The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  When it happened the second time, Spencer called Nancy. She told him she had scheduled a visit to the Mayo Clinic. “The local doctors think he has Alzheimer’s, and we’re going to have it checked,” Nancy said. After Ronnie’s 1989 surgery, doctors at Mayo began adding tests of mental acuity to Ronnie’s annual physical. He would be asked to read a paragraph and answer questions about it, and to do mathematical calculations. He passed the test with flying colors in 1992. But in 1993 the physicians began to see a deterioration. Ronnie noticed it too. “You know, I had to read the question, read the paragraph, read the question, and then go back and search for the answer. I don’t think I finished the whole exam,” he said.

  When Ronnie had his two-day physical the following year, it was worse. There was still a possibility that this was a hormonal problem, or maybe a brain tumor, so the Mayo team sent a physician to Los Angeles to observe him. The official diagnosis came in August. “My mother made the difficult, but, in retrospect, I believe, wise and kind decision to put off telling him until it could no longer be avoided,” Ron wrote later. “Knowing her husband as she did, she correctly intuited that such a diagnosis—a terminal illness with no hope of cure—once acknowledged might send him spiraling into a deep depression, jeopardizing any chance he had for a few relatively good years before darkness descended.”

  But finally, there could be no denying it any longer. The truth was becoming apparent, and Nancy got wind that media outlets were preparing stories about his decline. On the first Saturday of November, Ronnie, Nancy, and Fred Ryan met in the library of the Reagan home in Bel Air with one of the former president’s doctors. They discussed what lay ahead. Ronnie decided on the spot that he had to make a public announcement. He recalled the letters he had received after his operation for colon cancer from strangers who said they had decided to get checkups that had saved their lives. Ronnie also remembered how many women had gone for mammograms after Nancy’s mastectomy. Maybe by sharing this, they could help others who were heading down this long, ineluctable path with a loved one. Maybe he could put a face to this disease and bring it out of the shadows.

  Ronnie picked up a few pieces of stationery and went to a small table by the window in his library, where he sat down and wrote a letter to the country:

  Nov. 5, 1994

  My Fellow Americans,

  I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Upon learning this news, Nancy and I had to decide whether as private citizens we would keep this a private matter or whether we would make this news known in a public way.

  In the past Nancy suffered from breast cancer and I had my cancer surgeries. We found through our open disclosures we were able to raise public awareness. We were happy that as a result many more people underwent testing.

  They were treated in early stages and able to return to normal, healthy lives.

  So now, we feel it is important to share it with you. In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition. Perhaps it will encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families who are affected by it.

  At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done. I will continue to share life’s journey with my beloved Nancy and my family. I plan to enjoy the great outdoors and stay in touch with my friends and supporters.

  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.

  Sincerely,

  Ronald Reagan

  He gave it to Nancy to read. Her eyes filled with tears. She nodded silently. Then he handed it to Ryan and asked to have it typed and released. Ryan said no, that Americans should see this in Ronnie’s own handwriting. It was the right choice—the irrefutable evidence that the grace and strength of his character remained, even as disease was eating away at his memory.

  Nancy was the one who informed the Reagan children. She told her son, Ron, of the diagnosis by telephone. “It was no surprise,” he said.

  Maureen and her husband, Dennis Revell, were expected for lunch the day Ronnie wrote his letter to the country. They were in the process of adopting a daughter, Rita, whom Maureen and Dennis had met in a Ugandan orphanage when she was three and were bringing her as well to visit. Nancy called Maureen and asked if they could come by a little early. When they arrived, Nancy said to Ronnie: “Sweetheart, why don’t you take Rita down by the pool?” Helping his granddaughter master her swimming skills was one of the old lifeguard’s favorite things to do.

  Nancy showed Maureen and her husband the letter. “Then she explained what the doctors had found, and the letter, and said it would be released shortly, and we talked about it. He walked back in, and we resumed normal conversation,” Revell said. And that was it. Ronnie left for the ranch at two o’clock, as he had intended to do earlier. Rancho del Cielo is where Rawhide would be when the world heard the news.

  * * *

  So began the final chapter of their love story. What Nancy would call “the long good-bye” was also a deepening twilight, one without the prospect of a dawn. Soon, birthdays and anniversaries, which used to bring long, sentimental letters from Ronnie, would go by as if they were no different from any other day. “They were very short—the golden years,” Nancy said later. “The golden years are when you can sit back, hopefully, and exchange memories. And that’s the worst part about this disease. There’s nobody to exchange memories with, and we had a lot of memories.

  “… When you come right down to it, you’re in it alone, and there’s nothing that anybody can do for you, so it’s lonely.”

  Even her harshest critics would acknowledge the grace and determination she would show when her devotion was put to its greatest test. In seeing Nancy’s strength, the nation would gain a new appreciation of her character. Never again would anyone doubt that the adoring gaze she had fixed on her Ronnie for all those years was anything but genuine. She would become one of the most admired women in the country.

  Ronnie had intended to continue “doing the things I have always done” for as long as he could. For a few years, he would go to the office most days and receive visitors—though sometimes he seemed unclear as to who they were. Dressed impeccably as always, he would show his mementoes; the photos of himself with the pope and Thatcher. “He had this little routine; those synapses seemed to be still preserved for doing that. Some people would say, ‘He’s fine,’ ” Hutton recalled. A couple of afternoons a week, the doctor took Ronnie to a driving range, where he hit golf balls. He took walks with a caregiver and his Secret Service agents and enjoyed watching neighborhood children play in a nearby park. People sometimes spotted the former president strolling with Nancy along the Venice Beach boardwalk, savoring an ice cream cone. When he was recognized, as he inevitably was, Ronnie was still capable of a pleasant greeting.

  But doing anything more ambitious in public was no longer possible, in part because of the interest his condition drew. That became clear soon after his letter was published. “The next time he had a public appearance, the press was all over him,” Ryan said. “He realized that from then on, the story was going to be him and not whatever group he was out there for. So he began to pull back.” When Ronnie did go out, his aides made sure there was no announcement in advance, s
o that the media and its cameras would not be waiting for him.

  In 1995 Ryan moved back to Washington to become a top executive of the television and cable company Albritton Communications. He was also named chairman of the board of the Reagan Foundation, which kept him close at hand for Nancy. The fiercely loyal Joanne Drake, whom Nancy grew to trust as she did few others, took over as chief of staff.

  Nancy made some appearances in Ronnie’s stead. She was invited to speak at the 1996 Republican convention and accepted reluctantly. The former first lady was unhappy with the dark turn the party had taken in the mid-1990s and worried its San Diego convention would be a reprise of the venomous one that had taken place four years earlier in Houston. “Maybe if Colin Powell runs…” she told Patti.

  Her speech turned out to be the emotional high point of the convention, which nominated Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator, as the party standard-bearer. Delegates roared as she appeared on the stage, a tiny figure dressed in white, tears glistening in her eyes. Nancy did not mention Dole or the incumbent president, Bill Clinton. She did not make any reference to the roiling politics of the day. “I am not the speech maker in the family, so let me close with Ronnie’s words and not mine,” Nancy said. “In that last speech four years ago, he said: ‘Whatever else history may say about me, when I am gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts. And may all of you, as Americans, never forget your heroic origins.’ ”

  She was still allowing a few people outside the family and their closest circle to see Ronnie. Ken Khachigian brought GOP nominee Dole by. Ronnie looked good, but “he just wasn’t there,” Khachigian recalled. Nancy carried the conversation, as her husband sat silently. When news stories began appearing in which visitors described the president’s state, she grew more protective. In the late 1990s, Tennessee senator Bill Frist, a rising star in GOP politics who would later become Senate majority leader, happened to be in Los Angeles and asked Ronnie’s former aide Jim Kuhn to arrange an introduction to the president who had done so much to shape the modern Republican Party. Five minutes would be enough, he told Kuhn: “I just want to shake his hand.” Kuhn thought that Nancy might be willing to allow Frist to see Ronnie, given that he had a medical background as a surgeon. She refused.

  A few rays of solace penetrated the darkness of her grief. One was that Patti, who had been estranged from the rest of the family for nine years and was living in New York, reappeared. A couple of weeks after Ronnie’s announcement of his diagnosis, Patti had taken the first steps on a road to reconciliation with her mother by apologizing for “the pain that I have caused.” Though their relationship would still have its ups and downs, shared pain broke down some of the barriers that had stood between them for so long. There were moments when Nancy leaned on her daughter for comfort. “I don’t know how to be alone,” Nancy told Patti. “I’ve never been alone.” Within two years, Patti would move back to Los Angeles, to be closer to her parents, to be there for her mother when her father no longer was.

  Another blessing amid the grief was Diane Capps, a loyal and discreet retired military officer who had been a nurse in the White House. After Ronnie was diagnosed, Nancy contacted Capps in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had moved, and asked her to come out to California. Capps became not only a caregiver to Ronnie in the early years of his illness but also a source of support for Nancy, helping her to accept the inevitable. “Diane helped her understand that there would be good days and bad days, and, with time, there would be fewer good days and more bad days, and eventually all bad days,” Ryan said.

  Capps also counseled Nancy to accept Ronnie’s version of reality, whatever it happened to be at the moment. Nancy’s friend Robert Higdon recalled the nurse telling the former first lady: “If he says he wants to go out and play baseball, you say, ‘Have a nice game.’ ” As Nancy would describe it later, living with someone who has Alzheimer’s was “a crash course in patience.”

  While she offered a face of stoicism to the world, sadness and stress were taking a toll on Nancy. On April 7, 1995, she met Ronnie’s biographer Edmund Morris for a two-and-a-half-hour lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air. Things were tense between the two of them. Nancy was frustrated that, after nearly a decade, Morris had yet to produce his much-anticipated masterwork on Ronnie. The biographer, meanwhile, found Nancy a difficult subject to interview; evasive when he tried to pin her down on such basic details as when she and Ronnie first discussed the possibility that he might be president one day. That afternoon, Morris claims, Nancy’s behavior took a bizarre turn. The biographer, who died in 2019, described what happened in an interview I did with him in August 2017. He also provided an entry that he made in his diary about that day.

  It began: “I had lunch with Nancy Reagan at the Bel-Air. She is feeling very sorry for herself, having undergone surgery for sunspots two days ago. As she checks herself in her hand mirror, I contemplate, close up, the delayed ruin which is the lot of all face-lifters; crushed nose, parchment pouches, staring eyes. She sits back in despair, puts a heavy jeweled pillbox on the tablecloth, and extracts a blue pill the size of a wren’s egg. ‘Halcyon,’ [sic] she says, gulping it down.”

  Halcion, as it is properly spelled, was the brand name for triazolam, a powerful prescription sedative used to treat anxiety and insomnia. It was already becoming notorious at that time for allegedly causing irrational and violent behavior. In 1991 it was banned in Britain. Morris wrote that a while after Nancy took the pill, her mood changed suddenly. She told him: “They’re talking about me over there.”

  “Who? Where?” Morris asked.

  Nancy only grew more agitated, he wrote: “She arches her eyebrows across the room to where two young women are having an animated conversation, paying not the least attention to us. ‘I heard them say White House.’ ‘Well, so what? It’s natural they would have recognized you and said something. They’re obviously onto another subject now.’ But she cannot take her eyes off them, and strains to hear some more of their chat, ignoring me. After awhile, I become irritated. ‘Look, Nancy, I’ve got a book in my briefcase; why don’t I just do some reading while you listen in?’ She laughs mirthlessly, a little stitch-scar showing on her upper lip.”

  As they were preparing to leave the restaurant, Nancy demanded that the maitre d’ and receptionist tell her the identity of the two women and grew furious when she was told the restaurant had not gotten their names. Morris’s journal indicates he tried to defuse the situation with a joke: “Face it, Nancy, they’re KGB—we’ll never find out their true identity.”

  From the concerned but unsurprised demeanor of her Secret Service agents, the biographer surmised that this was not the first time something like that had happened. “We all began to realize she was going into some kind of paranoid frenzy,” he said. “The Secret Service and I literally escorted her out.” In his diary, Morris wrote: “My hearing is pretty acute, but hers would appear to be preternatural. That is, if what she heard was real and not delusory. The imagined sound of distant voices, the paranoia, the big pill, the blue fingers, the expressionless face—she’s off on a solo cruise.”

  All of this happened less than six months after Ronnie’s diagnosis was announced to the country. It is easy to imagine how helpless and adrift Nancy must have felt. She had to let go of her own wishful thinking that there might be some answer—some treatment, some way to keep Ronnie engaged. Early on, she told Robert Higdon: “This isn’t going to take my husband.” But as his deterioration accelerated on a series of downward plateaus, she could no longer hang on to her denial. Once, when Ronnie and Nancy were watching a football game on television, he got up and started rummaging around the room. “I’m trying to find my football gear,” he told her. “The coach is waiting for me.” Nancy decided he would watch no more games.

  In the beginning, the family hoped—and wanted to believe—that his ranch could be a respite where he might spend many of his
remaining days. Then John Barletta, a loyal Secret Service agent who was his longtime riding companion, began to notice that even the most familiar activities were becoming difficult for the former president—things as simple as cinching the girth strap on his saddle. “From the time that started happening, I would have my horse already saddled when he came up, so I could watch him tack up his horse,” Barletta wrote later. “Often he would put something in his hand and then hesitate. That would tell me he was having trouble. I would just take his hand and move it to the right position. A big smile would come over his face. ‘That’s what I was trying to do.’ ”

  But Barletta became alarmed one morning when Ronnie was unable to control his favorite horse, a headstrong Arabian stallion named El Alamein, which had been a gift from Mexican president José López Portillo for Ronnie’s inauguration in 1981. Barletta went to Nancy and said, “Mrs. Reagan, he’s making too many mistakes up there. I can’t protect him from himself. He’s making rookie mistakes, and he’s been riding fifty-five years. A new rider wouldn’t make these mistakes. I don’t think he should ride anymore. It’s getting that dangerous.”

  “Then you have to tell him, John,” she said.

  “I don’t want to tell him that, Mrs. Reagan,” Barletta pleaded. “You need to tell him that.”

  “No,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “I can’t.”

  After lunch that day, Nancy summoned Barletta and told him it was time to break the news to Ronnie. Barletta found him sitting by the fireplace, reading a book. “This riding isn’t working out. Sir, I don’t think you should ride anymore,” Barletta said. The agent felt crushed by sadness. It was like telling someone they couldn’t breathe anymore. Ronnie got up and put his hands on Barletta’s shoulders. “It’s okay, John,” he said. “I know.” And that was it. Ronnie later gave Barletta a pair of his three-buckle brown field boots and his saddle.