The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was a big fan of Ronald Reagan. He was the first president I got to vote for.
In the '80s, Ronald Reagan inspired me to become politicized, because I grew up in that era when everything I cared about was under attack.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.
First, President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me, and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.
Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin's bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.
Ronald Reagan's era can be defined, number one in most people's minds, by the Cold War and by the end of it - and by the strong principles he stood for.
I guess the Reagan era is defined as the 'I want it all for me, and screw everybody else' era.
Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.
I was very young, and I remember this heated, passionate argument and trying to figure out some place called Vietnam, something called a Watergate, and some guy named Gerald Ford who my dad knew who had just become president, and how all these things fit together.