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The Reagan Diaries

The Weekly StandardreviewThe Reagan Diaries
During the week of the Reagan funeral in June 2004, innumerable Reagan "experts" babbled endlessly on television and seemed only to believe that Ronald Reagan was a nice guy with a good sense of humor--a sort of global Captain Kangaroo. What they didn't know, and what these diaries now reveal, is that Reagan was a man of great passion, great ideas, great anger, great ideology, great pragmatism, and great love. He liked a good joke but he loved a good conversation.
Though some think Reagan didn't have a temper, he himself admitted that he did. In an unpleasant phone conversation with Senator Pete Domenici, the president inscribed, "I got mad."
Isaac Chotiner