The President says and does some more stupid things.

4/14/83 President Reagan is asked if his administration is trying to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. “No,” he says, “because that would be violating the law.”

4/18/83 Seventeen Americans and 46 Lebanese are killed when a truck bomb plows into the US embassy in Beirut.

4/27/83 President Reagan asks Congress for $600 million for his Central American policies, pointing out – as if it had some relevance – that this “is less than one‑tenth of what Americans will spend this year on coin‑operated video games.”

5/4/83 President Reagan lauds the Nicaraguan contras as “freedom fighters” and observes that nuclear weapons “can’t help but have an effect on the population as a whole.”

5/18/83 During a speech to the White House News Photographers dinner, President Reagan sticks his thumbs in his ears and wiggles his fingers. Says the leader of the free world, “I’ve been waiting years to do this.”

5/28/83 Telling his aides that, rather than reading his briefing books, he spent the eve of the Williamsburg economic summit watching The Sound of Music, President Reagan says, “I put them aside and spent the evening with Julie Andrews.”

6/9/83 Addressing a forum in Minnesota, President Reagan is asked how the Federal Government plans to respond to a report on education that he has “approved ... in its entirety.” He is unable to provide anything more specific than that he is “going to have meetings,” and finally turns to Education Secretary T. H. Bell for help. “Could you fill in what I left out?” the President asks Bell. “I won’t be offended.”

6/10/83 Reacting to President Reagan’s claim that he has increased federal aid to education, House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-TX) says, “It embarrasses all of us as Americans to have to point out that the President of the United States is not telling the truth ... I want to believe that he doesn’t know any better. I want to believe that those who furnish him those spurious statistics are the culprits and that the President of the United States is innocently making these statements, not aware of their total untruth.”

6/16/83 Ariela Gross, a 17‑year‑old New Jersey student, meets with President Reagan to present him with a petition supporting a nuclear freeze. She reports that the President “expressed the belief that there must be something wrong with the freeze if the Soviets want it.”

6/29/83 President Reagan suggests that one cause of the decline in public education is the schools’ efforts to comply with court‑ordered desegregation.

All entries are excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook. More to come.