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One of my favorite political memoirs of all time is Peggy Noonan's "What I Saw at the Revolution". I prefer this book to her more recent book on Reagan ("When Character Was King"), but it was written in 1990 -- only two years after Reagan left office. The memories were fresh and unfiltered by subsequent history and romanticised nostalgia.

What clues do we gain about Reagan there? Let's turn to the chapter titled "Who Was That Masked Man?". Here are some illuminating passages:

He was a modest man with an intellect slightly superior to the average.

      He gleams; he is a mystery. He is for everyone there, for everyone who worked with him. None of them understand him. In private they admit it. You say to them, Who was that masked man?, and they shrug, and hypothesize.
      James Baker said, He is the kindest and most impersonal man I ever knew.
       An aide said, Beneath the lava flow of warmth there is something impervious as a glacier...
       A woman who knew him said, He lived life on the surface where the small waves are, not deep down where the heavy currents tug. And yet he has great powers of empathy.

      I’ll tell you something surprising: This sunny man touched so many Americans in part because they perceived his pain. They saw beyond the television image, they saw the flesh and blood, they felt those wounds, they caught that poignancy.
       The reports and correspondents and smart guys, they missed it. But the people saw. They thought, Look at the courage it took at his age to be shot in the chest by a kid with a gun and go through healing and therapy and go out there again and continue being president, continue waving at the crowds as he walks to the car. Think of the courage that old man had!

      He was a compulsive entertainer: He couldn’t not do it...All he needed was a cane, a straw hat, and a glove – Is everybody happy?

       (It was a generous impulse, wasn’t it, to want to give people a lift? Or was it only or partly that he needed that laugh, needed the approval?)

      He really always played himself; the vivid have no choice. That’s why he seemed both phony and authentic. Because he was. He was really acting but the part he played was Ronald Reagan.

      But he held to the unfashionable. This man who wanted to be loved stood fast to his views and voiced them even though he knew the cultural leaders (by whom he wanted to be accepted, in whose movies her wanted to star) had contempt for what he thought...
      [H]is cultural betters would think, He’s obviously sincere, but he’s so…simplistic. Or: unsophisticated. Or: such a radical, and dangerous.

      Those who grew impatient with him or frustrated or resentful tried to cover it up. But sooner or later – and you really saw this in the Reagan years – what they were thinking could be seen in a sentence shot out, in a look or a shake of the head. They were thinking something like what Sergeant Warden said of the captain in From Here to Eternity: “He’d choke on his own spit if I weren’t here to clear his throat for him.” They’d say, with a certain edge, “The president isn’t a detail man” (the fool doesn’t know Antarctica’s the one on the bottom!); they’d say, “The president is a big picture man” (He wouldn’t know a fact if it ran up his nose!). You could see it in Deaver’s book, all the unexpressed hostility seeping out in those ‘The president of course has an amiable temperament, but he’s usually content to allow someone else to make the decisions’ sentences.

      We made so much of those winks.

      [His sense of humor] got him in trouble sometimes. After “We begin bombing in five minutes,” the aides of the first administration were frustrated because they knew his humor wasn’t being directed.