As an armchair history buff, I love famous historical people who were also prolific letter-writers. It gives a great insight into the person, especially when the letter was between family members or close friends and never intended for public consumption. (Reagan was one of these people) As much as I like Letters of Note for the great letters, for me having a stream of letters makes the person much more three-dimensional.
The book on the Adams-Jefferson letters has been on my reading list for a year now. Can't wait to get time to read it. http://amzn.to/MudjlA I believe there is a similar book for Reagan, but I haven't researched it. Enough stuff on the list already.
One of the great things about writing a letter is that it takes enough time and energy that you invest a bit of thought before you send it. I worry about 21st century thinkers who will be judged not only by the things they chose to write well, but the one-offs they sent out in the heat of the moment over email.
I wonder if some of that impression isn't anachronistic projection, though. Today you think of a letter as something that takes time/energy/thought investment. But it was not at all uncommon for frequent letter-writers of previous eras to write many letters in a day, closer to the way we write emails than the way we write letters. Probably not quite as routine as the average email, but people who wrote thousands of letters during their life treated it as just as normal way of communicating. It wasn't that strange for letters to be dashed off in short periods of time, and like with email, the amount of agonizing/revision/thought that was put into a particular letter varied greatly.
On your latter worry, it seems like there's some of that with earlier eras' figures as well. For example, some people's opinion of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre has shifted for the worse since their correspondence was published, since much of it is more like a sordid chatroom log, full of offhanded gossip about other people and such, than like the philosophical works they intended for public consumption.
Come now.. research your own deep track of historical data, all you've ever posted on the Internet for 'eternity' for 'all to see', and you do indeed get a broader picture of the person behind the posts.
Indeed we all have a common blithe ability to write a rotten sentence. But if you look at, say, jwz's broad swatches of data, or some other such figure, you can see that the bad emails are par for the course. I'd be worried if the figures of the 21st Century couldn't write an e-mail, at any position of the scale of troll to hero.
Oh I knew I was in trouble when AltaVista first hit and I realized that I would never get away from being 'that guy who used to post a lot of stuff on comp.sys.amiga.' :-)
You can choose not to send heat-of-the-moment emails.
a) You can be intentional about all your public writing - and I think that we have learned by now that email always has the potential to become public.
b) You can set up a delay-sending rule in your email client so that you have a grace period between pressing send and the message actually being sent - this has saved me embarrassment on any number of occasions.
You may be interested in reading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_a_Father_to_His_Da...] - letters from India's first prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru to his daughter Indira who later became India's first female prime-minister and the only one to have imposed a state of emergency.
My favorite epistolary book ever is Kafka's letters to Milena. Very profound and intense as Kafka, troubled and kafkian himself, collapses slowly -- into his tuberculosis and the realization of this platonic love affair.
President Reagan also has a book of speeches. His early speeches were self-written and pretty refined from multiple tellings. The advantage today is that you can listen to how he gave them as opposed to having an actor read it.
Of the modern Presidents, he probably wrote the most words and he did learn his style from radio and Hollywood. Not bad teachers in his day.
I do wonder in a hundred years what the historians will think of the writings of the first President to grow up with social media or maybe even USENET.
The book on the Adams-Jefferson letters has been on my reading list for a year now. Can't wait to get time to read it. http://amzn.to/MudjlA I believe there is a similar book for Reagan, but I haven't researched it. Enough stuff on the list already.