Which is why articles like this have no place here. It's simply not relevant to Hacker News unless you want to play the "7 degrees of Hacker News" game.
I think it's ok to take ideas and information as being somewhat independent from their creators. Bad people can produce good ideas, just as good people can produce bad ideas. I might feel very uncomfortable with Shockley's views on genetics and reproduction, but I'm happy he co-invented the transistor. Similarly, I can read Reagan's letter and get something out of it without needing to consider his acting or political career.
You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Talk highly of him all you want, his rhetoric has hurt the US far more than it has helped. Between his voodoo economics and ignoring of the AIDs crisis, Iran Contra, the 'Moral Majority', I think you are embarrassing yourself here, not me. He is the epitome of style over substance.
You can say the same about just any other politician. They all made (and make) mistakes and stumble. The key is how history judges them. In the case of Reagan I think history is pretty clear about what he accomplished and what he didn't. Notice I said "I think" because that's just my opinion; everyone is entitled to one. Informed opinions are not embarrassing. Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.
The US didn't win the cold war, the USSR stopped playing due to an insolvency of mostly their own creation. And the same could happen to the US if it is not extremely careful over the next decade or so.
Much as I hate to stray this far from the topic at hand, AIDS turned out to be a much, much smaller deal than the alarmists of the 1980s would have had you believe. Not that it wasn't worth being concerned about, researching, and educating people about, but y'know what the death toll from AIDS is in the United States nowadays? Forty per million per year.
While that's still an order of magnitude above "lightning strike" it's below, say, Hepatitis C or many hundreds of other diseases that get less press.
Talk about hindsight fallacy. "Nowadays" is hardly the point; at the time, depending on what circles you moved in (or perhaps one should say, which classes of human beings you cared about), AIDS was devastating.
This is exactly why this political stuff needs to stay off HN. By your apparent definition no one could level start criticism against Hitler (hopefully that kills the thread).
There are plenty of other places on the internet to make controversial personality politics statements.