Edward I. Koch
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Those of us who believe in God know that we will ultimately face our Maker. Some, who do not, expect to expire without hope of an afterlife. In the case of Ronald Reagan, we have an extraordinary figure whose afterlife can be seen right here on earth. He leaves behind a powerful, indeed unique, legacy of success.

Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, will forever be remembered in the history of our country as one of our most effective presidents.

I have always believed that when someone with whom we have positive emotional ties and who has led a long life that had a beneficial impact on others dies, we should celebrate his or her passing with a sense of joy, reflecting on their accomplishments. We should not be overwhelmed with anger or pain.

I define effectiveness as the ability of public officials to move the country in their political direction. Today we often hear Ronald Reagan's effectiveness compared with that of FDR.

The latter moved the country to the left, which was necessary to escape the Depression. Reagan moved the country to the right. Interesting for me is to see that many people who were critical of Reagan when he was in office are now praising him to the skies.

I thought President Reagan’s reference to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" was a sublime phrase. But he was attacked by many of the cognoscenti who like to think of themselves as intellectuals and academics, as well as by editorial writers, who labeled Reagan and his comment as puerile.

They did the same to President George W. Bush when he referred to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the Axis of Evil. Bush was as correct in his phrasing as was Reagan.

I remember when Reagan’s intellectual capacity was questioned by the same crowd that now questions the mental ability of George W. Bush. They attack Bush with the same catcalls and brickbats they used on Reagan.

My response when the political and unfair slanders were uttered was that anyone elected governor of California and re-elected with a smashing majority cannot be a dummy, even though his political philosophy is at odds with his critics. I say the same about President Bush, who was twice elected governor of Texas.

My admiration and affection for President Reagan was strengthened when I met him in person. The year was 1980. I was serving as mayor of New York. Governor Reagan was running for president against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, who was a Democrat and the leader of my own party.

One of Reagan’s staff members – I believe Lyn Nofziger – asked a member of my staff if I would meet with the governor to fill him in on New York City’s fiscal problems. In 1980, we were still operating with deficits, having been given permission by the New York State Legislature to do so with a requirement that we go to a GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) balanced budget in four years.

Members of my staff said to me, “You can’t meet with him; he’s a Republican running against Carter. It will give him national publicity and Carter will be furious.”

I said, “Of course I will meet with him. I’ll meet with anyone who wants to know more about my budget problems and who can help me solve them. He may be our next president.”

When Reagan showed up at Gracie Mansion, sure enough, he was accompanied by a truckload of national reporters. We had breakfast and chatted for about an hour. He had several staff members with him, as did I, including my deputy mayors and the corporation counsel.

At the end of our meeting I said, “Governor, we should sum up what we agreed to with respect to New York City, since the press will ask that question.”

Nofziger said, “What three things would you like?”

I replied, “One: The federal government owns the Astoria Movie Studios. I’d like to have them for New York City for a dollar.” The governor said, “Done.”

My second request, I said, is more complicated: “The federal guarantee of $1.650 billion, of which we have drawn down $600 million, can be stopped by the president at any time. So I want the governor’s assurance that if he is president, he will guarantee the entire amount.” The governor said, “Done.”

Then came my third request. I asked that the federal government take over the entire cost of Medicaid. Governor Reagan replied, “Over my dead body.” Nofziger added, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

We went out onto the porch. I reported our agreement, which he affirmed. Serendipitously, this was to become one of the most important press conferences I ever attended. Why? Because shortly after Reagan won the presidency, he designated a New Jersey resident, Donald Regan, as secretary of the Treasury.

Regan, who was very hostile to New York, announced he was ending the federal guarantees, depriving New York City of the $1.05 billion balance. I immediately called the White House and spoke with the president’s urban affairs adviser, Rich Williamson. I told him that the president had promised the entire amount would be guaranteed to the city.

He said the president always kept his word and did I have it in writing? I said, no, but we have it on tape – we always taped press conferences. He said, “Send it down.”

We not only sent it immediately, but a New York City detective hand-carried it to Washington. President Reagan was true to his word. The entire amount was guaranteed.

Over the years, I had a number of meetings with President Reagan. Whenever possible I would pick him up at the heliport when he came to New York City and drive with him to his hotel. We became friends.

On one occasion, we were driving across 42nd Street. New Yorkers had been informed the president was coming, and they were there in the thousands. Reagan was looking out the right side window when he suddenly yelled, “Look, that guy gave me the finger.” I said: “Mr. President, don’t be so upset. Thousands are cheering you and only one guy gave you the finger.” He replied, “That’s what Nancy says, that I always see the guy with the finger.”

Well, Mr. President, today seeing, hearing and reading what is being said about you, it appears unanimous that you are now everyone’s hero. There are no more fingers being waved in front of you, only loving, admiring statements with kisses. You deserve every one of them. I feel privileged to have known you. You will be remembered as one of our most beloved presidents.

Phil Brennan and NewsMax Staff
Monday, June 7, 2004

Earlier this year NewsMax Magazine published the special report "Reagan and God" based on newly discovered papers of President Reagan and the findings of scholar Paul Kengor in his book "God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life."

Part I follows:

Joan Sieffert had an almost mystical connection to Ronald Reagan. In 1974, she had a nightmare so startling she awoke from her sleep. Most people would have dismissed the dream, but Sieffert was moved enough by it that she wrote to her friend Ronald Reagan, then California’s governor.

As Paul Kengor reveals in his new book, “God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life,” Sieffert told Reagan that she pictured him “running for president, winning the presidency, and then being shot.”

She told Reagan the exact circumstances of the shooting; in her dream he “was shot before entering a car.”

Eerily, her dream mirrored exactly the events of March 30, 1981. John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan as he exited the Washington Hilton and was about to enter the presidential limousine.

In that prescient letter, Sieffert told Reagan that the dream “really terrified” her.

Sieffert had been president of the Pittsburgh chapter of Reagan’s fan club decades earlier, when he was a top Hollywood star. He had developed a bond with Sieffert, and though his club was long gone, he remained a close pen pal for decades. As Kengor notes, he was “characteristically candid and personal in his letters, many of which run longer than a full page.”

He read her letter with some alarm and shared it with his wife, Nancy. “A few days after sending the letter,” Kengor writes, “Sieffert received a phone call from a traumatized Nancy Reagan in California.” She revealed to Sieffert that she and her husband saw the possibility of his assassination as real.

Mrs. Reagan had good reason to worry. Ronnie, as she called him, was just finishing his second term as governor and already had been the subject of death threats. In one case, California police had unraveled an attempt by a radical group to take his life.

Sieffert remembers a worried but defiant Nancy Reagan telling her, however: “Ronnie really believes that it’s God choice that he run the country. And I feel that way, too.”

This anecdote unearthed by Kengor is just one of many in “God and Reagan” that add another dimension to what we know about the greatest living president of our times.

Kengor’s book reveals Reagan’s humanity and his fascinating spiritual side, one that has imbued his life from childhood through his final battle with Alzheimer’s disease. It is a story that has never before been told fully.

The Accidental Book

“God and Reagan” is a surprising work for Kengor. He is not a religious zealot but a political science professor and fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In his preface, he explains that he planned to write “a relatively straightforward book on Reagan’s personal role in his administration’s effort to undermine the Soviet empire.”

But while researching that book at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, Calif., Kengor had a revelation. Rummaging through Reagan’s personal papers, many of which have never been published, he discovered a degree of religious intensity that has not been publicly known.

He decided to make Reagan’s spiritual life a part of his larger work, Kengor writes, but when “I accumulated further evidence from other sources concerning Reagan’s religious beliefs, the story of the former president’s faith overtook the rest of the book.”

The finished book is a “spiritual biography,” Kengor says. It begins with Reagan’s difficult and unusual childhood, which helped shape him into the remarkable person he became.

Phil Brennan and NewsMax Staff
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Earlier this year NewsMax Magazine published the special report "Reagan and God," based on newly discovered papers of President Reagan and the findings of scholar Paul Kengor in his book "God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life."

Part one: Forewarned of Shooting Part two follows:

Ronald Reagan’s family and early childhood were unique and difficult. For starters, he and brother Neil never referred to his parents as Mom and Dad. They were simply Nelle and Jack, as they preferred to be called.

Reagan was born in 1911 in Tampico, Ill., during an era when America was more homogeneous. People of different races, ethnicities and religious backgrounds rarely intermarried. Catholicism and Protestantism were considered different religions.

But the Reagans’ marriage was unusual. Jack, a Roman Catholic, was married to Nelle, a stalwart Protestant who belonged to a small denomination known as Disciples of Christ.

The dichotomy, as Kengor notes, would serve the Protestant Reagan well. His sensitivity to the split between Christians would enable him to unite the Christian West and allow America, largely a Protestant nation, to ally with the Catholic Church in a stealth plan to bring down the Iron Curtain.

Other childhood circumstances would also mold him. His personality seems to have been formed by two major factors.

The first was that Jack moved from job to job as a salesman, and his family moved with him. Reagan’s family lived in dozens of homes during his childhood. By Kengor’s count, Reagan had lived in no fewer than 37 residences by the time he went to the White House.

Because of the constant moves, Reagan became a loner. He later admitted that the frequent moves made him “a little slow in making friends. … [T]his reluctance to get close to people never left me entirely.” Withdrawn into himself, he would develop a spiritual relationship with God. The other factor was Reagan’s parents.

Jack was an unsuccessful salesman and an alcoholic. Reagan recalled seeing his father so drunk he had collapsed outside their home and he had to drag his father inside.

Though his father was troubled, Reagan’s mother was his role model. She stood loyally by her husband and explained to her son that people’s shortcomings deserved a response of compassion.

Nelle was more than just a loyal housewife. As Kengor explains, she was probably the most influential person in Reagan’s life, and her story is key to understanding him and his presidency.

Reagan’s mother was an active church member who devoted her life to the poor and helpless.

She was a regular visitor to local hospitals, mental asylums and the sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers. Every week she would visit the jail, “where she came equipped with apples, cookies, and her Bible.”

Kengor notes that there are many stories of those in jail being converted.

She opened her home to strangers. Young Ron and Neil shared their home with destitute transients and others in need. On one occasion two black basketball players were visiting town and young Ronald discovered they had no place to stay. He brought them home, and Nelle gave them a hearty welcome and accommodation for the night.

She was fearless in her Christianity. For example, she regularly picked up hitchhikers. When others worried about her activities, she dismissed them. She said that if she did God’s work, He would protect her no matter what.

Despite being poor and with her husband frequently unemployed, Nelle believed in tithing, an Old Testament injunction that believers should give 10 percent of their income to charity.

She did so scrupulously. She also believed the words of Leviticus that she would receive a tremendous spiritual and earthly blessing in return. Nelle would later credit her son’s ascent in Hollywood and his financial success in the middle of the Great Depression to her tithing.

Reagan remembered his mother saying, “The Lord [will] make your 90 percent twice as big if you [make] sure He [gets] his tenth.”

The apple did not fall far from the tree. Reagan, Kengor writes, absorbed his mother’s Christianity and practiced tithing as well. He also became an active member of the church and, like his older brother, taught Sunday school. He developed a flair for drama by public readings of the Bible.

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Glenn Ford tells NewsMax that Ronald Reagan “was a true friend and an American Patriot.”

Ford, 88, according to his son, Peter, spent time today watching the television coverage of the late president’s tribute at the Ronald Reagan Library.

“I can tell you he had tears in his eyes,” recounted Peter Ford, who chatted with his father about his friend Ron on behalf of NewsMax.

“Dad doubled-dated with Nancy and Ron before they were married,” Peter recounts. “I hadn’t realized just how far back our two families' relationship went. I guess there’s not another family in Hollywood whose friendship goes back farther.”

Noting that he played with Reagan’s son Michael when they were kids, Peter recalled that his father, like Reagan, also started off as a Democrat, “before he saw the light.”

Peter said that his father and Reagan became part of the “stalwart conservatives” in Hollywood that included other luminaries such as Clark Gable, James Cagney and Robert Taylor.

Glenn Ford recalled for NewsMax that he worked with then-Nancy Davis – before she met her famous husband – in a 1949 film entitled “The Doctor and the Girl.” It was Nancy's first big-credit film.

“We are proud of him and his service to the country,” said Ford. “We need men like him today.”

Ford was a rising star, one of a small group of actors who would become film immortals, but he cast it aside to answer his country’s call.

In 1942, at the age of 26, Ford, already headed for superstardom, left the glamour and big money of Hollywood behind and joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a private.

Thirty-five years – and three wars – later, he would retire as a highly decorated Navy captain.

And he would go on to superstardom, making over 100 films, some of them blockbusters, and co-starring with filmdom’s greatest immortals.

On this day in 1916, Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born in the province of Quebec, Canada.

He got an early start as an actor, first appearing on stage at age 4 in a community production of "Tom Thumb's Wedding."

Among his films were the blockbusters "Gilda," "The Big Heat" and "The Blackboard Jungle" and the lesser-known but equally fine movies "Ransom," "Convicted," "So Ends Our Night," "The Green Glove," "Lust for Gold," "3:10 to Yuma," "The Rounders," "Don't Go Near the Water," "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" "and Love Is a Ball."

As a Marine in World War II, Ford helped build safe houses in France for those hiding from the Nazis and was among the first Americans to enter the infamous Dachau concentration camp at war’s end.

He also served two tours of duty in Vietnam, often under enemy fire, and is the only actor to have served with both the Green Berets and the French Foreign Legion.

In 1943, while in the Marines, he married the beautiful and famed dancer/actress Eleanor Powell. They had a son, Peter Newton Ford, in 1945 and were divorced in 1959.

Peter and his wife, Lynda, have three children: Aubrey, Ryan and Eleanor.

Today Glenn is retired and, according to his son, Peter, who with his wife and family live with him in his home in Beverly Hills, keeps up with current events and is helping Peter and co-author Christopher Nickens put the final touches on their forthcoming book, "Glenn Ford: A Life in Film," due out later this year.

Peter is a former Los Angeles radio host who keeps active in politics and civic affairs in Southern California. And Glenn Ford's political interests will be carried on by Peter's son Ryan, who plans to eventually run for office in California.

"Dad is fine," Peter told NewsMax.com. "Considering that he’s 88, he’s doing well. His doctor said he’s got the constitution of a 50-year-old. He’s in remarkably good health.

Peter told NewsMax.com in a prior interview that his dad keeps a close eye on the news, and that his favorite source is Sean Hannity, who he greatly admires.

According to his son, "There are only three male stars from the 1930s who are still alive – Dad, Ronald Reagan and Mickey Rooney – who started in the '20s. All the other great stars – Van Johnson, Kirk Douglas and the others – date back to the '40s."

In 1976, Ford co-starred with such film greats as Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Eddie Albert and Hal Holbrook in the film classic "Midway," which told the story of one of history’s greatest naval victories.

Ford played Adm. Raymond Spruance, who led the U.S. naval forces in a battle that spelled the beginning of the end for Japan’s naval air power.

It was a fitting role for Glenn Ford, a fierce patriot who his son describes as "one of those Ronald Reagan, true-blue American types."

Jon E. Dougherty, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, June 9, 2004

While most American leaders over the past several decades have been supporters of Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East, few were better friends of the Jewish state than Ronald Reagan.

The late president opened communications, security and economic links to Israel – many of which still exist today – that resulted in the close, symbiotic relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, according to U.S. and Israel political analysts and experts.

Also, Reagan shared a spiritual bond with Israel that has been compared with President Bush's understanding of the strategic, historic and biblical role of Israel, say experts.

"It seems that presidents like Reagan and Bush who have a foundation in the Bible have a better understanding of what Israel's role is in the world," said Helen Freedman, the executive director of American For a Safe Israel [AFSI], based in New York City.

"Israel is not meant to be a nation like all the other nations," she told NewsMax. "It's not meant to be absorbed into the Middle East or the Commonwealth of Nations. It is a nation that represents the biblical promise – the Promised Land, the chosen people, and its obligation to be a light unto the nations."

Reagan, Freedman said, was a president "we had heard woke up every morning and asked to do God's will – not his will, but God's will. We believe President Bush is somewhat on that track also."

Israel Legacy

In many respects, experts said Reagan was the best U.S. friend Israel has had since its founding in 1948.

Among his many accomplishments was his successful efforts to get the Soviet Union to allow persecuted Russian Jews to emigrate to the Jewish state. Reagan’s policies eventually led to a tidal wave of immigrants for Israel.

"There are a number of things President Reagan did that are monumental in their importance to U.S.-Israel relationship," said Josh Block, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] in Washington, D.C.

Among them: