Eugene Jarecki

“I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.”

“Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.”

“We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.”

“He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich.”

“The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.”

“I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.”

“The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, 'Let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,' and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections.”

“Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.”

“Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.”

“As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.”

“You can't have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.”

“Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama's boy and he said no, more of a papa's boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.”

“My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.”

“You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.”