Reagan liked to quip about détente: Détente—isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day?
Berns was vitally concerned about the philosophical ground of virtue in the individual, which was the necessary foundation of a decent regime. Jaffa was concerned with the philosophic ground of the re...
Only one Republican voted against Reagan’s tax cut—Vermont’s Jim Jeffords,
A few liberals understood that the size and nature of Reagan’s landslide clearly indicated significant problems for the Democratic Party. Pat Moynihan said: I’ll tell you what chills the blood of libe...
Kirkpatrick’s appointment was said to be unpopular with some Reagan insiders such as the Kitchen Cabinet, who held against her that she was a Democrat and therefore not a Reagan loyalist.
Reagan, to his credit, was never much impressed with Establishment credentials. When told that his prospective secretary of transportation, Drew Lewis, was a Harvard Business School graduate, Reagan q...
George Will’s equally serviceable formula was He does not want to return to the past; he wants to return to the past’s way of facing the future. Reagan’s variety of future-oriented optimism rooted in...
Casey was most famous for his supposed lack of diction; his mumbling became so legendary in Washington that Reagan quipped that Casey was the only CIA director in history who didn’t need to use a scra...
Even George Will deserted Reagan, writing in 1982 that the nation was undertaxed.
Reagan called Allen two hours later when he was changing planes in Chicago, asking, Who is he? Who is who? Allen replied. Who is this Jeane Kirkpatrick? Well, first, he’s a she.71
Soviet woman of child-bearing age had six to eight abortions. This translated into 10 million to 16 million abortions per year. (The comparable figures for the United States were 0.5 abortions per wom...
When asked if he knew about Pac-Man, Reagan quipped: Someone told me it was a round thing that gobbles up money. I thought it was Tip O’Neill.
Democrats would back larger domestic spending cuts if Reagan would cut in half the third year of the income tax cut. You can get me to crap a pineapple, Reagan replied, but you can’t get me to crap a...
One of the quips Reagan scribbled on a notepad after waking up after surgery was Winston Churchill’s famous line from his autobiography My Early Life that there is no more exhilarating feeling than be...
The friction began at this first meeting. O’Neill was not initially impressed with Reagan and said to him, You’ve been a governor of a state, but a governor plays in the minor leagues. You’re in the b...
By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than rem...
The Federal Communications Commission was preparing to grant the necessary authority to begin cellular telephone service, even though the technology had been around for more than twenty years. The fir...
Week before the election, the New Republic’s Morton Kondracke wrote that it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of...