Sacramento Bee editorial: Despite sunny image, Ronald Reagan’s racism paved the way for Trump’s
EDITOR'S NOTE: Not long after he was elected, Reagan busted the PATCO union and went on to become the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover.
“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation,” Will Rogers once said, “but you can lose it in a minute.”
This certainly seems to be the case with former President Ronald Reagan, who served as California’s governor from 1967 to 1975. Just a few awful seconds of a 1971 conversation, secretly recorded by then-President Richard Nixon, is all it has taken to indisputably recast Reagan as an unabashed racist.
In the shocking conversation, first revealed by The Atlantic, Reagan refers to African delegates to the United Nations as “monkeys” and says “they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” Nixon guffaws.