National Catholic Reporter: Reagan = Mussolini (?!?)

From "Remembering Ronald Reagan", a brief interview with William F. Buckley, comes this amusing little tidbit:

Q: Did he ever call you to express any special frustration?

A: Yes. One day, half way through his term of office, he called and said he had seen criticism all his life and understood it, but what he had read just now, printed in the National Catholic Reporter, was a bit much, an article by Alden Whitman which said that "President Reagan is bringing fascism to America as certainly as Mussolini did to Italy."

I told him the Catholic bishop in Kansas City was suing the National Catholic Reporter to make it remove the word "Catholic" from its logo, since the weekly had no connection with the Church. And I told him that Whitman, who wrote obituaries for the New York Times, had taken the Fifth Amendment when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party.

He said that information made him feel a whole lot better.