Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.
For people who have for been putting their hard-earned money into the system for years, the president's idea would replace their safety net with a risky gamble with no assurance of a stable return of investment.
We are still waiting for the president to introduce a concrete plan. He has just hinted at what he is thinking about doing, but no one has seen a proposal.
The president's claim that Social Security is going broke is misleading at best. The sky is not falling, although there is no doubt that the system needs to be strengthened.
President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.
First, President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me, and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.
So that was Reagan's political problem. As a rancher in California, he was an environmentalist himself. But the President of the United States doesn't control everything that happens in Washington.
So without getting into the specifics, I can tell you that to the extent that investigation is a relatively important investigation and meaningful, the president would have been periodically briefed.
