Last Act Quotes

“The funeral of Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage was flawed when his pet parrot had to be removed because it kept squawking out the profanity Jackson had taught the foul fowl.20”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“George and Barbara Bush were never invited to the Reagans’ private quarters during the eight years spent in the White House.104”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“While Reagan was often criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for quoting John Kennedy, he once received a letter from son John Kennedy, Jr., praising Reagan’s use of his father’s words and urging him to keep on quoting President Kennedy.26 In 1980, nearly all the extended Kennedy family had voted for Reagan rather than Jimmy Carter.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“drew more television viewers than did Ronald Reagan’s but in fact Reagan in 1981 had 42 million viewers while Obama in 2009 had 38 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“With a year left in the Gipper’s administration, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal signaled “the end of the Age of Reagan” and his time in Washington was marked by “more disgraces than can fit in a nursery rhyme.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“The week of the Reagan funeral, makeshift shrines of flowers and such sprung up at Eureka College and in Dixon, Illinois, at the presidential library in Simi Valley, at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, at the Reagan home in Bel Air, and in towns and villages across the nation. Memorials appeared, too, in Prague and Budapest and in cities and villages across the former “Captive Nations” of the Baltics, as well as in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Few, if any, were visible on the campus of Harvard or in the tony Georgetown section of Washington, nor in the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“In 1980, “radical chic conductor Leonard Bernstein said Reagan’s election would unleash the forces of fascism in America.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan

“The week of the Gipper’s death, syndicated liberal cartoonist Ted Rall would show an absence of tact and an absence of a soul when he said, “I’m sure he’s turning crispy brown right about now.”9 A former conservative, Kevin Phillips, wrote in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor, “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America—an ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the richest third of the population and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance.”
― Craig Shirley, Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan