In a sense, Ronald Regan was not real. All of his speeches were written by someone else, and he relied heavily on advisors. He was a figurehead for his administration to a greater extent than most presidents before and after. He was one of the few presidents that may have actually been innocent of the bad stuff that went on in the white house during his presidency (Iran-Contra), because he never showed any indication of really understanding it the way Nixon understood Watergate or LBJ understood Vietnam.
This is hilariously untrue. He was very well known for his “a time for choosing“ speech in 1964 introducing Barry Goldwater. It had the same impact as Obama‘s speech before the Democrats in 2004. As a union leader he gave many, many well received speeches that he wrote himself. He was politically active as a union Democrat for decades before becoming governor of California and wrote scores of speeches at that time.
From about the 1940s to the 1960s he made many radio addresses that he wrote himself. He was politically very active, touring the country and doing a lot of speeches on his own.
As a president he absolutely had the best speech writers of his time, but he went over each speech meticulously and gave feedback the writers claimed was expert and welcome.
One of his speech writers actually published a book that showed photographs of Reagan’s own handwritten notes for his speeches. There are thousands of them in his presidential library.
As another commenter has already pointed out, your assertions about his speeches is very much untrue. Also very much untrue is his lack of complicity in the Iran-Contra crimes.
He was both much better (as a writer) and worse (as a law-breaker) than your depiction of him.
If you consider the latter years of his presidency, as well as his immediate post-presidency retirement, it'd be more accurate to say:
"Ronald Reagen was probably innocent by way of Alzheimers"
A lot of people who met him during the last two years of his presidency described what we now know to be early symptoms of Alzheimers. He also came out publicly as having it not 5 years after leaving office.
