Lou Cannon: A personal remembrance

I’ve been writing words for a living for many decades now, and I can’t think of any I have hated to write more than those in this next sentence.

Longtime journalist and noted Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon died last Friday evening from complications of a stroke he suffered a few weeks prior.

There the most basic facts. Lou was 92. He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Mary, sons Carl and Jackson and daughter Judy, as well as by seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Another son, David, died in 2016. Over the course of his long career, he was an award-winning reporter, editor, columnist, White House correspondent, bureau chief, teacher, moderator, public speaker and author. He played a major role in the creation and editorial direction of the late, great California Journal, and he conducted many of Open California’s oral history interviews, including those with George Steffes, Stu Spencer and Ed Meese.

He was also my colleague at the State Net Capitol Journal (the California Journal’s digital multi-state publication) for almost two decades.

There is much more to be found on the chronology and professional accomplishments of Lou’s storied career in any one of the many fine obituaries published after his passing. But I don’t want to dwell on information you can easily find elsewhere. Instead, I want to share some memories of Lou Cannon that maybe you don’t know or won’t read elsewhere.

I first met Lou when I started at the Capitol Journal in 2002. I knew going in that my new boss, managing editor Melanie Smith, was battling breast cancer. I also quickly realized that Melanie was pretty much everyone’s adopted kid sister. It was understandable – she was as kind and gentle a soul as can be imagined, a lover of animals and anything to do with the English language. She was a joy to work with and to be around.

I had not been there long when I was informed that Lou was in the building and wanted to meet with me. No further context was given.

We soon were seated across from one another in my cube, where I had a pretty good idea what was coming. My daughter was in her mid-teens at the time, and I had already had a few “I have a shotgun and a shovel, you won’t be missed” conversations with the aspirational young men who showed up at our home. Given our collective protectionist feelings about Melanie, I figured I was about to be on the receiving end of a similar warning.

I could not have been more wrong.

The Lou Cannon I met that day definitely wanted to make sure I was fully aware of the seriousness of Melanie’s health, but he was also genuinely curious about me and my backstory. He was interested in the fact I was a single dad, and that I had previously covered sports before coming to political journalism. He noted that the great Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist George Skelton – who was both a friend and, in the tradition of all great old school newspaper reporters, a vigorous rival – began his career covering sports.

Things wrapped up with a handshake and his offer to help me in any way he could. I took him up on it many times over the years, especially after Melanie finally succumbed to her cancer in 2004 and I became the Journal’s managing editor. He would eventually come on board as my columnist, a role he filled for almost 16 years before finally retiring in 2021.

Over that time, he showed me again and again what it means to be a professional. Even though his was an opinion column, everything he submitted included a wealth of original reporting to underpin his points of view. He never rested on his laurels and never stopped cultivating new sources and staying as current on state and national politics as anyone in any newsroom in the country. And he was always there for me if I needed to noodle through a thorny political issue we were covering in the publication or, after LexisNexis bought us in 2010, the “guidance” the muckety-mucks in D.C. offered me on the regular. His wisdom and experience was an ongoing master class for me in understanding and covering state and national politics and the men and women tasked with creating public policy.

Even though his was an opinion column, everything he submitted included a wealth of original reporting to underpin his points of view. He never rested on his laurels and never stopped cultivating new sources and staying as current on state and national politics as anyone in any newsroom in the country.

Lou was also loathe to miss a deadline, no matter how valid the cause might be. Over the years he was with me at the Journal, he endured numerous challenges that would have sent most of us to the sidelines. A resident of Summerland (a bit south of Santa Barbara), he endured everything nature so often throws at Southern California – fires, floods, landslides, power outages – yet never missed a deadline. Not even when his son David also succumbed to cancer.

Not for a lack of me trying to get him to take it easier. He always said the same thing to my offer that he not worry about his column that week – thanks, but I’ll get it in.

And he always did. He always found a way. And oh, did I mention that by then Lou was in his 80s?

Through it all, he was unfailingly kind and supportive. He always asked about my wife, and at one of our visits after she got a promotion making her the first woman in the history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to lead one of their technology sub-agencies, he marked the occasion by presenting her with a Corps coffee mug. When my daughter opted to go to college at UC Santa Barbara, he offered his support should she ever need anything. He needed to do neither, but he did both without hesitation.

It would not have been surprising for us to lose contact when he finally retired to focus on finishing his memoir, which will come out next year. Thankfully that did not happen. We had fairly regular phone calls, and my wife and I went down every year to see him and Mary. And it never ceased to amaze us that even after his first stroke and all the other normal aspects of a slowly failing body, his grasp of current events stayed keen. Even more incredibly, his recall of so many of the people and events he had covered throughout his long career was pristine.

Oddly enough, I was in the area when he had his first stroke a few years ago, and my wife and I rushed to see him in the hospital. It looked grim – he couldn’t speak of course – but Lou being Lou, he eventually fully recovered. We all had hopes this time would be the same. Alas, time is undefeated.

Of course nobody is a saint or without faults and flaws, and I don’t intend to canonize him here (pardon the obvious pun).  But it is hardly making someone into a saint to acknowledge they accomplished so much so while always keeping kindness, compassion and humanity as their guiding stars.

A mutual friend suggested that Lou’s great drive was a product of the kind of insecurity often experienced by those born into poor circumstances who bootstrap their way into a world where they never quite feel like they belong. It could be true. The son of an alcoholic father, he had a peripatetic upbringing far removed from the halls of power where he later made such an indelible mark. Whatever started and continually stoked that fire, there is no denying he, like Reagan, achieved far more than his humble beginnings would have normally dictated.

For all of those many other achievements, history will undoubtedly remember Lou most for his connection to Reagan, and that is understandable. Nobody knew more about the former governor and president’s legacy than Lou, and nobody was more fair or more thorough in his reporting on the man and the people around him. We have the fully realized picture of Reagan that we do because Lou Cannon was willing to do the hard work to make it happen. Historians and political junkies will be gleaning insights from Lou’s efforts long after all of us are gone.

That connection once got the California Journal a sit-down interview with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The self-described “Governator” was giving most media outlets that wanted a one-on-one with him the stiff arm, including CJ. That is until he was informed that Lou would lead the interview, with Journal Executive Editor A.G. Block and reporter John Howard along as window dressing. Lou’s connection to Reagan was apparently a big draw for Schwarzenegger.

That interview broke some national news – that Arnold wouldn’t be stumping for George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign. He eventually went back on that plan, but it was major news at the time, and it happened solely because Lou was the guy asking the question.

But that is the legacy for the world at large. For me, I’ll always think of Lou not as “the” Reagan expert, but as a great reporter, a role model, a mentor, a wise sage and, most of all, my dear friend.

That was more than enough for me. I’m going to miss him a lot.