From the recently published Reagan Diaries. The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’er-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.
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Someone e-mailed me this earlier this week. Is this for real?
I guess I should have researched its veracity, but apparently Kinsley himself wrote it in a recent column. Here’s the full story from Snopes:
It is often the case that a piece of satire hits so close to home (i.e., seemingly confirms something that people believe to be true) that it becomes difficult to distinguish from reality — especially when an excerpt is presented outside of its satirical context.
Such is the case with the putative quote from President Ronald Reagan’s diaries reproduced above. Although some critics of the current president might find a delicious irony in the Republican icon’s once having described a young George W. Bush (who is the son of Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W. Bush) as a “ne’er-do-well,” they’d be disappointed to learn that the quote is an out-of-context excerpt from a tongue-in-cheek article.
In June 2007, political columnist Michael Kinsley penned an article for The New Republic after a colleague alerted him to the fact that his name appeared in the recently-published book The Reagan Diaries, a compilation of selected diary entries the 40th president made while in office. Kinsley ruminated about why President Reagan might have had occasion to mention his name in a diary entry and offered several flight-of-fancy suggestions:
As Kinsley ultimately discovered, the reference to him that appeared in Reagan’s diaries was both mundane and erroneous: