Los Angeles – After he was seriously wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt, Ronald Reagan described the experience simply in one of his presidential diaries: “Getting shot hurts.” That excerpt and many others form a portrait of an uncomplicated and amiable man who – despite occasional periods of worry and bursts of temper – took his eight years in the White House pretty much in stride.
Excerpts from the writings, which are in the custody of Reagan’s widow, Nancy, were published in the June issue of Vanity Fair magazine, which went on newsstands Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles. They were edited by historian Douglas Brinkley for a book.
In the entry about the assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. outside a Washington hotel, Reagan recalled how he first thought he had suffered just a broken rib at the hands of a Secret Service agent who shoved him into a car and jumped on top of him after the shooting started.
“I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes,” Reagan wrote. “It was then we learned I’d been shot and had a bullet in my lung.”
Reagan, who died in June 2004 at age 93, never kept a diary before entering the White House in 1981. During his two terms in office, he wrote every day except when he was in the hospital.
Each page of the diaries – five 8-by-11 hardback books bound in maroon leather – are filled to the bottom with Reagan’s neat handwriting. He sometimes used abbreviations, often referring to Democrats as “Dems” or “Demos,” for example, and he never wrote out curse words, substituting h-l for hell.
The diaries display a spare writing style that still gives a colorful peek into the private thoughts of one of the most popular presidents in modern American history.
In one entry, Reagan noted that his son Ron “called this evening all exercised because S.S. (Secret Service) agents had gone into their apartment while they were in California to fix an alarm on one of his windows. I tried to reason with him that this was a perfectly O.K. thing for them to do. … I told him quite firmly not to talk to me that way & he hung up on me. Not a perfect day.”
In April 1984, he wrote that daughter “Patti screamed & complained so much” about her privacy being invaded that her Secret Service detail was being eliminated, leaving her security at risk.
“Insanity is hereditary,” he wrote. “You catch it from your kids.”
Reagan also wrote frequently of his love for Nancy. An entry noting his wedding anniversary described their marriage as “29 years of more happiness than any man could rightly deserve.”
