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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 big leagues now." (O'Neill had said the same thing to Jimmy Carter four years before.) Reagan replied, "Oh, you know, no problem there." Despite the genial response, O'Neill's comment represented the very kind of Washington haughtiness that set..
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Steven F. Hayward |
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Reagan liked to quip about detente: "Detente--isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey--until Thanksgiving Day?"
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 being shot at without result."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 historical attachment has become almost unrecognizable in the age of a postmodernism that is openly contemptuous of history and historical experience."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory."14 David Broder had written: "There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress." Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed..
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin--the "incandescent" Lenin, as Churchill called him--would have been appalled."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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baa0070
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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 woman and roughly 1.5 million abortions per year.)
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 cactus."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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75f2a6d
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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."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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Even George Will deserted Reagan, writing in 1982 that the nation was "undertaxed."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 first popular handheld cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, would appear in 1983; the size of a brick, the DynaTAC cost $3,995, and its battery charge lasted only thirty minutes.
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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"
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 regime, which he thought was the necessary foundation for individual virtue.
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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.
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 scrambler phone. On some minutes of National Security Council meetings, Casey's indecipherable comments were recorded as "??????."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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Only one Republican voted against Reagan's tax cut--Vermont's Jim Jeffords,
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 quipped, "So much for his liabilities."
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Steven F. Hayward |
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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 liberals. It was always thought that the old bastards were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives and we're the old bastards."66"
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Steven F. Hayward |