Late President Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis addressed recently uncovered remarks in which her father referred to Africans delegates as “monkeys.”
Davis, 66, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post Thursday and said that although there is “no defense, no rationalization, no suitable explanation” for what Reagan said, she thinks he would ask forgiveness for the comments if he were alive now.
“I don’t know if it was masochism or shock, but I listened to the tape twice before allowing myself to cry. I wanted the story to go away, to get buried in the news of the debate. I wanted to immediately go back in time to before I heard my father’s voice saying those words,” Davis wrote.
In the tape, released this week, Reagan can be heard speaking with then-President Richard Nixon about a United Nations vote to recognize the People’s Republic of China. Reagan vented his frustration with the Tanzanian delegation for dancing after the country was seated.
“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan told Nixon to laughter.
In her op-ed, Davis described how she never saw that side of her father, noting, “He’s not a man I knew.”
She described her father holding her in his arms and telling her, “God made all his creations in different colors. It would be pretty boring if we all looked the same.”
Davis also described how her father, while governor of California, refused to accept membership into an all-white country club and as a college football player wouldn’t stay at a hotel that was whites-only, instead taking the black players to his parents’ house.
“I can tell you all these things, and more, but it doesn’t remove the knife cut of the words I heard him say on that tape,” Davis wrote. “That wound will stay with me forever. But I believe, if my father had, years after the fact, heard that tape, he would have asked for forgiveness.
“He would have sought to make amends for the pain his words caused,” she added.
