One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.
News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.
I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.
As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.
As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.
Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.