A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Senior White House Correspondent Barrett Seaman was six miles above the Atlantic when he got his first look at Donald Regan's book For the Record. It was a heady experience. "I had been asked to read the manuscript and offer an opinion as to whether TIME ought to publish excerpts from it," recalls Seaman, who took the memoirs of the former White House chief of staff along on a vacation to the Bahamas last March. "Settling in for the flight to Nassau, I picked up the text. Not a minute later, almost involuntarily, I let forth a cry that caused several passengers to turn in their seats." By the time his plane had landed, Seaman knew that TIME and the book's publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, had a best seller on their hands.

The problem was keeping it quiet. While cutting the 397-page tome down to cover-story length, Seaman had to take special care not to arouse the curiosity of fellow reporters, especially about the manuscript's stunning disclosure of Nancy Reagan's obsession with astrology. "All it would take would be one small hint, one drop of evidentiary blood in the water, and the sharks would go on a feeding frenzy," he says. "For a week or so, I felt almost like an Administration insider trying to keep a scoop away from my colleagues." Seaman's work benefited from the experience gained in half a dozen years of dealing with Regan. "I first met him when I was TIME's Washington news editor and he was Treasury Secretary," says Seaman. "He was more engaging than I expected from reading about him." By 1985, when Regan swapped jobs with White House Chief of Staff James Baker, Seaman was covering the White House. "Regan's efforts to crack down on press leaks made my life considerably more difficult," Seaman reports. "But Regan remained engaging personally."

Ultimately, the decision to print excerpts of For the Record had less to do with personality than with history. "We thought a look at an Administration still in power by someone who had been the President's right-hand man for two years and a Cabinet officer for four years would be of extraordinary interest," says Executive Editor Ronald Kriss, who edited the excerpts. "Most of the people mentioned are still on the political stage. That makes the book particularly sensitive." So sensitive that first-time readers, like Seaman over the Atlantic, can be excused an occasional outburst.