by Bob Spitz
The next morning, a Saturday, they gathered in the library, a small, comfortable room at the front of the house where the Reagans typically received guests. The president seemed puzzled when the doctor and Ryan arrived. “Honey, come over here and sit down,” Nancy said, directing him to a couch opposite the two men. “The doctor has something he wants to talk about.”
The doctor didn’t beat around the bush. “We think you have Alzheimer’s,” he told Reagan.
“Okay,” he responded faintly. “What should I expect?”
“We don’t know much about it,” the doctor admitted. “It’s a degenerative disorder.” He ran down a few of the effects that Alzheimer’s patients experienced while Nancy Reagan struggled to control her emotions. She tried her utmost to be supportive, but was overcome hearing about the devastations of the disease. Noticing her unease, the doctor made a point about how difficult Alzheimer’s can be on loved ones and, particularly, the caretaker. He acknowledged, quite bluntly, “There is no cure.”
“Can I ask a few questions?” Ryan interjected.
While he and Nancy discussed how to handle the president’s activities—his schedule, office hours, appointments, and appearances—Reagan wandered over to a small round table in a corner and sat down, staring hypnotically into the yard. After a few minutes, he picked up a pen and began to write. When he finished, he handed two sheets of paper filled with his cramped handwriting to Ryan. “Why don’t we get this typed up and put it out,” Reagan suggested.
It was a letter dated November 5, 1994. “My Fellow Americans,” it began, “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.” He admitted struggling with whether to keep the news private or make it known, but decided to share it in order to raise public awareness. “At the moment I feel just fine,” he went on. “I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on the earth doing the things I have always done. . . . Unfortunately, as Alzheimer’s Disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage.
“In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your President. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future.
“I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.
“Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”
Ryan read it once, choking back emotion. “You don’t need to have this typed,” he said. “Let’s just put it out in your own handwriting.”
The letter was photocopied and released to news organizations later that day, after the Reagans had left Los Angeles for the seclusion of the ranch.
Nancy left explicit instructions for the office staff. She wanted her husband’s life to be normal and active to the extent that was possible. She didn’t want any dramatic changes, but she expected everyone to be sensitive. If late in the day he wasn’t faring as well, she insisted, people should be mindful of that. Reagan was just as emphatic. “He made it clear right from the beginning that he wanted people to remember him as they had known him,” Ryan recalled. He did not intend to remain in the public eye if his condition started to degenerate. Hollywood vanity encroached. He called up the image of Bette Davis, an actress he considered beautiful in her youth, who had refused to yield to old age and continued making appearances, “no longer looking like herself,” when, of course, he meant her glamorous, youthful self.
Reagan realized that from that point on, the story was going to be him, as opposed to an issue or policy he wanted to promote. The letter made that clear right away. It got a huge amount of attention. For weeks, thousands of letters—tens of thousands—were delivered to the office expressing their support, extending best wishes, and applauding him for his courage. Tributes were delivered from all quarters by politicians and world leaders, no matter their political affiliation or previous interaction.
For several months, Ronald Reagan kept to his old schedule, coming into the office every day, getting briefings, meeting with people. Groups would come by to have photos taken with him or just to say hello and shake his hand. A few speeches were interspersed, but mostly his public appearances were restricted to photo ops in order to avoid embarrassing situations in which he’d repeat himself or forget where he was. As the months wore on, he began to cut back. He might go home after lunch or hit a few golf balls. Appointments were kept to a minimum and geared to uncomplicated conversations, nothing substantive such as rehashing SDI or discussing upcoming legislation. Visitors were limited to people he knew from his school days, friends, or those who had worked with him.
Unexpectedly, he took up playing the harmonica—“for my own self-amusement,” he insisted. “He was really taken with it,” says Joanne Drake. “He kept one in his desk drawer and would take it out regularly to play a tune.” His repertoire was limited to songs like “Red River Valley,” “Git Along Little Doggies,” or “Streets of Laredo.” On his birthday in February 1995, Edward Rowney, Reagan’s old arms-control negotiator, stopped by the house and taught him how to play “Happy Birthday.” Rowney found him “still fairly coherent” but “fading.” “He didn’t remember things and was vague and got things mixed up.”
Nancy noticed that over the six months since the diagnosis, her husband’s deterioration had been dramatic. The diagnosis and his heartfelt letter had precipitated a “final letting go,” a sort of surrender to the disease. Reagan slowed down—slooooooowed down—and his hair got a little grayer. He lost the pleasure of going to the ranch, an aversion to long car rides being one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In any case, John Barletta, his able ranch hand and riding partner, was recruited and, through a cascade of tears, told him that his horseback-riding days were over. At a certain point, Nancy made the decision that it was best for him not to be in public. People blamed her for overprotecting him, but her instincts prevailed. She was his loving wife but also his caretaker, and if anyone thought she was strong-willed in the former role, her tenacity in the latter was not to be misjudged. Overprotective?—not by a long shot. She gave up everything that had once taken precedence in her life—the lunches with friends, the shopping excursions, the parties, the invitations, the trips to Europe. None of that mattered anymore. She devoted herself exclusively to her husband’s welfare, making sure he was never in jeopardy.
“She ached for him,” Doug Wick explains. “She talked to me about the romance she had for him, how once, during his battle with Alzheimer’s, he had gotten up at four in the morning and dressed, as if to go out, and how it had broken her heart to coax him back to bed.”
He was failing, gradually and steadily. Long stretches went by during which he was stuck deep in a reverie. Ron Reagan recalled how throughout his childhood his father “was often wandering somewhere in his own head,” but that referred to abstraction, concentration, when he tunneled into the complexities of his job. This was different. Now he was . . . somewhere else, somewhere unreachable. Occasionally, he’d lapse into a dissociative fugue that transported him to an earlier time and place in his life. If he had been watching football on TV, he might awaken in the middle of the night intent on suiting up for the home team. “There’s a game. They’re waiting for me,” he’d insist to Nancy, who did everything in her power to restrain him.
Socializing was out of the question. Friends were no longer invited to the Reagan home, because he did not recognize them. If they went out at all it was to a local restaurant that would accommodate them with a private room or to visit the Wicks, who were like family. “It was too difficult for Reagan to communicate,” Wick recalls. “He couldn’t really follow a conversat
ion. And he’d grow uncomfortable, but not be able to express it. It was clear to all of us that he was no longer fully inhabiting his body.”
His eyes no longer showed signs of engagement. “He was sort of there, but not there,” Ron recalled. Somewhere in the interim, he’d drifted away. “Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him,” Nancy acknowledged.
Doctors had predicted that a man of Ronald Reagan’s sturdy constitution might live another five to eight years. He’d surprised them, as he’d surprised all the pundits who predicted he’d never overcome the liabilities of his B-actor status, never survive the Justice Department’s inquiries into MCA’s monopolistic grip on the entertainment industry, never beat Pat Brown or Jerry Ford or Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale, never stand up to the demands of the presidency or live down the detritus of the Iran-Contra scandal. Ten years after his initial diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, he continued to hold on to life. But in the spring of 2004, Nancy could tell he was slipping away. Reagan had fallen and broken his hip three years before, and recurrence of its agonizing spasms had pretty much confined him to bed, leaving him unable to sit up. In early June, he stopped eating and taking fluids. His kidneys had begun to fail. Family members were summoned to say their goodbyes. Michael came and went while Ron and Patti maintained a bedside vigil.* Nancy, who hadn’t budged from the room in weeks, reached a point of near exhaustion. “He hadn’t opened his eyes for three days at all,” Ron recalled. His breathing was irregular, ragged, he gulped for air. Ron felt that his father looked almost youthful in repose—his face “free of care . . . had lost many of its worry lines and wrinkles,” his hair, neatly combed, “remained full and soft.” Still, it was clear this was the end.
On June 5, 2004, shortly before one p.m., Ronald Reagan’s breathing grew shallower, and he began to struggle. With his last breath, he angled his head to one side, opened his eyes wide, wider, until they found Nancy’s face. He looked right at her, then he closed his eyes and was gone.
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A great American life has come to an end,” President George W. Bush told reporters hours after learning of Reagan’s death. “Ronald Reagan won America’s respect with his greatness, and won its love with his goodness. He had the confidence that comes with conviction, the strength that comes with character, the grace that comes with humility and the humor that comes with wisdom.”
Bush’s homage touched off an outpouring of tributes in print and over the airwaves, in the halls of Congress, and throughout the world, extolling Reagan’s leadership and his indomitable spirit. Even Democrats who had fought him throughout the eight years of his administration esteemed him now as one of the important figures of the twentieth century. Massachusetts senator John Kerry, in the throes of challenging George W. Bush for the presidency, put Reagan’s political integrity in perspective, saying, “Even when he was breaking Democrats’ hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate. Despite the disagreements, he lived by that noble ideal that at 5 p.m., we weren’t Democrats or Republicans, we were Americans and friends.”
The American public expressed its own extravagance of gratitude to the person considered by many as a man of the people. For days after Reagan’s death, folks thronged to sites associated with his presidency, paying their personal respects to the man and to the concept of democracy he cherished. Crowds gathered outside his home in Bel-Air, at the foot of the Washington Monument, in front of the White House, on the steps of the Capitol, along the National Mall, and many points in between. “Makeshift shrines of flags, balloons, and flowers sprang up” in communities across the United States.
Thousands—hundreds of thousands—planned to observe some aspect of his funeral. Four public ceremonies were planned to mark his death. A committee of loyalists had met periodically to discuss the details, outlined in a 300-page document on file with the Military District of Washington. Originally, Reagan’s body lay in state at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, where more than 100,000 mourners came to pay their respects. From there, he was transferred via Air Force One—making an unscheduled low dip over Tampico, Illinois—to Washington, D.C., for the formal rites. At the Capitol, he lay in state in the Rotunda, below the Dome, on a velvet-draped catafalque first used at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, in 1865. Afterward, the casket continued its procession down Constitution Avenue on a horse-drawn caisson, accompanied by a riderless horse with the president’s own English riding boots, expressly left unpolished for the occasion, reversed in the stirrups. A squadron of twenty-one F-15 Eagle fighters roared overhead as three howitzers thudded out a twenty-one-gun salute. A state funeral service was held at the Washington National Cathedral on June 11, 2004, followed by a private burial, timed to coincide with the sunset, on the grounds of the presidential library in California.
Afterward, at the grave site, several members of the library staff peered out the windows. In the distance, they recalled, they could make out the stooped figure of Nancy Reagan—not in her trademark red, but in black, mourner’s black—standing small against the majestic natural backdrop and looking forlornly out across the sun-splashed hills, as though half expecting Reagan to come galloping over the rise at the end of the last reel.
* * *
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He hardly ever played the hero on-screen, he rarely got the girl, seldom came across as the figure of authority. As Jack Warner enjoyed pointing out: “Bob Cummings for President, Ronald Reagan for Best Friend.” Somehow in real life he managed to fold both roles into one and played it to perfection. In the eyes of his audience he was statesman extraordinaire and benevolent friend, someone to look to for reassurance, who wouldn’t steer them wrong. The composite character—the Ronald Reagan who appeared at times distinguished and tough-minded, at times intimate and paternal—would have made Jack Warner reconsider.
Reagan’s legacy as president was more spectacular and larger-than-life than anything he encountered as a movie star. Several highlights of his political career unspooled as only Hollywood would script it. He survived an assassin’s bullet, struck back against the Evil Empire, and conducted a clandestine hostage caper whose props included high-tech weaponry, a bogus airline, and bags of unmarked cash. He delivered memorable lines: “There must be a pony in here somewhere.” “Honey, I forgot to duck.” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And he knew how to play to the crowd. Reviews didn’t come any sweeter than the one scrawled on a sign held high on Constitution Avenue as his casket rolled by: “Now there was a president.”
Fate had cast him in the role of a lifetime, and he played the part for all it was worth. As the president he rebuilt the American military, beat back inflation, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, cut the top personal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, encouraged free trade, oversaw the creation of 16 million new jobs, and eventually produced a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union and effectively ended the Cold War.
His lack of empathy for those in desperate financial straits and for AIDS victims, the supply-side Reaganomics, the punitive “war on drugs,” the reckless spending on the military, stratospheric budget deficits, the implausibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Bitburg, even Iran-Contra faded from memory as admirers eulogized Reagan in the weeks immediately following his death. His presidency had taken on an almost mythical revisionism. It represented something more than the sum of his accomplishments—or failures. It restored the power of the presidency in a way that rose above politics and deeds to a time when the country looked to the office for a sense of national identity.
“What I’d really like to do,” Reagan declared six months into his first term, “is go down in history as the president who made Americans believe in themselves again.” In that sense, he reached out to a segment of the populace whose everyday problems he understood so well, people much like those he’d grown up with in Dixon, like
those who listened to him in Davenport and Des Moines, people proud of their country who worked hard pursuing the American dream but often felt thwarted by the vague and faraway concept of Big Government.
People much like himself. Reagan’s humble beginnings in Illinois laid the foundation of his own humility. As a poor boy of the heartland whose first job paid him thirty-five cents an hour (most of which he contributed to the family’s weekly budget), he had had to make many of the same difficult choices that working-class Americans faced every day. As president, he sought to apply the lessons he learned from personal hardship to a modern world that craved common sense and decency, and whether he succeeded or not, he never lost sight of where he came from, his mother’s iron conviction of right and wrong. This was the root of his great communication. As Time impressed in a moving obituary, “He had a moral clarity that framed political choices in terms of core beliefs.”
In all of Reagan’s pursuits, he held to the persona of Everyman. As the most powerful leader of the free world, he played the leading man with the modesty of a stalwart supporting player, drawing inspiration from people who weren’t stars in their own right. Nothing moved Reagan more than the letters he received from ordinary citizens. They reinforced all that he shared with them, mainstream values and a familiar dialect, a simple view of a complex world. In that mutual embrace, he often lost sight of those who didn’t share his white-picket-fence, morning-in-America outlook.
Schooled in the ABC’s of Hollywood fantasy, Reagan aspired to upbeat expectations and happy endings. His gospel of optimism restored the country’s spirit, lifted it out of the malaise he inherited from Jimmy Carter. He ascribed to FDR’s belief that “there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon,” and he set out toward that destination from the day he entered office attuned to his inner compass. “His most endearing aspect was his fundamental decency,” George Shultz reflected—his simple faith in people and in himself. “He appealed to people’s best hopes, not their fears, to their confidence rather than their doubts.”
