What This Washington Post Journalist Discovered Will Have You in Tears

[Jerome]

It did me.

for the past couple of years I've been working on a biography of Nancy Reagan. And as a result, I have spent many, many, many weeks at the Reagan library. I was going through a box of Nancy Reagan's personal effects, and then I came across this truly extraordinary letter that President Reagan, himself, had written.

it was a letter to his father-in-law Loyal Davis, who was a pioneering neurosurgeon, and who also, in August of 1982, was on his deathbed. Loyal Davis was, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. In this letter, his son-in-law, Ronald Reagan...is trying desperately to convince his father-in-law to accept God before he dies.

Karen Tumulty, whom you also may recognize from her appearances on Washington Week in Review on PBS, provides a transcription of the letter in her column:

Washington Post - Ronald Reagan Witnesses to His Father-in-Law

The handwritten letter scanned here: (PDF)

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4883568/Ronald-Reagan-s-Letter-to-Loyal-Davis.pdf