2026-11-12
1 小时 9 分钟It's hard to remember now, but people mocked Ronald Reagan
and in fact expressed what seemed like genuine alarm about Ronald Reagan based on his age when he was president.
Ronald Reagan was the oldest man at the time to serve as president of the United States.
He was 77 when he left office.
Of course, he died of Alzheimer's.
But even while he was president, people accused him of having Alzheimer's.
He was seen as very, very, very old.
Well, 40 years ago this week, Ronald Reagan was in his second term two years into it.
It was right after the midterm elections.
Of course, that year, 1986, in which Republicans did very badly, Ronald Reagan was 75 years old at the time.
And this is not widely remembered, but it was that year, 40 years ago this week,
that Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty bill, probably the first in American history,
that gave amnesty legal status to people who had been breaking the law.
It basically wiped away their crimes, sort of as if by magic, a stroke of a pen,
and put them on what we now refer to as a path to citizenship.
It legalized them, about 3 million people, people
who are living here illegally and thanks to Ronald Reagan signing this.
They were on their way to becoming citizens.
And people don't remember it in part because history records Ronald Reagan as a terrifyingly right wing president.
And by the second year of his second term, he'd been hearing that, well, for six years.