George W. Bush might be tempted to consult The Reagan Diaries to help resuscitate his own reputation. It would provide an answer or two, as long as he doesn't go beneath its surface.

At 781 pages, there are many passengers aboard this long train ride. In the dining car we see Reagan's inner circle developing their arguments for supply side economics and conducting the Cold War through often dubious means. The viewing car is packed with Hollywood luminaries of the Studio era — Princess Grace of Monaco, Claudette Colbert and, briefly, in the corner, a mysteriously wasting Rock Hudson. Restless in the sleeping car are Reagan's counterparts in Britain, France, Israel, an economically surging Japan and a succession of decrepit Soviet leaders huddled around their bright young hope, and Reagan's unlikely comrade, Mikhail Gorbachev.

But one needn't go too far into this trip before feeling the absence of the conductor — Ronald Reagan himself. Gorbachev has written extensively about the same period of diplomatic jostling with a verve that challenges the adage about history belonging to the victors. Reagan, while keeping a daily log of the era that we've named after him, stylistically shrinks from his own mantle.

A look at the circumstances surrounding the writing of The Reagan Diaries, edited and abridged by popular historian Douglas Brinkley, helps explain why. Presidential diaries are a rare event. Only five are known to have been kept out of forty-three administrations. Before Reagan's, the most recent was Rutherford B. Hayes's, barely a decade after the Civil War and a little over a hundred years before Reagan's inauguration. So the prospect of a late 20th Century American president sidestepping the incidental record compiled by State Department documents and the Washington press corps suggests an unwarranted personal initiative. But as Edmund Morris's official Reagan biography attests, after more than 30 years of marriage, the president appeared to lack a square inch of inner life that he hadn't rented out to the needs of his wife, Nancy Reagan. Considering the number of third-person love notes to Nancy included here, it's fair to assume that the intended audience for these diaries are at most two in number: the skeletal figure of Nancy peaking over one broad shoulder with the cool specter of History brushing the other.

"When we left Sacramento, we felt the time passed so quickly, we could hardly remember the eight years," Nancy Reagan recently explained. "When Ronnie became president, he wanted to write it all down so we could remember these special times."

In these diaries, Reagan didn't see the point of interjecting himself more than any working stiff who might scribble a heart on corporate stationery then pass it on to the charmer in the next cubicle. The lack of detail further suggests, contrary to our most natural presumptions, that Reagan wasn't primarily concerned with using this intimate forum to pre-empt history.

But this background is only part of the intrigue of Reagan's near-transparent prose style. With the posthumous release of the diaries, Reagan achieves something far cleverer than mere self-defense. By submerging his presence into the glib day-to-day summaries of wave-making speeches, intelligence meetings, and the odd spat with his children, Reagan, as he did on the stump, secures his cult of personality by projecting an absence of personality. "Amiable dunce" is the classic Reagan description offered by his colleague Alexander Haig. But the steady references to his old-school Hollywood chums etches the picture of an astute Reagan following the lead of the top rank of stars, an exclusive club to which his mediocre box-office reputation denied him membership. First time round, anyway.

The Great Communicator, as Reagan was known on the campaign trail, displayed his command over electronic media right away in the 1964 televised speech that defined Barry Goldwater Republicanism more strikingly than Goldwater managed on his own. Reagan's successful 1966 campaign for the California Governorship would see many parallels with Arnold Schwarzenegger's speed-campaign for the same office in 2003 — the most notable of which being an unusually deft ability to steer talk about the finer details of complex issues toward a populist rhetoric that is the touchstone of Reagan's most memorable speeches. Though most politicians try this, Reagan nearly always succeeded.

He fine-tuned this talent in the 1970's with a weekly syndicated radio program that was a kind of polite forerunner to the talk radio format populated by many of the Gipper's ditsier contemporary champions. It would be a bit unfair, though, and certainly cruel (if not simply inaccurate) to credit Reagan as the midwife to this form of entertainment. It's doubtful that Reagan, who eccentrically censors his own light curses in the diaries, approved of the tone that talk radio assumes and promotes, often in his name.

Beginning with the Iran hostage crisis in late '79, Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign is popularly remembered as a year-long drubbing of the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. However, the record according to contemporary media and polling tells a different story. The hostage situation surely put Carter in a vulnerable position throughout the Spring primaries, but a confluence of good news, a drop in petrol prices being the topper, helped Carter regain his position mid-summer as the party nominations turned into the national campaign. By then, Reagan had thoroughly exposed himself as a policy-making lightweight and the stigma of an ex-screen actor divorcee created a formidable block in the imaginations of many voters.

Arguably, Reagan's final crossover to the mainstream merged on a Labor Day stump speech that the then 69-year-old candidate gave at Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty treated to guest-of-honor seating behind him. A tie-less, windblown Reagan punctuated an attack on Carter's economic policies with a taut rejoinder:

"I'm told I can't use the word depression." Reagan's once-sharp diction strained through the sea breeze. "Well, I'll tell you the definition. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

It wasn't the first or last time Reagan would cleverly mash-up a twelve-bar populist appeal into a catchy tune worthy of heavy national (and later, international) rotation.

Neatly demonstrating Reagan's ability to disappear behind his prose is the diary entry summarizing the famous "Star Wars" speech. Here, using his favorite forum, the nationally televised prime time address, Reagan announced a plan to develop a high-tech nuclear shield over America. This shield would zap offensive Soviet missiles with a complex system of, according to the short video demonstration accompanying the presentation, unprecedentedly cool lasers:

I did the speech at 8 & then joined the party for coffee. I guess it was O.K.-they all praised it to the sky & seemed to think it would be a source of debate for some time to come. I did the bulk of the speech on why our arms build up was necessary & then finished with a call to the Science community to join me in research starting now to develop a defensive weapon that would render nuclear missiles obsolete. I made no optimistic forecasts — said it might take 20 yrs. or more but we had to do it. I felt good.

Proto-glamour icon Greta Garbo once remarked, "Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening." Reagan's rather avant-garde vision of a 21st Century space war frightened many of his supporters, but it was the benign way in which he proposed the solution that frightened everyone else.

In her quip, Garbo explained what she felt was a misconception about her own invulnerability. Famously stoic in front of the camera, Garbo exuded a sexuality perfectly in sync with the new unsentimental mode of post-World War I high Modernism. Often trapped in schmaltzy prestige films, Garbo's popularity stemmed from the clear line of vision that she offered the viewer, connecting them to their desire. But Garbo contends that her iconic repose actually revealed her own weakness. It's a poor argument by an expert architect of her own ageless glamour.

Typically, when a person is considered an icon, their image transmits a message that is loaded with meaning but is paradoxically non-verbal. To live in such a way as to not tangle your various messages is the real trick to remaining a powerful icon. It must be carried out by deed and example — and by lack of examples. So mystery becomes an essential ingredient. Garbo spent the last fifty years of her life quietly stalking the streets of Manhattan, her face permanently fixed in the minds of her audience to the year of her last film, 1942. She had mystery in droves. From some source predating his political career and probably acquired intuitively, Reagan applied this lesson of constructed glamour to every facet of himself. Befitting his former career in Hollywood, Reagan used electronic media as a precision instrument to transmit two messages ("Big Government is bad" and "Communism is worse") ad infinitum. He fortified this by keeping his public self dimensionally minimal — no more dynamic than the surface of a TV screen, though much dimmer than the cathode-rays projecting his image.

In The Reagan Diaries, like the two previous volumes collecting his speeches and correspondence, the icon rarely contradicts our basic impressions of him. He remains anti-Communist even as Mikhail Gorbachev in succeeding entries morphs from "the new Soviet boss", a threat, to "Gorby", the friend. He stays resolutely opposed to Big Government, even while dropping his characterization of liberals as 'dangerous'. And he remains callously adroit in his dodge of the AIDS issue (or "Aides", as he spells the disease as late as 1988), even as it reaches him personally.

... Called Rock Hudson in a Paris Hospital where press said he had inoperable cancer. We never knew him too well but did know him & I thought I might be a reassurance. Now I learn from TV there is question as to his illness & rumors he is there for treatment of AIDS. Usual homework, some reading & so to bed.

Through 781 pages Ronald Reagan remains, as ever, absent.

— Andrew Stout (andrewstout at gmail dot com)