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Tag: president reagan

  • Ronald Reagan biographer, legendary California journalist Lou Cannon dies

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    For the record:

    2:49 p.m. Dec. 20, 2025An earlier version of this story included a photo caption that identified journalist Sander Vanocur as Lou Cannon.

    Journalist and author Lou Cannon, who was widely considered the nation’s leading authority on the life and career of President Reagan, died Friday in a Santa Barbara hospice. He was 92.

    His death was caused by complications from a stroke, his son Carl M. Cannon told the Washington Post, where his father served for years as a White House correspondent.

    The elder Cannon covered Reagan’s two-term presidency in the 1980s, but his relationship with the enigmatic Republican leader went back to the 1960s, when Reagan moved from acting to politics.

    Cannon interviewed Reagan more than 50 times and wrote five books about him, but still struggled to understand what made Reagan who he was.

    “The more I wrote,” Cannon told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001, “the more I felt I didn’t know.”

    Cannon was born in New York City and raised in Reno, Nev., where he attended the University of Nevada in Reno and later San Francisco State College.

    After service 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 for the Washington Post as a political reporter.

    Cannon recalled first encountering Reagan in 1965 while assigned to cover a lunch event for reporters and lobbyists and being surprised by Reagan’s command of the room when he spoke.

    Reagan was beginning his campaign for governor by proving he could answer questions and “was not just an actor reading a script.” At the time, the word actor was “a synonym for airhead. Well, Reagan was no airhead,” Cannon said in a 2008 interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum.

    To Cannon’s surprise, the reporters and lobbyists mobbed Reagan after the event was over to get his autograph. Cannon introduced himself.

    “I remember those steely eyes of his. I thought he had this great face, but his eyes are tough,” Cannon said. “His eyes are really something.”

    On the phone later, Cannon’s editor asked him what he thought of Reagan. He replied, “I don’t know anything, but if I were running this thing, why would anybody want to run against somebody that everybody knows and everybody likes? Why would you want him to be your opponent?

    “I predicted that Reagan was going to be president, but I didn’t have any idea he was going to be governor,” Cannon said. “I was just so struck by the fact that he impacted on people as, not like he was a politician, but like he was this celebrity, force of nature that people wanted to rub up against. It was like seeing Kennedy again. They wanted the aura, the sun.”

    In 1966, Reagan was elected governor by a margin of nearly 1 million votes and Cannon found himself “writing about Ronald Reagan every day.”

    Reagan’s political opponents in California and Washington consistently underestimated him, assuming the former actor could be easily beaten at the ballot box, Cannon said. Reagan ran for president unsuccessfully twice, but had the will to keep trying until he won — twice.

    “Reagan was tough, and 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 sakes. And certainly no advisor could or no other candidate. Ronald Reagan wanted to be president of the United States.”

    Cannon’s first book on the president, “Reagan,” was published in 1982. In 1991 he published “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” which is regarded as a comprehensive biography of the 40th president.

    Cannon also authored a book about the LAPD and the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, in addition to chronicling a range of tales over the years, including the federal bust of a 1970s heroin kingpin in Las Vegas.

    Mr. Cannon’s first marriage, to Virginia Oprian, who helped him research his early books, ended in divorce. In 1985, he wed Mary Shinkwin, the Washington Post said. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children.

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Granderson: If the economy is so great, why are evictions soaring?

    Granderson: If the economy is so great, why are evictions soaring?

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    There is another migrant crisis brewing. Unlike the one at the southern border, this one will be all over the country.

    A recent Harvard study found that half of the country’s renters are spending a third or more of their income on housing. Those are the people fortunate enough to find housing when there’s a nationwide shortage of affordable homes. Combine the rent line item with the soaring cost of child care, and don’t forget groceries, and … well, you can understand why evictions have spiked and homelessness has reached a record high.

    Opinion Columnist

    LZ Granderson

    LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America.

    We’re living through an age of contradictions. The United States is the strongest economy in the world, and Americans’ credit card debt has never been higher. The unemployment rate has been less than 5% for President Biden’s entire first term, and voters disapprove of his handling of the economy. Wall Street predicted that last year’s gross domestic product would grow by less than 2%, and instead it was 2.5% — yet the economy feels weak to a lot of people.

    That’s because for many people, the economy is weak.

    Right now the top 1% has more money than the nation’s entire middle class. For Americans with the lowest incomes, rent is just the beginning of the worries.

    Unaffordable rent is a continuation of the wealth redistribution that accompanied the economic policies of President Reagan.

    Before disco, the top 10% shared 30% of the nation’s income, while the remaining 90% lived off the rest. Today, the bottom 90% is getting by with less than 60% of the income. The top 1% took in 14.6% in 2021, which is twice their 7.3% share in 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

    After 1979, Reagan convinced voters to make capital more important than people. Give the rich more, and the extra will “trickle down” — remember that? Greed is a part of capitalism, but it’s not a part of patriotism. Reagan’s characterization of our economy conflated those two concepts, and many Americans embraced that fallacy as truth. Those who struggled to achieve prosperity were viewed as lazy and unworthy of help. Something had to be wrong with them, the thinking went, because nothing was wrong with this “land of opportunity.”

    This was the era when well-paying manufacturing jobs went elsewhere. This was when large, successful companies were able to rake in record profits, while hardworking employees began to rely on food stamps to feed their families.

    And now Congress is trying to solve the housing crisis by offering housing developers more tax credits. So much for the invisible hand of the free market, right? Although there is a desperate need for more affordable housing, developers apparently do not make enough money to want to do it, so government has to dangle a carrot to ensure that thriving corporations will thrive even more.

    Conservatives often talk of the country’s unsustainable spending. It isn’t federal debt that should worry them most, though. How much longer can 22 million people spend a third or more of their earnings on rent?

    In 2023, some states saw eviction filings jump more than 50% compared with pre-pandemic levels — and back then, the unemployment rate was higher. That’s not sustainable either.

    Whether it’s living off borrowings in order to avoid taxable income or reporting losses legally while still making money, the various ways billionaire owners end up paying a lower tax rate than many of their employees are well-documented. When rising costs are passed down to consumers — rent, baby formula, bacon — we are conditioned to blame the government and not the price-gougers. When gas prices are up, many point fingers at the White House, even though, of course, presidents don’t control gas prices.

    This sorry state of the American economy is not attributable entirely to either party or any one presidential administration. This redistribution has continued on everyone’s watch. However, we are reaching a point where a lot of people are fed up with their hard work not paying off, and they’re going to take action. That’s why the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2023 “the year of the strike.” Workers saw the prosperity at the top and demanded their fair share.

    Now more than ever, we need Congress to close the tax loopholes that have allowed trillions of dollars to be redirected away from the many and hoarded by the few. Because the rent crisis isn’t a new problem: It’s the latest incarnation of the one that started when policymakers began to pretend that greed is good.

    @LZGranderson

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    LZ Granderson

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