President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday anniversary

My wife, three friends, and I were with him the night before he died. In his lovely, quiet Beverly Hills home, he was terribly ravaged by the disease.
He couldn’t speak, and his emaciated body bore no resemblance to the one millions of women had dreamed of. But his eyes shone as our little group gathered by his bed to pray with, and for him. Obeying the admonition in James 5 in the New Testament, I poured a little oil on his bare chest and rubbed it in with my hand, praying for him to be healed and restored. He smiled gratefully at all of us.
His countenance had brightened, and his friend/caregiver Tom exclaimed, “Roy, tomorrow is going to be a better day! I’ll lay out your ‘happy clothes’, and maybe you’ll feel good enough to get up . . . ”
But early the next morning, as Tom opened the shutters to admit the first rays of the sun, Roy, in his “happy clothes,” slipped away to join our friend Jesus. I believe, since he gave his last days to their Lord, we’ll be together again . . . and I so look forward to that.
In 1980, for example,economist Paul Samuelson wrote that “two-digit price inflation is a distinct possibility for much of the decade of the1980s.” He predicted an inflation rate from 1982 to 1987 of 9.4 percent a year. The Democratic party was endorsing a host of inflation-fighting measures that were economically wrongheaded and almost certain to fail. During the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, Jimmy Carter’s anti-inflation policy included credit controls and gas rationing while Ted Kennedy, his opponent, endorsed wage and price controls.
Most Keynesian economists had predicted that Reaganomics would make inflation worse, not better. Hobart Rowen of the Washington Post stated the conventional wisdom by arguing that the Kemp-Roth tax cuts would be “dangerously inflationary.”
He added, “There is nothing in the [Reagan] fiscal program–in the view of those not addicted to supply-side theory–that works against inflation.” James Tobin, a Nobel prize winner and an informal Clinton administration adviser, also had warned of the inflationary impact of Reagan’s tax cuts and had called instead for “a five-year period of gradually declining wage-increase guide-posts.”
- Robert Lincoln is the only man in U.S. history known to have witnessed the assassinations of three different presidents, his father, James Garfield, and William McKinley. After he saw anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoot McKinley, he vowed he would never again appear in public with an incumbent president.i
- Much has been written about Lincoln-Kennedy assassinations coincidences, including:
- Both had seven letters in their last names.
- Both were shot in the head on a Friday seated beside their wives.
- Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre. Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln Limo, which was made by Ford.
- Lincoln was in Box 7 at Ford’s Theatre, and Kennedy was in Car 7 of the Dallas motorcade.
- Both assassins had three names with 15 letters (John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald).
- Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and was captured in a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy in a warehouse and was captured in a theater.
- Both were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in ’46 (1846/1946), were runners-up for their party’s nomination for vice president in ’56, and were elected president in ’60.
- Both were succeeded by southern Democrats named Johnson.k