Mr. Anderson, who has been working on the book for seven years, declined to talk about what their meticulous research discovered. But the buzz in knowledgeable circles is that it will reveal how the Gipper shaped and steered the nation's national security apparatus throughout the eight years of his presidency.
It has been two decades since Reagan left the White House at the peak of his popularity, but his influence is still very much with us today.
Early in his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he talked of political figures he most admired. One of them, he said, was Reagan. He called him a "transformational" leader who had appealed to the nation's hopes instead of its fears, and lifted up a dispirited nation with his optimism for the future. Last week, pollster Scott Rasmussen wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Polls Show That Reaganism Is Not Dead."
"Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns," Rasmussen wrote. "He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates."
"Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan," he said. Well, up to a point. Unlike Obama, Reagan would never propose raising taxes on anyone in a recession when the nation needs all the economy's cylinders running at full throttle. And at his very first 1980 general election campaign event near the Statue of Liberty, he outlined his vision for what became the North American Free Trade Agreement -- a pact Obama wants to dismantle.
But like the former president he so admires, Obama exuded a sense of self-confidence and optimism in his campaign and talked often about his belief in America's can-do spirit and enduring goodness.
One of the polling questions Rasmussen asked voters on Oct. 2 found that 59 percent still agreed with the belief expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Notably, his poll also found that 44 percent of Obama's supporters "agree with Reagan's assessment." Now Reagan's party is leaderless and in disarray, looking for someone to rekindle that same spirit of optimism and transformational leadership. So far, there seems to be no one like that in sight.