I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.

Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mamas boy and he said no, more of a papas boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.

Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.