# Ronald Reagan article (good stuff)



## SgtAndySipowicz (Mar 17, 2008)

*Secret Service Thwarted Reagan Assassination*

Sunday, August 9, 2009 6:23 PM

*By:* Jim Meyers  
*Unlike his predecessor Jimmy Carter, President Ronald Reagan treated those who protected and served him with respect and courtesy*, Ronald Kessler reveals in his new book about the Secret Service. 
"In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect," already an Amazon.com best-seller since its publication on Tuesday, chronicles the agency's activities guarding every president from Kennedy to Obama and features startling disclosures about the presidents and their families. 
Newsmax Chief Washington Correspondent Kessler is the first journalist to penetrate the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service, and his book is based on interviews with more than 100 current and former agents.

"*Carter came into the cockpit once in the two years I was on with him,*" James A. Buzzelli, an Air Force One flight engineer, told Kessler. "*But Reagan never got on or off without sticking his head in the cockpit and saying, 'Thanks, fellas' or 'Have a nice day*.'" 
Another agent told Kessler that one Christmas when he was on duty at *Reagan's ranch, the president apologized to him for having to be away from his family on a holiday. *
*Said Buzzelli: "He was just as personable in person as he came across to the public*." 
Reagan's wife Nancy, on the other hand, was "very cold," a "precise and demanding woman," agents told Kessler. 
She made it clear to her children that if they wanted to see their father, they had to check with Nancy first. 
Ronald Reagan received Secret Service protection for the first time when he ran unsuccessfully for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976. *One day as he was preparing to drive from his Los Angeles home to his ranch near Santa Barbara, an agent noticed that he was wearing a gun and asked what it was for. *
*"Well, just in case you guys can't do the job, I can help out," Reagan replied.* 
Years later, he confided to an agent that on his first *presidential trip to the Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase*. 
Kessler uncovers a fascinating story related to a Reagan trip to Spokane, Wash., in 1986. 
One night the local police called Pete Dowling, who was part of the advance team of Secret Service agents in Spokane, and told him a couple staying at a downtown Best Western hotel had found a large paper dinner napkin on the floor of an elevator. The napkin had a diagram of the Spokane Coliseum, where Reagan was going to speak in four days. 
The napkin "had a legend," Dowling said. "It had Xs around the exterior of the coliseum, and then in the legend it said X equals security post. Then it had all of our license plates of the cars we were using. Clearly somebody was conducting surveillance of us." 
Dowling examined the hotel's sign-in cards until he found one with the exact handwriting he had seen on the napkin. 
Agents went to the hotel room indicated on the card and found a man in his underpants. They also found a bullet on top of a dresser, with a string attached. A small white piece of paper was attached to the string, with the words, "Reagan will die." 
A gun was found in his car. 
"It turned out the man had just gotten out of prison after being convicted of bank robbery," Kessler discloses. 
"While he was in jail, he had had a romantic relationship with another male inmate. The other inmate had just been transferred to another prison, and the suspect heard that his former lover was romantically involved with somebody else." 
Dowling said: "He wanted to do something spectacular in the Spokane area so he could go back to jail and be reunited with the other man." 
Kessler also tells about Reagan's reaction to the news that the leading Democratic presidential contender for the 1988 election, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, was having an affair with Donna Rice. 
"We were in the elevator going up to the residence on the second floor of the White House," said former agent Ted Hresko. 
"The door of the elevator was about to close, and one of the staffers blocked it. The staffer told Reagan the news about Donna Rice and Gary Hart." 
*Reagan nodded his head and looked at the agent. "Boys will be boys,*" he said. 
When the door of the elevator closed, Reagan said to Hresko, "*But boys will not be president*." 
Donna Rice was not the first woman the married politician frolicked with, agents told Kessler. 
Hart routinely cavorted with stunning models and actresses in Los Angeles, courtesy of one of his political advisers, actor Warren Beatty, Kessler revealed. 
"Warren Beatty gave him a key to his house on Mulholland Drive," a former agent who was on Hart's detail told Kessler. 
Beatty would arrange to have 20-year-old women - "tens," as the agent described them - meet Hart at Beatty's house. 
The young woman stayed well into the night and often left just before sunrise. 
"Sometimes there were two or three girls with him at a time," the agent said. "He was like a kid in a candy store."

© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.


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## LongKnife56 (Sep 9, 2008)

Some great Reagan quotes:


> * Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. * You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done. * The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated. * People don't start wars, governments do. * Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. * My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes (Joking during a test before one of his radio addresses.) * Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. * Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. * I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. * There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. * I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting. * The nine most terrifying words in the English language are... I'm from the government and I'm here to help. * Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. * But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret. * You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans. * Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying. * I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. * General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! * I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there. That's how I saw it, and see it still. We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.


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## LGriffin (Apr 2, 2009)

No doubt he was a class act and he NEVER "acted stupidly" like the current POTUS.


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## mpd61 (Aug 7, 2002)

He was my Commander-in-Chief for eight good years!


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## SgtAndySipowicz (Mar 17, 2008)

The question is will there be a *new Ronald Reagan in 2012* who can save our country???


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## jmestano (Aug 31, 2008)

I love hearing old Reagan stories. He was a great man, and a great president. My college history professors always tried to diminish and deconstruct him, but they never could succeed.


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