From the recently released Reagan diaries:

[phrog]

Quote:
"A moment I've been dreading. George [Bush] brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."-- Ronald Reagan in his recently published diaries, May 17, 1986.

[stan2reason]

That's priceless! Are you sure it's the real deal? I haven't read his memoirs.

[phrog]

I have to admit I haven't researched it. It was passed along from my mother. Surely Mom wouldn't lie!

[phrog]

Aw shit, urban legand. I should have gone to Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/kinsley.asp) in the first place. Still funny though.

[minorwork]

31 years underground has opened my eyes to the evil in men's nature. I have seen too many men driven to quit or be forced to quit because of malicious rumors taken to be fact. I wonder about J. Edgar Hoover rumors. Snopes has nothing about the picure in drag. However, the following and others clarify the situation. http://crimemagazine.com/05/jedgarhoover,0719-5.htm

I did have a chance to play with this trait though. I was asked one day in the shower room if I was going bossin'. I asked who started that one. He said Gipper. Now Gipper was a fellow repairman and had convinced himself he was smarter than all. He was good on electrics. So I asked if was to say I was goin' bossin do you think Gipper would believe his own rumor. Well by the end of 2 weeks all at my end of the mine and some at the other had Gipper believin' it. Even the bosses were in on it, telling Gipper how I was goin' to change the way Gipper down things. He would only stare arrows at me and would walk away when I approached him. It was common knowledge he wanted the job. You didn't want the acceptance of a bossin' job to be public knowledge or your last union day would be ended with a greasy peter and stripped out your clothes.

To this day I am amazed at the power of an untruth repeated assumed to be true.