by H. W. Brands
THE FIRMNESS OF Reagan’s tone impressed many readers and caused North to claim he hadn’t said or meant what had been reported. What neither North—who won the Republican nomination but lost in the general election after Nancy Reagan declared, “He lied to my husband, and he lied about my husband”—nor the great majority of Americans knew was that Reagan’s statement was unsupported by anything he himself could still recall. His memory of the events he spoke so confidently about in his letter to Laxalt was gone.
Americans learned soon enough. Nancy had noticed continuing changes in her husband’s mental abilities but had hesitated to speak to anyone about them. “One small leak to the press, and the media would begin homing in on the ex-president, testing him at every turn,” Michael Deaver said, characterizing her feelings and his own. Yet she couldn’t shield him forever. Others began to notice. Phil Gramm later recalled approaching the former president at a public event. Reagan looked at him with a slightly puzzled expression. “I don’t remember your name,” he said. “But I remember what you did.” Gramm assured him that was plenty. At his eighty-third birthday party in February 1994, Reagan stumbled badly over his lines in front of a large and friendly Washington crowd. They tried to ignore the slips and explain them away, but obviously something was wrong.
Even so, Nancy waited until their regular checkups in August to investigate thoroughly. John Hutton, still Reagan’s primary physician, notified the Mayo doctors of his memory lapses, and they added several neurological assays to the standard protocol. Their conclusion was that Reagan was in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease.
The diagnosis was a shock, though not a great surprise. Deciding how to deal with it, personally and publicly, required some time. Reagan chose to inform the American people himself. “My Fellow Americans,” he wrote in a letter released on November 5. “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.” He explained that he and Nancy had decided to share this diagnosis with the public so that others might benefit through greater awareness of the disease and deeper understanding of what it entailed. “At the moment I feel just fine,” he continued. “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.” He recognized that the burden of Alzheimer’s often weighed heavily on the families of patients. “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.”
Reagan had delivered several valedictories by now. But this one carried a moving definitiveness. “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.”
Readers of this letter, many with tears in their eyes, could imagine Reagan’s characteristic grin and sideways duck of the head as he bade them farewell: “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.”
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ON THAT DAY Reagan passed from politics into history. His public appearances became fewer and more fleeting, as Nancy understandably sought to protect him from embarrassment and discomfort. He visited the Reagan Library to see the Christmas exhibit. He rang in the new year with old friends at Walter Annenberg’s estate in Rancho Mirage. At his office in Century City he occasionally posed for photographs with newlyweds or visiting schoolchildren.
But as the last of his memory faded, his world grew ever smaller. Travel outside California ceased. Trips to the ranch, long his source of greatest joy, now caused him distress. He didn’t know why he was taken there or what he was supposed to do. Nancy put an end to them and in 1996 listed the ranch for sale.
He ceased to recognize even his oldest friends. Mike Deaver recalled his last visit to Reagan, in 1997. “He looked great when I opened the door and stepped in—a blue suit, flawless French cuffs, just the right tie,” Deaver wrote. “But it didn’t take long to realize that Ronald Reagan had no idea who I was or any interest in why I had walked into his office. A book was in his hands; his attention to it was total. Finally, I slipped over to his side to see what it was. He was reading a picture book about Traveler, Robert E. Lee’s famous horse. I was heartbroken.”
Though Reagan forgot the world, the world didn’t forget him. The 1996 Republican national convention nominated Bob Dole to oppose Bill Clinton, but the delegates found greatest joy in feting Ronald Reagan. A special video, featuring testimonials by Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham, auto industry executive Lee Iacocca, and others, paid tribute to Reagan’s life and accomplishments. The beaming images of Reagan in his prime, combined with the knowledge of his current affliction, left the delegates in tears. The lights went up after the video to reveal Nancy standing before the convention; her appearance elicited further tears and additional applause. She spoke briefly, thanking them for their support for her husband and herself in their difficult time. She quoted his remarks to the previous convention, when he had told the delegates never to lose America’s natural optimism. And she closed, “Ronnie’s optimism, like America’s, still shines very brightly. May God bless him, and from both of us: God bless America.” The delegates melted once more.
The country as a whole honored him. Congress voted unanimously to name a large new federal office building on Pennsylvania Avenue for the former president, prompting some to wonder whether Reagan, the avowed foe of government growth, would have approved. His name was prefixed to Washington’s National Airport, again raising eyebrows, this time especially among the air controllers he had fired. More obviously fitting was the christening of a new aircraft carrier, the symbol of American military power, as the USS Ronald Reagan.
The nation learned in early 2001 that he had fallen at home and broken his hip. Many familiar with the complications that often follow such falls expected to read his obituary shortly. But he was discharged from the hospital in time to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in February. Later that year he passed John Adams to become the longest-lived president in American history.
He held on for three more years. He died on June 5, 2004, at the Bel Air house, at the age of ninety-three.
IN DEATH HE retraced his journey from California to Washington and back. First services were held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Nancy was joined by Michael Reagan, Ron Reagan, and Patti Davis. Maureen Reagan had died of cancer three years earlier. The retired pastor of the Reagans’ church, Bel Air Presbyterian, gave the eulogy.
Reagan’s casket lay in the library for that afternoon and the next day as thousands of visitors—many famous, most not—paid their respects. The casket was flown to Washington, where the ritual was repeated in the Capitol Rotunda.
The public funeral service took place in the National Cathedral. Four thousand mourners filled the pews; millions watched the live coverage on television. Former presidents Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton attended. Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Lech Wałesa arrived from abroad. Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, represented the British government. Secretary-General Kofi Annan brought condolences from the United Nations.
President George W. Bush delivered the principal eulogy. “Ronald Reagan believed in the power of truth in the conduct of world affairs,” Bush said. “When he saw evil camped across the horizon, he called that evil by its name. There were no doubters in the prisons and gulags where dissidents spread the news, tapping to each other what the American president had dared to say. There were no doubters in the shipyards and churches and secret labor meetings where brave men and women began to hear the creaking and rumbling of a collapsing empire. And there were no doubters among those who swung hammers at the hated wall that the first and hardest blow had been stru
ck by President Ronald Reagan.”
At the end of the service Nancy and the children accompanied the casket to Andrews Air Force Base for the return west. Back in California they laid her husband and their father to rest on the hilltop beside his library. “He is home now; he is free,” Ron Reagan said. Patti Davis spoke of her father’s final affirmation of love for her mother. “When he opened his eyes, eyes that had not opened for many, many days, and looked at my mother,” she said, “he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.”
“IN HIS LAST years he saw through a glass darkly; now he sees his savior face to face,” George Bush had said at the Washington service. “And we look for that fine day when we will see him again, all weariness gone, clear of mind, strong and sure and smiling again, and the sorrow of this parting gone forever.”
Bush was speaking of the hereafter, but an approximation arrived in 2011, on what would have been Reagan’s hundredth birthday—or, by the reckoning he liked to employ, the sixty-first anniversary of his thirty-ninth birthday. The tears had dried; the darkness of his last decade had lifted; the time that had passed since his departure from office allowed a clearer view of what his life and his presidency meant.
The celebrations were less restrained than at the moment of his passing. Reagan had become sufficiently iconic that civic and corporate groups could safely attach themselves to his memory without fear of alienating clients or customers. The Tournament of Roses included a Reagan- themed float in its annual parade in Pasadena. The National Football League hailed the Gipper in a video aired just before kickoff at the Super Bowl. A similar tribute played before the Daytona 500 car race. The Professional Golfers’ Association tipped its cap to Reagan. The U.S. Postal Service issued a Reagan stamp. A measure was introduced in Congress to put Reagan’s image on the $50 bill. Initiatives were launched to name something for Reagan in every county in the country.
In a more analytical vein were the symposia and conferences that weighed his achievements and measured his contribution to the landmark events of his time. None of the participants could deny that America and the world had changed dramatically during the Reagan era. The nation’s politics took a sharp turn to the right; after a half century of liberalism, Americans rediscovered the virtues of conservatism. The international order was transformed by the collapse of Soviet communism; the end of the Cold War completed what American presidents had been attempting since 1945.
From the vantage of the Reagan centennial, with the twentieth century receding into the past, it wasn’t unreasonable to measure Reagan against his political hero, Franklin Roosevelt. And by that measure, he fared quite well. What Roosevelt had been to the first half of the twentieth century, Reagan was to the second half. Roosevelt entered office amid a crisis of the private sector, when the conservative status quo had lost legitimacy. Roosevelt tipped the balance to the left, launching the age of liberalism in American politics. In foreign affairs he asserted America’s world leadership and defeated the first of the century’s two modes of totalitarianism, fascism. Reagan entered office amid a crisis of the public sector, when the liberal status quo was floundering. Reagan tipped the balance back to the right, reviving conservatism as the more credible force in American politics. In foreign affairs he confirmed America’s world leadership and set the century’s second form of totalitarianism, communism, on the path to extinction.
An additional parallel appeared in the fact that while the magnitude of the accomplishments of the two presidents was impossible to deny, the meaning of those accomplishments continued to provoke vigorous debate. The New Deal was the salvation of democracy, in the minds of Roosevelt’s liberal supporters, and the onset of socialism, to his conservative critics. The Reagan revolution was the restoration of freedom, in the view of Reagan’s conservative admirers, and the abandonment of the weak and vulnerable, to his liberal opponents.
In certain respects, Reagan’s accomplishment was greater than Roosevelt’s. During the formative stages of the New Deal, Roosevelt enjoyed rubber-stamp majorities in Congress. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt as commander in chief met almost no resistance as he redesigned American foreign policy. Reagan, by contrast, had to struggle with a Democratic House during his entire presidency and with a Democratic Senate during his last two years. Nothing in international affairs gave him anything like the carte blanche in foreign policy enjoyed by Roosevelt.
The key to Reagan’s success, like that to Roosevelt’s, was his ability to restore Americans’ faith in their country. Reagan was called the “great communicator” with reason. He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt, combining conviction, focus, and humor in a manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too.
It helped that his beliefs relentlessly flattered the American people. Reagan blamed the country’s problems not on the people but on their government, as though the government—in a democracy, of all systems—existed apart from the people. His message was an easy sell. He asked next to nothing of the people, neither the soaring sacrifice of John Kennedy’s inaugural nor the quotidian adjustments sought by Carter. He promised Americans the gift of tax cuts, which he delivered without insisting on conservatism’s traditional precondition, spending cuts.
Reagan’s focus was no less important than his conviction. Focus is often the inverse of expertise, and Reagan understood that at the highest levels focus is far more important. He refused to clutter his mind with details that might distract from his major goals. From the start of his political career to the finish, his major goals were always the same: to shrink government at home and defeat communism abroad. Everything else was secondary. Reagan communicated effectively not least because he gave essentially the same speech again and again. The particulars and the anecdotes varied, but the message never did.
Yet the anecdotes were crucial. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked him. Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular.
Also vital to Reagan’s success was his ability to get other people to do his dirty work for him. He was accounted a terrible manager, unwilling to fire people, unable to keep track of what was being done in his name. If he had been the chief executive of a large corporation, these would have been damning failures. But in a president they can be essential to success. Whatever William Casey was up to in the months before the 1980 election, none of it touched Reagan. Reagan likely gave Casey no encouragement to stall the hostages’ release. But he didn’t have to. He knew what kind of person Casey was and what Casey was capable of doing.
In the matter of Iran-contra, Reagan understood full well the connection between the arms deliveries and the release of the hostages. His diary makes this quite clear. But he distanced himself from the details, leaving them to John Poindexter and Oliver North. Poindexter didn’t inform Reagan what North was doing, because every signal he got from Reagan told him the president didn’t want to know. By remaining in the dark, Reagan eventually managed to convince himself that the dealings were something other than arms for hostages. His outrage at the accusations of bargaining with terrorists was emotionally sincere, if logically incredible. As for the contra connection, Reagan didn’t know about the diversion of funds, again because he didn’t want
to know. He set the moral tone of the administration, which placed the survival of the contras above nearly everything else, including the repeatedly legislated will of Congress. He left it to his subordinates to figure out how to keep the contras alive. He let Poindexter and North work out the details, and he let them take the fall when the scandal broke. Even if his memory hadn’t failed by the time the Walsh investigation got to him, there was little chance of his being prosecuted. There were no fingerprints and no smoking gun.
A related talent was Reagan’s ability to say one thing and do something else. In an individual this is hypocrisy; in a president it is realism. Reagan’s political philosophy was adamant conservatism. He valued freedom over equality, the individual over the group, the private sector over the public sphere. In every speech he gave, he preached the conservative gospel. But Reagan’s political practice was flexible pragmatism. He opposed abortion, but as California governor he relaxed the state’s abortion laws. He favored lower taxes, but he accepted tax increases when necessary to achieve the best bargain with Congress. He believed communism to be evil, but he forged an alliance with the leader of the most powerful communist country in the world.