antoine-roquentin:

Hovering outside was a habit of Bush’s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been Carter’s national security adviser, told me that he had been invited to brief the president early in his first term on the Soviet threat. When he had finished his summary, he said, he asked Reagan if he had any questions. Reagan responded: ‘Do you know the one about the newly elected black judge in Mississippi?’ Brzezinski said no. Reagan explained that the judge, after being told by his clerk that the case involved a charge of rape, said: ‘Well then, bring in the fuckee and the fucker.’ That was it. Brzezinski was ushered out of the Oval Office and found Bush waiting outside, eager to learn of Reagan’s response to the briefing. ‘I said he told me a joke,’ Brzezinski recalled. The vice president replied: ‘Oh no. Not the one about the Mississippi judge.’

Bush was petrified that the president would say the wrong thing to outsiders about what was going on, and he was hanging around the Oval Office,’ the officer said. ‘You never knew whether the president might start talking about an operation in China or into Vietnam.’​  Reagan was kept out of trouble at important national security meetings by being given a script. ‘My colleagues and I would write a talking paper for the president before meetings that resembled movie scripts, because the Old Man knew scripts as a reference. We were constantly updating the script, because if we made a dumb mistake, he would read it. We’d talk among ourselves about where to put the emphasis for certain words and phrases.’ In Deadly Gambits, his 1984 study of arms control, Strobe Talbott showed what happened when Reagan didn’t have a script. During a conversation about arms control with a group of congressmen, the president suddenly proclaimed: ‘Land-based missiles have nuclear warheads, while bombers and submarines don’t.’ ‘Even as he said these words,’ Talbott wrote, ‘his voice dropped and wavered, as though he had forgotten his lines and knew there was something not quite right about his attempt to improvise.’

in case you thought trump was the first moron in the oval office

also vice president george hw bush helped build jsoc from the ground up as his personal wetworks squad and conducted dozens of off the books operations including assassinations until, in an attempt to gain the advantage in a turf war with cia director bill casey, his underlings made the initial iran-contra leak to a lebanese newspaper and ended up almost putting bush and themselves in jail.

One thing to push back on though, even if we don’t go full SNL before he was Governor of California Ronald Reagan wasn’t just “an actor” but the head of the SAG, immersed in Hollywood industry politics

(and even the people who minimize that are like “oh, that was just scheming with Jack Warner leveraging McCarthyism”)

And the conceit that obviously the Establishmentarianist Bush could run rings around him at bureaucratic politicking and double-dealing and institutional infighting is a little eeeeh