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Journalism of Courage
Ronald Reagan thought Alexander Haig was “utterly paranoid,” considered former senator Lowell Weicker “a pompous, no good fathead” and was “surprised at how shy” Michael Jackson was. Reagan also refused to talk to his son after Ron Reagan hung up on him, felt that daughter Patti had “a kind of yo yo family relationship” and was invariably “lonesome” when his wife, Nancy, was out of town.
The earnest entries are marked by a spare writing style in which Reagan reduced complicated matters to their essence. A 1981 entry on Cuban leader Fidel Castro said: “Intelligence reports say he is very worried about me. I’m very worried that we can’t come up with something to justify his worrying.”
The former actor was well aware of his public image, and tweaked the Fourth Estate after he deliberately reversed the order of the opening sentences of his welcome at the 1984 Olympics: “The press having a copy of the lines as written are gleefully tagging me with senility and inability to learn my lines.”
The diaries, which have been stored at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, cover the gamut of his presidency, from arms-control negotiations to the Challenger disaster to his meetings with Hollywood figures. Reagan drew on the diaries in writing his 1990 autobiography.
In the excerpts, Reagan recounted his March 30, 1981, shooting by John Hinckley in a just-the-facts style: “I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes. It was then we learned I’d been shot and had a bullet in my lung. Getting shot hurts.”
Emotion comes through strongly in some entries. After the 1981 assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, whom Reagan had found to be “truly a great man,” he directed his ire at Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi: “I’m trying not to feel hatred for those who did this foul deed but I can’t make it. Gadhafi gloating on TV, his people jubilantly celebrating in the streets. He is beneath contempt.”
Reagan enjoyed meeting the “most likable” Prince Charles in 1981, but tea proved a disaster because the royal visitor refused to drink it: “Horror of horrors they served it our way with a tea bag in the cup… I didn’t know what to do.”
