Document Type: Book (Informational).

Purpose: Informational.

Authority: Author Expertise.

Scope (from the Foreword): "I have kept Plutarch's observation in mind while writing this memoir of my more than six years of public service as the Secretary of the Treasury and as Chief of Staff in the White House under President Reagan, and have attempted to describe the President I served, the people I encountered in the course of that service, and the events in which I participated, exactly as I remember them.

Although I have consulted some of my own unclassified memoranda in order to verify dates and facts, I have not based this narrative on classified documents. Nothing is quoted or paraphrased from unpublished or non-public Presidential papers or other confidential White House documents. All my life I have kept detailed notes of my workaday actions and conversations, and I did the same while I worked for the President. Those contemporaneous notes, and the press, constituted my basic source material. Journalists and historians may be disappointed to hear it, but there is really no need to consult secret documents in describing the fortieth Presidency because, as a practical matter, it kept no official secrets. In the Reagan Administration the leak was raised to the status of an art form. Everything, or nearly everything, the President and his close associates did or knew appeared in the newspapers and on the networks with the least possible delay.

Between the graffito and the whitewash lies the brushstroke, and it is the brushstroke that I have striven to employ in rendering this portrait of one of the most interesting and maddening experiences of my life. The main topics-the Iran-Contra affair; the President's convictions, style, and economic philosophy; the negotiations with Mikhail S. Gorbachev; and my differences with Nancy Reagan, among others-had already been systematically salted into the press by persons acting on behalf of the President and his wife."

Contents (from the Table of Contents):

- "Acknowledgements

- Foreword

- Part One: A Case of Poison

- Part Two: An American Life

- Part Three: In the White House

- Afterword: Reflections on Public Service

- Index"