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Reagan had a mystical streak in him. He just was sort of driven by something that I don't think any of us, including me or Nancy Reagan, ever fully figured out.

Reagan told me that when he was in college in Ureca College that gone I think just for fun to this fortune teller who reads your hand.

Anyway, this fortune teller predicted that he'd be president. The fact that he remembered that many years later said to me that some part of him paramed a notion that will he could be.

That's Lou Cannon and I'm Lillian Cunningham with the Washington Post. This is the 39th episode of Presidential.

I shall design the presidency effect that means enough.

I shall touch this and go for you. This is for you and I'll live. Let's get it today.

For such a recent president there is something kind of surprisingly mystical and mythical even about the way that Reagan's legacy lives on in American culture.

For this episode we're not going to spend too much time on the nuts and bolts of economic policy in the 1980s or what was going on in Afghanistan or the air traffic controller strike.

We are going to focus instead on some of the myths and the narratives that have enveloped Reagan's legacy.

So politicians today invoke his name constantly as you're sure to have heard many many times this election year.

So we are going to take a look at where the image of Reagan today lines up with or veers off from the reality of who Ronald Reagan, the man, the president, really was.

And with me here to help separate that fact from fiction is a reporter and a biographer who is considered like the ultimate Reagan expert and that is Lou Cannon.

Thank you.

Lou, thank you so much for doing this.

You're welcome. I'm happy to do it.

You were the Washington Post senior White House correspondent covering the Reagan presidency. You covered his governorship. You've written five books about him.

So, you know, to start off, why do you think it is that today there's so much collective nostalgia for Reagan?

I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is, I think people want to hark back to a time when things seem better when presidents were respected in the actual time.

There was a very partisan division in Reagan, but I think looking back at him and overall people saw him as a leader of the country.

The other reason is that the Republicans have not really had a successful two-term president since then.

George H. W. Bush might have been, but he was defeated in his reelection campaign. And President George W. Bush is still a very controversial figure primarily over the Iraq war.

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