbyists and was surprised by Reagan leading the room as he spoke.
Reagan would begin his campaign for governor by proving that he could answer questions and “wasn’t just an actor reading a script.” At the time, the word “actor” was “synonymous with airhead. Well, Reagan wasn’t an airhead,” Cannon said in a 2008 interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
To Cannon’s surprise, reporters and lobbyists mobbed Reagan after the event to get his autograph. Kanon introduced himself.
“I remember his steely eyes. I thought he had this great face, but his eyes were so powerful,” Cannon said. “His eyes really are something.”
Later, Cannon’s editor asked him by phone what he thought of Reagan. He replied, “I don’t know anything, but if I’m running this thing, why would anyone want to compete against someone everyone knows and everyone loves? Why would you want him to be your opponent?”
“I expected Reagan to become president, but I had no idea he would become governor,” Cannon said. “I was struck by the fact that he had an impact on people, not as if he was a politician, but as if he was this celebrity, this force of nature that people wanted to rub shoulders with. It was like seeing Kennedy again. They wanted the halo and the sun.”
In 1966, Reagan was elected governor by a margin of nearly a million votes and Cannon found himself “writing about Ronald Reagan every day.”
Cannon said Reagan’s political opponents in California and Washington continually underestimated him, assuming the former actor could be easily defeated at the ballot box. Reagan ran unsuccessfully for president twice, but he had the will to keep trying until he won twice.
“Reagan was tough, he was determined, and you couldn’t talk him out of doing what he wanted to do,” Cannon said. “Nancy couldn’t talk him out of what he wanted to do, for God’s sake. And certainly no advisor or any other candidate could. Ronald Reagan wanted to be president of the United States.”
Cannon’s first book about the president, “Reagan,” was published in 1982. In 1991 he published “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” a comprehensive biography of the 40th president.
Cannon also wrote a book about LAPD and the Rodney King riots of 1992 in Los Angeles, as well as chronicling a host of anecdotes over the years, including the federal bust of 1970s heroin kingpin in Las Vegas.
Mr. Cannon’s marriage to Virginia O’Brien, who helped him research his first books, ended in divorce. In 1985, he married Marie Chinquin The Washington Post He said. In addition to his wife, he leaves behind three children.