Previously on The President Reagan Show, he told a Time magazine reporter that he sometimes feels trapped in the White House: “You glance out the window and the people are walking around Pennsylvania Avenue and you say, ‘I could never say I am going to run down to the drugstore and get some magazines.’ I can’t do that anymore.”
10/12/82 White House spokesman Larry Speakes to the press: “You don’t tell us how to stage the news, and we don’t tell you how to report it.”
10/19/82 During a White House meeting with Arab leaders, President Reagan turns to the Lebanese foreign minister. “You know,” he says, “your nose looks just like Danny Thomas’s.”
11/11/82 President Reagan explains that his proposed five-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax would not be a tax at all. “It would be,” he explains, “a user fee.”
11/25/82 Larry Speakes chooses Thanksgiving as the ideal moment to announce that the White House is considering a proposal (conceived by Ed Meese) to tax unemployment benefits. This, says Speakes, would “make unemployment less attractive.”
11/26/82 Ed Meese denies that taxing unemployment benefits has been seriously considered, though he can’t help adding, “We do know that generally when unemployment benefits end, most people find jobs very quickly.”
12/4/82 President Reagan returns home from his five-day trip to Latin America. “Well, I learned a lot,” he tells reporters. “You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.” An aide is soon sent out to explain that the President certainly didn’t mean to imply that he was surprised by this.
12/9/82 Discussing his feelings of confinement with a reporter for People magazine, President Reagan says, “Sometimes I look out there at Pennsylvania Avenue and see people bustling along, and it suddenly dawns on me that probably never again can I just say, ‘Hey, I’m going down to the drugstore to look at the magazines.’”
12/15/82 Literary agent Bill Adler announces that The Deaver Diet, recounting the White House aide’s 35‑pound weight loss, will be published in early 1984. Adler says the book will consist of 75% diet, 20% exercise and 5% “inspiration.”
12/16/82 Spontaneously conveying one of his regrets to a Washington Post reporter, President Reagan says, “I sometimes look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can’t do that anymore.”
12/18/82 Sharing a sudden thought with a radio interviewer, President Reagan says, “I sometimes look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can’t do that anymore.”
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.