Germond was skeptical. He had recently dined at the Reagans’ home at Sears’s invitation. The would-be statesman kept going off on bizarre tangents—wondering, for instance, whether Gerald Ford had staged fake assassination attempts to win sympathy for his renomination in 1976, and expressing incredulity that anyone could believe General Eisenhower had had an affair during World War II. Each time, Germond assumed Reagan was joking—until he “looked
