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Journalist and author Lou Cannon, who was widely considered the nation’s leading authority on the life and career of President Reagan, died Friday in a Santa Barbara hospice. He was 92.

His death was caused by complications from a stroke, his son Carl M. Cannon told the Washington Post, where his father served for years as a White House correspondent.

The elder Cannon covered Reagan’s two-term presidency in the 1980s, but his relationship with the enigmatic Republican leader went back to the 1960s, when Reagan moved from acting to politics.

Cannon interviewed Reagan more than 50 times and wrote five books about him, but still struggled to understand what made Reagan who he was.

“The more I wrote,” Cannon told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001, “the more I felt I didn’t know.”

Cannon was born in New York City and raised in Reno, Nev., where he attended the University of Nevada in Reno and later San Francisco State College.

After service in the U.S. Army, he became a reporter covering Reagan’s first years as governor of California for the San Jose Mercury News. In 1972, Cannon began working for the Washington Post as a political reporter.

Cannon recalled first encountering Reagan in 1965 while assigned to cover a lunch event for reporters and lobbyists and being surprised by Reagan’s command of the room when he spoke.

Reagan was beginning his campaign for governor by proving he could answer questions and “was not just an actor reading a script.” At the time, the word actor was “a synonym for airhead. Well, Reagan was no airhead,” Cannon said in a 2008 interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum.

To Cannon’s surprise, the reporters and lobbyists mobbed Reagan after the event was over to get his autograph. Cannon introduced himself.

“I remember those steely eyes of his. I thought he had this great face, but his eyes are tough,” Cannon said. “His eyes are really something.”

On the phone later, Cannon’s editor asked him what he thought of Reagan. He replied, “I don’t know anything, but if I were running this thing, why would anybody want to run against somebody that everybody knows and everybody likes? Why would you want him to be your opponent?

“I predicted that Reagan was going to be president, but I didn’t have any idea he was going to be governor,” Cannon said. “I was just so struck by the fact that he impacted on people as, not like he was a politician, but like he was this celebrity, force of nature that people wanted to rub up against. It was like seeing Kennedy again. They wanted the aura, the sun.”

In 1966, Reagan was elected governor by a margin of nearly 1 million votes and Cannon found himself “writing about Ronald Reagan every day.”

Reagan’s political opponents in California and Washington consistently underestimated him, assuming the former actor could be easily beaten at the ballot box, Cannon said. Reagan ran for president unsuccessfully twice, but had the will to keep trying until he won — twice.

“Reagan was tough, and he was determined, and you couldn’t talk him out of doing what he wanted to do,” Cannon said. “Nancy couldn’t talk him out of what he wanted to do, for god’s sakes. And certainly no advisor could or no other candidate. Ronald Reagan wanted to be president of the United States.”

Cannon’s first book on the president, “Reagan,” was published in 1982. In 1991 he published “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” which is regarded as a comprehensive biography of the 40th president.

Cannon also authored a book about the LAPD and the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, in addition to chronicling a range of tales over the years, including the federal bust of a 1970s heroin kingpin in Las Vegas.

Mr. Cannon’s first marriage, to Virginia Oprian, who helped him research his early books, ended in divorce. In 1985, he wed Mary Shinkwin, the Washington Post said. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children.

An Al Jazeera crew at the Thai border with Cambodia was forced to take shelter in a bunker as Cambodia shelled the village of Ban Nong Mek, in Thailand’s Sisaket province.

A New York Times reporter told Jeffrey Epstein that he could write an article that would define the financier on his own terms as he faced allegations of sexually abusing minors in the months leading up to his 2008 conviction, newly uncovered emails reveal.

After a negative article about Epstein was published in September 2007, then-New York Times journalist Landon Thomas Jr advised Epstein to “get ahead” of more bad publicity by doing an interview that would define the story “on your terms”.

“I Just read the Post. Now the floodgates will open — you can expect Vanity Fair and NYMag to pile on,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated September 20, 2007, referring to the magazines Vanity Fair and New York Magazine.

“My view is that the quicker you get out ahead of this and define the story and who you are on your terms in the NYT, the better it will be for you.”

Thomas, who left the Times in 2019, urged Epstein to quickly do an interview to prevent the “popular tabloid perception” about him from hardening, and expressed sympathy over his legal troubles.

“I know this is tough and hard for you, but remember jail may [be] bad, but it is not forever,” Thomas wrote.

As part of his pitch to Epstein, Thomas recalled a 2002 profile he wrote about the financier for New York Magazine, titled Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.

Written before Epstein’s first arrest in 2006, the profile portrayed the financier as an enigmatic but highly successful businessman with the appearance of a “taller, younger Ralph Lauren” and a “relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize-winning scientists”.

The piece contained glowing appraisals from Epstein’s many high-profile associates, whose praise-filled descriptions included that he was “very smart”, “amazing”, “extraordinary”, and “talented”.

“Remember how for a while my NY Mag piece was the defining piece on you? That is no longer the case after all this,” Thomas wrote to Epstein.

“But I think if we did a piece for the Times, with the documents and evidence that you mention, plus you speaking for the record, we can again have a story that becomes the last public word on Jeffrey Epstein.”

A little more than a week later, on September 28, Thomas sent Epstein an email reiterating the importance of “getting out ahead” of other publications.

Thomas suggested that he begin reaching out to associates of Epstein who could talk about the financier’s business activities and scientific and philanthropic work, including former Harvard President Larry Summers and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

“Before I get a glimpse of the legal material, I was thinking that I should at least start calling around to people who know you. Again to focus on the business and scientific/philanthropic aspect of the piece,” Thomas wrote.

“Could I start to do that — call people like Larry Summers, Jess Staley, George Mitchell, Ehud Barak, Bill Richardson and others?” Thomas finished the email expressing his hope that Epstein was “holding up okay” and stating his view that “we need to move on this.”

It is not clear how Epstein responded to Thomas’s emails, which were included in a trove of emails from Epstein’s personal accounts that were made available to Al Jazeera by the whistleblower website Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Thomas did not respond to a request for comment.

Following Thomas’s correspondence with Epstein, the Times went on to publish an article by the journalist detailing the financier’s downfall the following year.

The article, published a day after Epstein’s guilty plea on June 30, 2008, drew from in-person and phone interviews that Thomas had conducted with the financier, including during a visit to Epstein’s island of Little St James several months earlier.

In the article, Thomas described the financier sitting on the patio of his island mansion as he likened himself to the eponymous character of the satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels.

“Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences,” Epstein was quoted as saying.

“That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens as well as benefits.”

A 2019 report by NPR said colleagues of Thomas at the Times had been “appalled” by the article when they reviewed it years later, following the journalist’s admission that he had solicited a $30,000 donation from Epstein for a cultural centre.

The emails obtained by Al Jazeera also show that Epstein emailed an error-strewn Word document to himself in which Thomas is described discussing the legal case against Epstein with then-Florida prosecutor David Weinstein.

The purpose and origin of the document, which describes Thomas and Weinstein discussing technical aspects of the charges facing Epstein, is unclear. Weinstein said he spoke to Thomas in January 2008, but that the document did not contain an accurate description of their conversation.

Weinstein said they had spoken about the “criminal justice process and general state and federal statutes”, but not Epstein’s case specifically.

He said he did not know where the information in the document came from or who provided it to Epstein.

“I never spoke with him about the specific facts of the late Mr Epstein’s case, nor did I offer any opinion about that matter,” Weinstein told Al Jazeera.

The emergence of the emails between Thomas and Epstein comes after correspondence the two men shared from 2015 to 2018 came to light last month in a batch of documents released by US lawmakers.

Among other revelations, those emails showed that Thomas let Epstein know that the late investigative journalist John Connolly had contacted him for information for Connolly’s 2016 book Filthy Rich: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.

“He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated June 1, 2016. “I told him you were a hell of a guy :)”.

A spokesperson for the Times said Thomas had not worked for the newspaper since early 2019 “after editors discovered his failure to abide by our ethical standards”.