A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan

New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x, [2], 228 pages. Illustrations. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Foreword by Nancy Reagan. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Michael Keith Deaver (April 11, 1938 - August 18, 2007) was a member of President Ronald Reagan's White House staff serving as White House Deputy Chief of Staff under James Baker III and Donald Regan from January 1981 until May 1985. He worked for IBM, served in the United States Air Force, and later was executive director of the Santa Clara County Republican Party. While Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California, Deaver worked as a political field representative for the California Republican Party. After being elected governor, Reagan's chief of staff recruited Deaver to the administration where he began a 30-year career working for Reagan, and building a very close friendship with him and Nancy Reagan. As Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, Deaver worked primarily on media management forming how the public perceived Reagan, sometimes by engineering press events so that the White House set the networks' agenda for covering the president. A warm, personal portrait of Ronald Reagan, A Different Drummer brims with recollections from a relationship that has spanned more than three decades. Former aide and longtime family friend, Michael Deaver first met Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for governor of California and later served him in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as the president's deputy chief of staff. Deaver worked with the former chief executive for twenty consecutive years. Now he offers his memories of Ronald Reagan as governor, president, and friend. In A Different Drummer, Deaver writes of the Reagan he has known: a man who was shy and deplored talking about himself, who would rather spend a party talking to a laborer than policy wonks; a man whose convictions remained unchanged over the course of his life, who never used pollsters to decide his position on issues; a man whose idea of relaxation was riding a horse, fixing fence posts, and chopping wood until his muscles ached and his hands blistered. Reagan emerges in this impressionistic portrait as charismatic and unwaveringly optimistic, a devoted husband and dedicated leader, disciplined and tough.