Lou Cannon obit

Lou Cannon, Post reporter and preeminent Reagan biographer, dies at 92

His books on Reagan “have never been transcended,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. 

He was not on the list.

Lou Cannon, a Washington Post reporter who became the preeminent biographer of Ronald Reagan, chronicling the former actor’s election as California governor, his long pursuit of the presidency and his two terms in the White House, died Dec. 19 at a hospice facility in Santa Barbara, California. He was 92.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said his son Carl M. Cannon, the Washington bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.

At The Post from 1972 to 1998, including many years as senior White House correspondent, Mr. Cannon became known as the Washington press corps’ indispensable authority on the 40th president. His weekly column, “Reagan & Co.,” was a must-read during the 1980s and leaned heavily on sources he had cultivated from his days as a young reporter covering Reagan in Sacramento.

Mr. Cannon began following Reagan in 1964, two years before he was elected governor. At the time, Mr. Cannon said, political insiders viewed the future president as a washed-up, middle-aged Hollywood leading man, a conservative lightweight parroting right-wing talking points about the evils of big government and communism.

Pulled into state politics by wealthy GOP business interests, Reagan was pushed along by Democrats who thought he would be a weak candidate. But from the start, Mr. Cannon discerned potential in the former New Deal Democrat, whose rhetoric sometimes belied the sophistication of his politics.

Mr. Cannon also felt a degree of kinship with Reagan, who like Mr. Cannon had an alcoholic father named Jack and considered himself a Westerner. (Reagan had grown up in the Midwest, Mr. Cannon in Nevada.)

Over the course of more than 50 interviews with Reagan and four major volumes from 1969 to 2003, Mr. Cannon traced his rise to power. There were two terms as governor, from 1967 through 1974; two unsuccessful runs for the White House, in 1968 and 1976; the victorious presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984; and eight years as president.

Reagan helped end the Cold War without nuclear catastrophe and restore American confidence after the debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. He also made good on pledges to cut taxes and to increase military spending. At the same time, as Mr. Cannon reported, Reagan blundered his way through the Iran-contra scandal and neglected the AIDS crisis and other critical issues.

Mr. Cannon said he struggled at times to see into the political and personal heart of the man, who remained “a riddle.” “The more I wrote,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001, “the more I felt I didn’t know.”

Mr. Cannon reached what he described as an “armed truce” with first lady Nancy Reagan, who was highly protective of her husband. His itinerant early life with a troubled father, she confided in Mr. Cannon, made part of him inaccessible even to her.

“This nomadic-ness made it very difficult for Ronald Reagan to form boyhood friendships,” Mr. Cannon told C-SPAN. “If you think about it, that would have to be true, because you’d just be in town for a few months and then you’d move on.”

Reagan’s upbringing, Mr. Cannon observed, helped explain his outward persona — mannerly and highly personable, but also remote — and his resilience after the Iran-contra scandal and other debacles.

“His genial demeanor and genuine modesty shielded a hard, self-protective core that contained both a gyroscope for maintaining balance and a compass pointing toward success,” Mr. Cannon wrote in his third and best-received Reagan book, “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” (1991). “Most of those who dealt with Reagan in public life saw the soft surface instead of the hard core, and underrated him.”

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s diaries, called Mr. Cannon the “fountainhead of Reaganalia whose books on the president have never been transcended.”

“He understood that Reagan mixed avuncular charm with political cunning,” Brinkley added in a 2020 interview for this obituary. “Cannon recognized that he had more political street smarts than the popular perception” allowed.

Making sense of a ‘riddle’

Few journalists devote themselves so entirely to a single subject. But Mr. Cannon — who once said his driving mission was to contribute to greater public understanding of government “and those who inhabit it” — found in Reagan a seemingly inexhaustible source of lessons in leadership, both inspirational and cautionary.

In his second book about the president, “Reagan” (1982), Mr. Cannon described his tendency to proffer a “cinematic version” of events in which “the heroic world of make-believe and the real world coalesced. The man who lived in both of them could not always distinguish one from the other, and he came to believe in many things that weren’t true.

“He believed that budgets could be balanced, and taxes lowered, by the simple elimination of waste, fraud and abuse,” Mr. Cannon added. “With equal simplicity, he believed that the nuclear waste problem could be solved for all time by compressing the waste into particles the size of baseballs and dropping them into the ocean. He believed that the shah of Iran had presided over ‘a progressive regime.’ He believed and believes that the United States is more popular abroad than it used to be.”

Mr. Cannon said that, of all the stories he reported about Reagan, the one that caused the greatest alarm among the president’s advisers was an article detailing Reagan’s claims — repeated to then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in separate White House visits — that he had filmed the liberation of Nazi death camps as a soldier during World War II. Reagan, who made war-training films for the Army in Hollywood, had seen such newsreels but had not been overseas during the war.

“I don’t think that Ronald Reagan was consciously lying when he said those things,” Mr. Cannon later told C-SPAN interviewer Brian Lamb. “He actually impressed Shamir, particularly, so deeply that he cared so much about the Holocaust. … I think that there’s nobody who has occupied that office who felt more deeply that the world had abandoned the Jews.”

David E. Hoffman, who covered the Reagan White House at The Post with Mr. Cannon, said in an interview that his colleague proved “very good at writing about the character of people in politics,” and that Mr. Cannon was “determined to figure out who they were and lay out fundamental patterns to their thinking.”

Mr. Cannon told C-SPAN that some conservative reviewers mistakenly thought that by titling his biography of the president “Role of a Lifetime,” he wished to play on the caricature of Reagan as a man who recited lines put before him by aides. In fact, he said, Reagan was a quick-witted and self-deprecating ad-libber.

“Reagan was portrayed in his very first campaign as a guy who couldn’t hold his own with a chimpanzee in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’” Mr. Cannon added, referring to one of Reagan’s lesser films. “The point that I was trying to make, both with the title and in the book, is that Ronald Reagan is a person who values the performance and who thinks of himself as a performer.

“After he was elected governor, he was asked what kind of a governor he would make,” Mr. Cannon continued. “He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never played a governor.’ When he left the White House, he was asked about how acting had helped him be president and he said, ‘I don’t understand how anybody could do this job without having been an actor.’ So Ronald Reagan didn’t run away from the fact that he was an actor. He was proud of it.”

Louis Simeon Cannon was born in New York City on June 3, 1933, and grew up in Fallon, Nevada, and then Reno. He once described his father as a “nomadic character” who mined for gold, operated a ranch, a hotel and a restaurant, and eventually became a real estate agent.

Mr. Cannon edited his high school newspaper and contributed sports stories to the old Nevada State Journal. After mustering out of the Army in 1954, he said, he “bummed around” the San Francisco Bay Area and was employed as a laundry-truck driver and a tire-shop vulcanizer. Then he worked his way through several small California newspapers, where he was appreciated for his willingness to work for little pay.

Hired by the San Jose Mercury-News, he rose to bureau chief at the state Capitol in Sacramento in time to cover the first of Reagan’s two terms as governor. For the old Ridder Publications chain, he was a Washington correspondent from 1969 to 1972.

Mr. Cannon’s first marriage, to Virginia Oprian, who helped him research his early books, ended in divorce. In 1985, he wed Mary Shinkwin.

In addition to his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Carl, Judith and Jackson Cannon; seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Mr. Cannon was preceded in death by his only sibling, Joel Robert Cannon; his first wife, Virginia; and a son, David.

At The Post, Mr. Cannon’s coverage of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations brought him the first Gerald Ford Prize, in 1988, for distinguished reporting on the presidency.

Reporters of his era are often stereotyped as slovenly, but Mr. Cannon, with his tendency to drop cigar ash on his lapels and food on his shirt, was known for a particular lack of polish. James Gerstenzang, who covered the Reagan White House for the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, recalled being in a room where political writers were filing stories from the road, when “a bunch of pizzas arrived and someone shouted, ‘Lou, your shirts are here!’”

After Reagan left the White House in 1989, Mr. Cannon was a California-based correspondent for The Post. He later wrote for publications including the State Net Capitol Journal, which covers state legislatures.

His books included “Reporting: An Inside View” (1977); “Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD” (1997); “Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power” (2003); and “Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy” (2008), written with his son Carl.

According to Mr. Cannon, Reagan, who died in 2004, professed to have never consulted books about himself, often joking that he “didn’t have time for light reading.” In late 1980, Mr. Cannon was interviewing the president-elect when the topic of Mr. Cannon’s book in progress — his second about Reagan — arose.

“I said, ‘Yes, governor, I’m going to write about you until I get it right,’” Mr. Cannon recalled in a C-SPAN interview. “And he said, ‘Good line,’ which from Reagan was about as much praise or comment as you were going to get.”