Jams

The Reagan Diaries

by Rodney Anonymous

HarperCollins, 784 pp., $35

"Today I asked James Baker to see if he could hire some colored boys to chase those noisy faggots away from the White House fence."

OK. That's not really in the Reagan Diaries, but neither is much of anything else of any real substance.

You might think that reading the diary of Ronald "the bombing begins in five minutes" Reagan � a man so completely bat-shit crazy that he, despite having spent the entirety of WWII in Hollywood, once told Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal that he had personally helped to liberate the concentration camps � would be like suddenly finding oneself on Charles Manson's Christmas card list. Sadly, there are only a few nuggets of crazy here and they're scattered about like crow droppings in an Iowa cornfield.

Here's some Reagan-tastic nuttery from June 7, 1981: "Got word of Israeli bombing of Iraq nuclear reactor. I swear I believe Armageddon is near."

Apart from the revelation that "getting shot hurts" (March 30, 1981), the only real take-away is the scary, scary impression that the Leader of the Free World wasn't too good with details � "A man, no hostage, was in jail in Iran for something during Pres. Carter's term. Then he was freed. He committed something or other and is back in jail in Iran." (Nov. 9, 1988) � and the even more frightening knowledge that, on at least one occasion (May 3, 1986), Reagan switched off CNN in order to catch The A Team and Hart to Hart.

Hannah Arendt was right: It's not the evil; it's the banality of the evil.

Interestingly, the most sympathetic character tucked between this book's 784 pages turns out to be Ron Reagan Jr., whose appearances mostly consist of him habitually (and, after reading about 150 pages of the senior Reagan's diary, one might say "wisely") hanging up the phone on his doddering, chalk-faced, A Team-loving, imaginary concentration camp-freeing, Armageddon-anticipating old man.