Getting Shot Hurts: Reagan's Folk Wisdom Gets New Airing

Ronald Reagan was famous for his succint, folksy one-liners. On being shot by a would-be assassin in Washington, the president told his wife, Nancy: "Honey, I forgot to duck."

In his newly released diaries, he records a variation on this, saying with typical understatement: "Getting shot hurts."

The diaries, excerpts of which appear in Vanity Fair to be published tomorrow, cover his presidency and record his reaction to international crises, meetings with personalities from Michael Jackson to Prince Charles, and fraught relations with his family.

In the entry about the shooting on March 30 1981, written up on April 11, he recalls he had been giving a speech at the Hilton ballroom. "Speech not riotously received - still it was successful. Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car - suddenly there was a burst of gun fire from the left. SS [Secret Service] agent pushed me onto the floor of the car and jumped on top ... I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes. It was then we learned I'd been shot and had a bullet in my lung. Getting shot hurts."

Reagan, who died in 2004, records his thoughts on another assassination, this time successful, of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He says: "I'm trying not to feel hatred for those who did this foul deed but I can't make it. Qaddafi [Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadafy] gloating on TV, his people jubilantly celebrating in the streets. He is beneath contempt."

His admiration for Lady Thatcher also comes through. On a visit to Washington, he records some senators "tried to give her a bad time. She put them down firmly and with typical British courtesy."

Another Briton was less courteous. Prince Charles, on a visit in 1981, turned up his nose at a teabag. Reagan says: "Highlight was noon visit by Prince Charles. He's a most likeable person. The ushers brought him tea - horror of horrors, they served it our way with a tea bag in the cup. It finally dawned on me that he was just holding the cup and finally put it down on a table. Reagan adds: "Mike [Deaver, deputy chief of staff] escorted him back to the W.H and apologised. The Prince [said], 'I didn't know what to do with it'."