In a self-interview, William F. Buckley recalls that the one time Reagan expressed frustration to him was with regard to the National Catholic Reporter. (RR was in good company then.)
Q: Did he ever call you to express any special frustration?
A: Yes. One day, halfway through his term of office, he called and said he had seen criticism all his life and understood it, but what he had read just now, printed in the National Catholic Reporter, was a bit much, an article by Alden Whitman, which said that President Reagan is bringing fascism to America as certainly as Mussolini did to Italy.
I told him the Catholic bishop in Kansas City, where the National Catholic Reporter’s offices are located, was suing the paper to make it remove the word “Catholic” from its logo, since the weekly had no connection with the church. And I told him that Whitman, who wrote obituaries for The New York Times, had refused to answer a congressional committee questioning him about Communist Party connections. Reagan said that information made him feel a whole lot better.
That’s the National Catholic Distorter all right. They print an attack on Reagan as a fascist written by a reporter who’s a Communist. Too bad that bishop wasn’t successful.
