25 years ago ...

Two books fresh off the press would merit little attention except that the author of one and the subject of the other is the re-election-seeking incumbent of the White House. Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation by Ronald Reagan is hardly a book at all. It is a four-thousand-word reprint of an article by Reagan fluffed out to wide-margin, large-print pages with essays by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and British curmudgeon Malcolm Muggeridge, plus eight full-page photos (Lincoln, Dred Scott, Mother Teresa, and so forth.) Bob Slosser's "spiritual portrait" of Reagan, Reagan Inside Out is campaign puffery aimed at conservative Christian audiences. The author shares the Manicheaen delusion of the Radical Right--that the world is locked in a struggle between light and darkness, between an ultraconservative version of Christianity on one side and "secular humanism" on the other. "The president is a spiritually minded person," Slosser quotes White House resident ethicist Ed Meese as telling him, "but he has been scrupulously careful not to flaunt that or to use it in a way that would allow it to appear that he's using it for self-serving or political reasons" Anyone who believes that probably also believes in the Easter Bunny.

--Edd Doerr, Church and State"