The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Much of the conjecture about the disease’s onset centers around Ronnie’s performance leading up to and during the most serious crisis of his presidency, the Iran-contra scandal. Would the misconduct have been allowed to happen if the president had been more on top of things? Did his fumbling as it unfolded show that he was already losing his faculties? David Abshire, who helped steer the president through the rough waters of Iran-contra, insisted he never saw signs of dementia. Ronnie was confused about names and dates, and his testimony before the Tower Board had been a disaster. But Abshire always felt he had the president’s full attention when they spent time together. He wrote: “Of course, I also cannot compare this Ronald Reagan with the younger one who was governor of California or who was president before the assassination attempt early in his first term. But for me the speculation about when Alzheimer’s set in has never been a real issue. I never saw him faltering or failing, except in the egregious and stunning case of the second Tower Board hearing.… True, there was this horrendous Reagan naiveté on arms-for-hostages deals. He could also compartmentalize out bad news and not face it. However, I reminded myself almost daily that this was a president in his midseventies, recuperating from an operation [for a prostate problem], with a confusing crisis on his hands. Yes, he was depressed. Although the flame burned low, he was a bit frail but still a president in command of himself.”

  Peter Wallison, who was White House counsel during that stressful period, told me much the same. “I don’t think there was any slippage. He was not a detail person. He never was a detail person. He was a person who had principles, and so he structured his policies or insisted on certain policies based on some principles that he thought were important. The details were not something that he needed to know about,” Wallison said. “I was only there for a year, from April of ’86 to April of ’87. I was in many meetings with him, and I never saw any change. Now, maybe from 1981 to 1985, there was a slippage, but when I was there in that year, I never saw anything like that. He was always alert to what people around him were thinking and doing.”

  However, the president’s own son Ron caused a sensation in 2011 when he seemed to imply otherwise. In his book My Father at 100: A Memoir, Ron wrote of feeling “shivers of concern” during the first term that “something beyond mellowing was affecting my father.” As Ron watched his father stumble through that initial debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, the younger Reagan began to experience what he described as “the nausea of a bad dream coming true.” When I pressed him on the subject for this volume, Ron insisted that passage of his book has been blown out of proportion to its significance. “I simply acknowledged the medical reality. My father’s own neurologist, Ronald Petersen at the Mayo Clinic, was the man who led the team that discovered that late-onset Alzheimer’s develops over at least ten years, maybe twenty years. [It takes] years and years in order to reach the stage where you begin to suffer from dementia,” Ron said. “The question of whether he had the disease in its early stages during the presidency more or less answers itself.”

  But, Ron added, “It is unfair and unwise to judge a presidency based on some ailment that a president might have had. We don’t judge Lincoln’s presidency by his depression. We don’t judge FDR’s presidency by his polio, or anything like that. You judge a president by what he has done, what he did, his actions in office. Judge him that way. The fact that the disease was working away in him is all but irrelevant, unless you can point to something where, oh my God, he was clearly out of his mind.” Had the president or his doctors had so much as an inkling that something serious was wrong with him, Ron said that he is certain his father would have resigned.

  In retrospect, others wondered whether they might have seen but not recognized some early signs. His former aide Nancy Reynolds recalled how out of sorts Ronnie seemed when she sat next to him at his last Christmas dinner in the White House. As she told her fellow Sacramento veteran Curtis Patrick in a collection of remembrances of Ronnie, the man they knew so well wasn’t the relaxed and funny host of previous years. “It was in the middle of the Iran-contra scandal. I mean, he wasn’t his usual self. You knew it was weighing heavily on him—I knew it—I could tell by the flick of an eyebrow,” she said. “Now, he made every attempt—and maybe nobody else noticed it; probably the Wicks did, because they know him very well—but he was a distracted man; very withdrawn. Obviously something was wrong!

  “And I don’t know if it had anything to do with Alzheimer’s.”

  There were also small indications that Ronnie himself was worried that he was not as sharp as he used to be. As early as August 1986, he noted in his diary that something had disturbed him as he looked down from his helicopter on the ride from Los Angeles to his ranch: “I watched for landmarks I remembered and was a little upset when I could locate them & then couldn’t remember their names—Topanga Canyon, for example.” And yet, if he were becoming truly incapacitated, Ronnie would not have had the self-awareness to take note of that small lapse.

  “The fact that he’s recognizing those things as being aberrations tells you that if it was early Alzheimer’s, it was just beginning. It had not advanced, or else he wouldn’t be able to even be writing down how bizarre it was that he did those things,” noted historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Ronnie’s diaries. Brinkley has his own theory of when the first signs appeared. It is based on his research, which included going through the massive collection of handwritten note cards—a compilation of jokes and anecdotes and the like—that Ronnie kept as fodder for his speeches. The historian noticed “on the later jokes he was collecting, I saw his handwriting trailing off. And I saw some other writings that he had that seemed to be different from the diaries. I think that there’s a sea change that occurred around the time he left the White House. It may have been the month before leaving. It’s much more noticeable.”

  For her part, Nancy always believed that Ronnie’s decline was precipitated by an incident that happened shortly after he left office. In July 1989, while the Reagans were vacationing in Sonora, Mexico, at the ranch of their good friends Betty and Bill Wilson, Ronnie was thrown from a horse. He hit his head on the ground, knocking him unconscious briefly. Ronnie was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Tucson, Arizona, but after spending four hours there, he insisted upon returning to the ranch, where preparations were under way for a birthday party for Nancy. “I’ve always had the feeling that the severe blow to his head in 1989 hastened the onset of Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s. The doctors think so too,” she recalled. But while there are theories that head trauma can have that effect on those who develop Alzheimer’s, there is not yet a solid scientific consensus.

  A couple of weeks after Ronnie’s head injury, Nancy became worried when he lost his balance getting out of bed. She demanded that he see a doctor and get a CT scan. It showed a subdural hematoma, which is an accumulation of blood, on the right side of his brain. The hematoma was deemed minor and did not require treatment at the time. But during his physical at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, a couple of months after his fall from the horse, doctors took more extensive tests. The hematoma had enlarged and was beginning to exert pressure on his brain. Doctors drilled a hole in his skull to drain it.

  As she had been after his colon cancer surgery, Nancy was anxious about how the story would be spun in the media and told spokesman Mark Weinberg that Ronnie had been upset when he heard the procedure described in news reports as “brain surgery.” It is unclear, however, whether her concern represented her husband’s sensitivities about public perceptions or her own. As the former president and his wife boarded a plane to return home, Ronnie playfully doffed the Minnesota Twins baseball cap he was wearing, so that the reporters and photographers covering their departure could see that the right side of his head had been shaved. Nancy, unamused, tried to shield that portion of his scalp with her hand. “It was like a cobra—zoom—on top of it to cover it up,” Hutton recalled.

  For all Nancy’s vigilance at prot
ecting Ronnie’s image and dignity, it would soon become clear, in small ways and bigger ones, that he was losing a step here and there. Joseph Petro, who had spent years by his side as a Secret Service agent, saw the Reagans at a celebration of the ex-president’s eightieth birthday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 6, 1991. By then, Petro was head of the detail for Vice President Dan Quayle, one of more than five hundred guests at the luminary-studded gala to raise money for the Reagan Library. Nancy brought Ronnie over to say hello. “Our eyes catch. Nothing. There was no recognition,” Petro recalled. After an awkward moment, Nancy tugged at her husband’s sleeve. “Ronnie,” she said. “It’s Joe.”

  Onetime national security adviser Richard Allen crossed paths with the former president around that time at the Bohemian Grove, a famed all-male encampment where the powerful gather in Sonoma County, California. It was obvious to Allen that Ronnie did not recognize him, though Allen had been an aide and adviser going back to the mid-1960s. Even worse: he didn’t know the ever-faithful Ed Meese or his erstwhile policy director Martin Anderson, both of whom were with Allen. “We walked up to him at the Grove together. He was seated in the chair, and he was startled. I could see he had no idea who we were,” Allen said. “He looked up, and it was clear he was having trouble placing us.”

  Landon Parvin wrote the address that Ronnie gave at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, where the party gathered to nominate George H. W. Bush to a second term. The speechwriter began to sense something off-kilter when he noticed the tension in the air around Ronnie. The ex-president’s staff hovered. “Everyone was so worried. They seemed more concerned about that speech and him. And around that time, he started relying more on the old stories than he had before,” Parvin observed.

  The speech came off fine. In fact, Ronnie’s address was a grace note to a disaster of a convention remembered mostly for its bitterness. Other speakers such as Pat Buchanan; the vice president’s wife, Marilyn Quayle; and Republican Party chairman Rich Bond stoked the flames of generational and cultural divisions. The former president asked the delegates and the country to look back at a version of Republicanism that had aspired to bring Americans together. And in retrospect, it sounded like an elegy. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts,” Ronnie said. “My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. My fondest hope for each one of you—and especially for the young people here—is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism. May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will make the world a little better for your having been here.”

  As he campaigned with Bush in North Carolina, New Mexico, California, and Georgia that fall, Ronnie seemed like his old self. Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, was pulling ahead of Bush in the polls. “You may have noticed that in presidential races, the Democrats prefer to nominate unknown Democratic governors,” Ronnie declared in Anaheim, making a sly reference to Carter, whom he had beaten twelve years before. “The reason for this is the Democrats who are known couldn’t possibly win.” But amid a recession, Ronnie’s help wasn’t enough to put his former vice president over the top. Bush lost to Clinton by more than 5 points, and leadership of the country was handed to a new generation.

  Nancy’s own view of the Bushes had not grown any warmer in the first years after the Reagans left the White House and George and Barbara moved in. It didn’t help things when, in 1989, Smith College awarded an honorary degree to Barbara Bush, who had dropped out after her freshman year to get married. This was the honor that Smith had pointedly declined to bestow on Nancy, a graduate, when she was first lady. Nancy’s appetite for less flattering news about the Bushes is evident in a 1990 fax she received from her friend Leonore Annenberg. The note on the fax, which is in the files at the Reagan Library, said: “Thought you might be interested in reading this.” Attached was a clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer lamenting that social life in the nation’s capital had gone flat since the Reagans left town. It quoted “DC society watcher” Diana McLellan as saying: “It’s as though the Jacuzzi of Washington has been turned off and everyone is sitting around wet, waiting for towels.”

  A final rupture in Nancy’s relationship with Barbara Bush came as the result of a weird episode that played out on live national television on Inauguration Day for Bill Clinton in January 1993. Normally, if former presidents are able, they attend the swearing-in of their successors. The Reagans’ absence from the inaugural platform was noted in the coverage on ABC. Barbara Walters, one of the anchors, mentioned there was some confusion as to why. Walters said that Nancy had told her they hadn’t been invited, but that a member of Ronnie’s staff said an invitation had, in fact, been received. Walters then got a message that Nancy, who was watching, was trying to reach her by phone. Coanchor Peter Jennings got on the line and handed it to Walters, creating a comic scene in which their fellow commentator David Brinkley briefly got tangled in the cord. Though Nancy’s voice was not heard on the line, what she said was relayed to viewers by Walters. The former first lady continued to insist that, to her knowledge, the Reagans had not gotten an invitation.

  And that wasn’t all she wanted to get off her chest. Nancy denied a report that she had not given Barbara Bush a tour of the White House residence during the transition four years earlier—and, in fact, insisted that she had even shown her the laundry. She also complained that the Bushes had never brought her and Ronnie back to the White House for a state dinner. Finally, Brinkley counseled: “Let’s leave that where it lies.”

  Nancy tried to smooth things over in a subsequent phone call to Barbara, but Barbara wasn’t having it. Near the end of her life, Barbara still bristled with fury as she related their exchange to biographer Susan Page: “I told her the press was outside my door yelling questions about her statements and that I was not answering, but that she had hurt me badly and I just could not understand it.” No reporters were actually there, but Barbara knew that fib would make Nancy nervous. “Don’t you ever call me again,” Barbara concluded and hung up.

  Undeniably, Nancy had done a petty and insensitive thing at the very moment the Bushes were at their lowest. It was a spectacular—and uncharacteristic—lapse of judgment. Her behavior also revived memories of all the slights that Nancy had dealt the Bushes during the eight years of the Reagan presidency.

  But it is also possible—indeed, likely—that stress and anxiety about her husband were a factor in Nancy’s peculiar behavior. Only a week before the inauguration, as unmarked moving vans were loading up in front of the White House, Bush had honored Ronnie by presenting him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. As one of his final acts in office, Bush gave an emotional tribute to the man he had served so loyally for eight years: “Ronald Reagan didn’t just make the world believe in America. He made Americans believe in themselves.… Some men reflect their times. Ronald Reagan changed his time.”

  Ronnie’s voice sounded a little weak as he accepted the honor. His step was a little slower. His suit hung loosely on a thinner frame. Richard Allen was there and noticed the former president standing alone with his medal after the ceremony, so he went over to talk to him. Allen reminded Ronnie of a funny story about a trip they had taken together to Germany in the 1970s. It was a tale they had laughed about many times over the years. This time it didn’t seem to register with Ronnie. Allen recalled later: “I knew he was always bad on names. Now, I thought, he’s bad on memory. But it didn’t cross my mind…”

  The following month, at a February 1993 birthday celebration for Ronnie at the Reagan Library, there came a more obvious and public lapse. It was another event where Margaret Thatcher was on hand. Reading from his index cards, Ronnie gave the same toast
to her twice, word for word. The five-hundred-plus guests at the fund-raising gala were unsettled and awkwardly gave him two standing ovations. One factor may have been that Ronnie, uncharacteristically, had three glasses of wine before he delivered his tribute to Thatcher, the woman he called his political “soul mate.”

  This was a full year before the subsequent year’s birthday event in Washington, where Hutton and the others became alarmed at the former president’s disorientation. By that point in 1994, most everyone agreed, Ronnie’s condition was becoming increasingly evident and harder to explain away. At Richard Nixon’s funeral in April, White House photographers who hadn’t seen Ronnie in a while were shocked at his appearance. Nancy, a picture of worry, guided her husband by the arm to his seat. Not only had Ronnie’s hair gone gray, but he had a vacant look on his face. He listened to the eulogies with his mouth slightly agape. George Bush was concerned and told people he recognized what he feared was dementia. Bill and Hillary Clinton noticed how Nancy had to keep gently coaching her husband: “Ronnie, you remember so-and-so…”

  His longtime political adviser Stu Spencer also saw odd things in the months before Ronnie made the announcement he had Alzheimer’s. That summer, the two of them were playing golf at the Los Angeles Country Club, something they often did. Spencer was driving the cart, with Ronnie sitting on the seat beside him: “We’re out there a few holes, and I kind of looked over at him, and he was staring at me. He had that look on his face. Blank look. Like: ‘Who’s this guy?’ Me! I mean, I sensed it. I read it. I’m pretty good at reading body language. I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ ” But two holes later, Ronnie was bantering with Spencer as he always had. At another point, Spencer visited the ex-president in his Century City office. The same thing happened. For a moment, Ronnie didn’t seem to know who Spencer was. Then he was fine.