The late Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, said there was "no defense" for racist remarks he made in a 1971 phone conversation with then-President Richard Nixon.
In a commentary for The Washington Post, Davis said, "I listened to the tape twice before allowing myself to cry."
"I wanted the story to go away, to get buried in the news of the debate. I wanted to immediately go back in time to before I heard my father's voice saying those words," Davis wrote of the recording, in which Reagan calls African leaders "monkeys."
"There is no defense, no rationalization, no suitable explanation for what my father said on that taped phone conversation," she added.
"But I believe, if my father had, years after the fact, heard that tape, he would have asked for forgiveness," she wrote.
The clip was unearthed by the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, who wrote this week in The Atlantic that when the original tape was released in 2000, Reagan's remark was excised due to privacy concerns.
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