President Week: Ronald Reagan

1. The weather was so cold that Ronald Reagan’s inauguration was actually cancelled. I wonder what he would have said if that hadn’t happened. 

2. Before Ronald Reagan serves two terms as president he is a broadcaster, a movie actor and former Democrat. But after his experiences in Hollywood, no longer. In 1962, he registers Republican.

3. An attempt is also made on Reagan’s life, by John David Hinckley who was trying to impress Jodie Foster, thinking that if he killed a politician he would prove himself to her. He missed the president but hit three Secret Service men instead, one of whom would later die from his injuries. 

4. Ronald Reagan did alot in his eight years as President including releasing hostages from Iran, cutting spending for entitlements and lowering taxes for the rich. 

5. Reagan was the oldest elected president (although that is no longer true). When his opponent brings this up during a debate for his second term Reagan says “I will not make age an issue of this campaign….I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponents youth and inexperience” Zing. Worth a seventeen point lead in the polls?

6. Ronald Reagan and the press enjoy an uneasy relationship. They like to paint him as feeble minded, particularly magazines that are liberal or flat out anticonservative. Despite the media’s take on everything, he is still a very popular president. 

7. One of the things Reagan is most famous for is the way he confronts the Soviet Union. He delivers a speech in which he speaks the infamous words “tear down this wall” which happens two years later, a direct result of U.S. policies. 

8. In 1994, after he has left office, America discovers the once president has developed Alzheimer's. He slips out of the public eye after that. 

9. There is evidence that while in officeThe White House staff had planned on invoking the Twenty Fifth Amendment, which removes the president from office if he is mentally incompetent. 

10. My source (Bill O’Reilly’s book, see below) says that “Reagan’s poor treatment of the mentally ill and homeless will be one of his strongest failures, a legacy America more than four decades after Reagan left office” This disappoints me because, honestly, I like Reagan. But it is hard to support someone who goes against something you stand for strongly. If I were president (God forbid) helping the mentally ill and homeless is probably the first thing I’d do.  

Source: Confronting the President by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard