The most important relic of the Reagan family, the 100-year-old Bible of Ronald Reagan’s mother, has arrived in Washington amid intense security on its way for use today by Vice President-elect Pence at his noontime swearing-in at the U.S. Capitol.
Used for the first time in a ceremony since the former president’s 1985 second inauguration, the Reagan Bible was carried from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi, Calif., by one of the Gipper’s former advance men.
Once in Washington, it was put in a safe in the Senate where it will remain until just minutes before it is needed for the incoming vice president’s ceremony. Special preparations are also being made to keep it safe from the forecast rain.
“It’s really well worn and we’re taking care of it,” said John Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.
The King James version Bible, filled with notes from Reagan and his mother, has a very special place in the Reagan museum, said Heubusch. Placed in bullet proof glass, “it is the first artifact that you see in the Reagan museum,” he told Secrets.
Pence apparently took a special interest in the Reagan Bible when he visited the Reagan center last fall. He has always admired Reagan and Heubusch said that the former Indiana governor gave a Reaganesque, “electric” address.
“He’s all the things people make him out to be,” said Heubusch. “He’s an eloquent conservative whose head and mind are in the right place,” added the author of the upcoming Simon and Schuster thriller The Shroud Conspiracy.
He said that he was “surprised and very excited” when the Pence team called to ask to use the Bible. “Our mission is to ensure that we protect as well as promote President Reagan’s legacy,” said Heubusch.
And the use of the Bible does that, added Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. “Reagan conservatism and the Reagan presidency is not a past event, left in dusty history books. It is still as relevant and as powerful as ever,” he wrote for Lifezette.com.
He added, “Swearing on the Bible that the Gipper himself had used not only tells us he is the personal hero of Mike Pence, but the ideological hero of conservatism and republicanism in the GOP: one of individual liberty, freedom, and self-determination, all from the hand of God. The conservative party in the United States is going through a sort of identity crisis today, electing the first non-political president in American history. Pence is showing America that this crisis in the Republican Party is not a crisis at all. It’s still Reagan’s party, no matter who is in charge.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
