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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (9157)	3/1/1998 9:45:00 PM
From: jhild	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

A fly-on-the-wall glimpse into a presidency 9.10 p.m. ET (211 GMT) March 1, 1998 By Mike Feinsilber, Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - Twelve years after receiving unprecedented access to a president at work, historian Edmund Morris is offering a few tantalizing hints into what he thinks about Ronald Reagan. He sees the 40th president as an aging, declining leader who was not up to handling the greatest crisis of his presidency, the Iran-Contra affair. Morris' insights are of interest because he was given what no other presidential biographer ever had - a "fly-on-the-wall'' opportunity to observe history as it occurred in the White House during much of Reagan's second term. With the former president himself silenced by Alzheimer's disease and unable to offer any now-it-can-be-told accounts of his own, Reagan followers have been eagerly awaiting the Morris book. The book was originally planned for 1991 and was reported to have fetched Morris a $3 million advance, and Random House said it will come out in the fall. Morris is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris has been generally private about what he saw first hand in the White House and what he concluded from it. As one of a number of Reagan observers interviewed for a two-part "American Experience'' biography of Reagan aired on PBS last week, Morris shared some insights, including his view that Reagan's tenure was one of steady physical and mental decline. When the disclosure came along about the sale of arms for hostages to Iran and the unlawful transfer of the proceeds to the anti-communist Contra forces in Nicaragua, Morris said, Reagan was at sea, incapable of coping. "That was the first time I got the feeling that he was not able to handle anything that came at him again,'' Morris said in the TV interview. "He wasn't quite up to handling a crisis of that dimensions.'' And when it became necessary to sacrifice his chief of staff, Donald Regan, to put the matter behind him, Reagan could not bring himself to tell Regan. Word leaked, and Regan left in a huff. By that point, the White House "troika'' - Edwin Meese, Michael Deaver and James A. Baker III, the advisers who carried out Reagan's broad philosophical directives - were gone from the White House, Baker to run the Treasury, Meese to run the Justice Department and Deaver out of government. And that left Reagan virtually abandoned, "an old tired man'' and "divorced from reality,'' the author concluded. One piece of evidence: Reagan wrote in his diary on a Friday night in 1987 that Nancy Reagan's brother and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Richard Davis, visited the residential quarters after dinner "and things immediately livened up.'' In fact, Morris said, although the guests had been on the schedule for a visit, they did not come. But Reagan was so out of touch that he did not realize that. The following day, Reagan corrected his diary: "Oh, I was mistaken. They didn't come down until lunch time today.'' Morris offered the view that Reagan's decline started when Reagan was shot and seriously wounded on March 30, 1981, in the third month of his presidency. "His thoughts became slower, his speech became slower, he deliberated more, he hesitated more when he spoke,'' he said. "He lost his quickness. And for the rest of his presidency it was a very, very slow and steady mental and physical decline.'' Initially, he said, Reagan was fully engaged with the paperwork that came his way, constantly checking off points and writing comments in the margins. "But as the years proceed you see he is less and less interested,'' Morris said. "He was saving his faculties, as old men do, for the really important, vital events.'' The shooting had another effect, Morris said: It strengthened Reagan's feeling that his destiny was preordained. Reagan concluded "that the life which had been spared was now going to have to be put to the service of the God who had saved him,'' Morris said. "He became much more devout and evangelical from that moment on.'' foxnews.com

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (9157)	3/1/1998 9:54:00 PM
From: jhild	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 20981

Also mentioned by Geraldo, that tomorrow Newsweek will be reporting that Linda Tripp was peddling a book in 1994 that was characterized as a "tell all" about the White House. The proposed table of contents included a "Chapter 5: The President and his Women." If true, Kind of establishes a predisposition on Linda's slant on things.