Love him or detest him, Ronald Reagan was a remarkable man, and was much more than the filmoid one-dimensional character that some liberals have sketched him as being.
From the UK Telegraph:The Prince of Wales was a "most likeable person", President Gaddafi a "mad clown" and Michael Jackson was "surprisingly shy".
|  | Reagan in the Oval Office. His wife Nancy, he wrote, gave him 'more happiness than any man deserves'
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The private diaries of Ronald Reagan, which are about to be published for the first time, reveal a US president who was worried about imminent Armageddon but who also fretted about how he would handle chopsticks in front of the Chinese.
The man who was credited with ending the Cold War reveals that he was "lonesome" when his wife, Nancy, was away and refused to talk to their son, Ron Junior, after he hung up on him.
His carefully handwritten and succinct private musings, contained in five leather-bound books embossed with the presidential seal, span his eight years at the White House from 1981 to 1989. Excerpts have been published in Vanity Fair magazine prior to a new book by Douglas Brinkley, a historian who was given exclusive access to the diaries.
They will reassure both Mr Reagan's supporters and his detractors, providing supporting evidence that he was both a dangerously simplistic buffoon or - alternatively - that, beneath the folksy exterior, lay a razor-sharp and highly-principled mind.
|  | On being shot: 'I sat on the edge of the seat
almost paralyzed by pain. Getting shot hurts'
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Tom Leonard in New York, for the UK Telegraph |
Copyright (C) UK Telegraph
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