WASHINGTON — Ronald Reagan, the optimistic, patriotic Hollywood actor who as the nation's 40th president revived the conservative movement in America, died Saturday.

Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, died at his Los Angeles home. He was 93.
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He also devalued the idea of a strong central government — to the chagrin of his detractors and delight of his supporters.

After he was shot... two months into his presidency... he told his wife, Nancy: "Honey, I forgot to duck."

Goldwater's Administrative Director Tom Dunlevy... was an insider at the [1980 GOP] convention... I will always remember the very words of Tom Dunlevy following my protest of the selection of George Bush for VP. They were etched into my mind. "We didn't like that either. It was a deal with the Devil. Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, present at the convention as agents of David Rockefeller, assured Reagan the presidency if he accepted Bush on the ticket. Otherwise Rockefeller would swing the election to Carter."

Cleon Skousen spoke with Reagan at the convention, both before and after the Bush decision, and related how Reagan told how Kissinger and Ford with the support of Walter Cronkite coerced him. According to Skousen these are Reagan's very words "They showed me the brush by which I would be tarred if I did not go along." After the election, when George Bush's top man, campaign manager James Baker, became Reagan's chief of staff -- the one person who controlled who saw the president -- the betrayal of conservatism was complete.

Scott Hinckley, brother of John W. Hinckley Jr., who allegedly shot Reagan, was to have dined tonight in Denver at the home of Neil Bush, one of the vice president's sons...

Scott Hinckley [is] vice president of his father's Denver-based firm, Vanderbilt Energy Corp... Neil Bush lives in Denver, where he works for Standard Oil Co. of Indiana.

In 1978, Neil served as campaign manager for his brother, George W. Bush, the vice president's oldest son, who made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Neil lived in Lubbock throughout much of 1978, where John Hinckley lived from 1974 through 1980...

Sharon Bush, Neil's wife, said... "From what I know and I've heard, they (the Hinckleys) are a very nice family and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign."

Another of the vice president's sons, George W. Bush, lived in Lubbock in 1978 and ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Police have said John Hinckley Jr. lived in Lubbock at that time and once attended Texas Tech University.

Young George Bush did not recall meeting the suspect.

"It's certainly conceivable that I met him or might have been introduced to him," he said. "I don't recognize his face from the brief, kind of distorted thing they had on TV and the name doesn't ring any bells."

In the period when Reagan came in, I believe Bush took over. He was vice president and rose to power, I believe, on March 31 1981 when Reagan was nearly assassinated. The person placed as the patsy, not the person that actually shot Reagan but the person placed as the patsy in the case, was John Hinckley. His family ties were to oil. Through that oil connection, Neil Bush -- George Herbert Walker Bush's son, who worked in oil -- knew Scott Hinckley who also worked in oil. Neil had been involved with Scott in many oil operations -- both working for oil speculation and oil companies.

The two families lived close to each other. They knew each other socially and financially. When the Hinckley oil company started to fail in the sixties, Bush's Zapata Oil financially bailed out Hinckley's company. It went from being Vanderbilt Oil to Vanderbilt Energy or Vanderbilt Resources in the 60s after Bush intervened. The Hinckleys had been running an operation with six dead wells but then they were making several million dollars a year after the Bush bailout. I always thought this was some sort of a money-pass front where they were laundering money through on this phony oil operation but actually operating some type of an intelligence pay-off.

The father in that family, John W. Hinckley Sr., was also the president of the board for World Vision. World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and "good work" operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there.

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The Secret Service helped to set-up Reagan too. Reagan was told not to wear his vest that day -- his protective vest. I'll bet he wore it after that. They did not call the procedure with the limousine. He should have come out the door and gone directly into the limousine. That's how he arrived.

He came, the Secret Service formed two rows on either side of the back door, they opened the back door and he goes in. When you hire a limousine, they don't go to the house down the street, they come to your door. When you're the president, they'll move it six inches to make sure that it's in the right place. It was in the right place when he arrived. He got out and went in through the phalanx of the two rows of agents. He's safe into the VIP entrance.

He comes out the same exit and where's the car?' It is nowhere near the door. It's 40-50 feet down the pavement. So, he's got to walk out into the open. What's supposed to happen? The Secret Service is supposed to surround him like a diamond and protect him. One guy goes forward, McCarthy, to open the door for him. The rest don't surround him. They all file out like a line of ducks off to the right and they leave Reagan walking in the open with Brady and these other guys. Then, the shooting happens.

The damage that was done there once the shooting started was quite extensive. Brady was hit which literally took a large chunk of his brain and knocked him on to the ground. A black cop was nicked in the neck, a big beefy cop, and he spun and hit the ground hard by the shot. McCarthy, 160 pounds, was lifted by the shot, that hit him in the groin at the back door of the car, and thrown through the air to the front bumper of the car. He himself says that was no 22.

All of the early press reports said that Hinckley was firing a 38 and that is much more consistent with these kinds of reactions. A 22 will hurt you, enter you and do damage inside you, but it's not going to knock you over. A 38 is a much larger caliber of bullet. Hinckley purchased a 38 at a pawn shop on Elm Street in Dallas -- the same street where Kennedy was assassinated...

Then the official story changes after three or four hours and Hinckley supposedly had a 22. I went through the ABC footage and you can actually see the replacement of the 22 and the pick-up of the 38 by a Secret Service agent.
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Hinckley, instead of being taken under civilian custody or even federal custody -- he is in a military district in DC but he is also in several federal districts -- he's whisked off to Quantico Marine Base and that's where he is held for questioning. I think that that was part of his debriefing and deprogramming. But he's not taken under civilian control, he's taken under military custody.

Then he's moved from there for psychiatric evaluation to Fort Butner, South Carolina, which was the first prison that was developed where the cells (and the blueprints) were called labs. It was the first mind-control experimentation prison in the country. He spends his time down there. Again with a group of psychiatrists that are interlinked with other assassinations and then he is eventually brought to court and declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the assassination attempt.

It's a convoluted story but the patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light.

"I knew I'd been hurt, but I thought that I'd been hurt by the Secret Service man landing on me in the car, and it was, I must say, it was the most paralyzing pain. I've described it as if someone had hit you with a hammer.

But that sensation, it seemed to me, came after I was in the car, and so I thought that maybe his gun or something... suddenly I found that I was coughing up blood."

When Reagan was shot, he apparently assumed that his Vice President did it. How do I know this? From the fascinating information that my mother, who volunteered at the hospital where he was taken and was a friend of his from the old Hollywood days, shared with me. It seems that shortly after he woke up, he asked for a DC patrol officer, had this person find a US ship that had just reached the area, and soon sailors with sidearms guarded his bedside while he placed the whole hospital under his direct command and swore all to secrecy. They buffered him from the Secret Service and anyone else. He trusted no one—and perhaps, by protecting himself with unentangled sailors and officers fresh from sea, saved his own life, and the country from one more black mark of shame.