Yesterday, I shared an anecdote from the NYT about Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and shoe protectionism. A reader emails to say how much the story reminded him of a passage from Dinesh D’Souza’s book on Reagan (pgs. 121-122):

Sometimes Reagan had to be shrewdly diplomatic in the way that he handled protectionist demands. Senior aides told of an incident in which a group of northeastern shoe manufacturers came to see Reagan. These men, big Republican donors who had contributed to his campaign, wanted him to help block cheap foreign shoes from being sold in the United States. … [Reagan] launched into a lengthy reverie about how much he liked to wear cowboy boots on his ranch in Santa Barbara, finishing up with a lament about how difficult it was to find a good pair these days. The businessmen listened politely and then left, commenting among themselves that Reagan was an awfully nice man but had seemed not to follow their line of reasoning at all. As the press reported it, this was another one of those “anecdotal non-sequiturs,” as Morton Kondracke put it in the New Republic. Yet it turns out that Reagan knew exactly what he was up to. Under the guise of being distracted, he was doing something that we all do when pressed to discuss something we don’t want to talk about: he was changing the topic. When the shoe manufactureres left, Reagan commented to his aides, “No way was I going to give in to that crew.”