Is it true that Reagan liked to receive policy suggestions in cartoon format?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/07/EDG5071T011.DTL
> ...Reagan relied on a controversial managerial device to drive this
> process: the one-page memo.
Reagan required officials and staff to boil down an issue into a one-page format with the following four elements: the issue, the facts, reasoning and recommendations. His cabinet secretary, William P. Clark Jr., had helped develop the routine. "It has been found," Clark said, "that almost any issue can be reduced to a single page."
Reagan made as many as eight decisions an hour during staff meetings, affixing an "OK, R.R." next to one of the alternatives presented in a memo. Critics ridiculed Reagan's one-pagers, not realizing that Reagan had followed the practice of Winston Churchill, who often demanded "on a single sheet of paper" memoranda from his cabinet about wartime issues, and also Dwight Eisenhower, who had used the single-page format both as president and also as Allied commander during World War II.
"Amazingly enough," Newsweek magazine reported in May 1967, "with little more than his first 100 days in office scratched from the calendar, the quondam host of 'Death Valley Days' has managed to close one of the widest credibility gaps any politician ever faced." Even before his passing, Reagan had begun to close the credibility gap about his presidency as well. Whether you liked his views or not, he showed that he could be a genial person and govern effectively, too.
Steven F. Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order" (Prima Publishing, 2001).
-- Michael Pugliese