* * *
Four months after the Nixon funeral, Ronald Reagan is back at the Mayo Clinic for his annual physical. It is August 1994. Southern Minnesota is humid and hot this time of year, but it is cool and comfortable in the small examination room in which Ronald Reagan now sits. His hair is turning silver in a show of his advanced age. As he does every year, the former president is having his blood pressure checked as a doctor listens to his heart.
But at Nancy Reagan’s behest, the esteemed physicians of the Mayo Clinic are also conducting a different sort of test today.
“What did you have for breakfast?” Ronald Reagan is asked.
It is a simple question, something anyone with a memory could answer immediately.
Reagan stammers. He smiles as he racks his brain. He does not know what he had for breakfast. In fact, it is not clear if he knows what breakfast is.
The doctors take notes. The truth is the former president is now totally dependent on Nancy. Reagan has begun asking Nancy questions such as “What do I do next?” and observing aloud, “I’m not sure where I am.” He no longer recognizes old friends. Nancy Reagan listens in on his phone calls to prompt him when he experiences memory failure. When asked by Time magazine journalist Hugh Sidey about Watergate shortly after Richard Nixon’s death, Reagan cannot even recall the scandal.
“Forgive me,” Reagan finally admitted to Sidey, “but at my age, my memory is just not as good as it used to be.”
Now, at the Mayo Clinic, Reagan fails to answer the breakfast question. He also cannot recite a short three-item list after it is presented to him. The situation is clear.
“Over the past twelve months we began to notice from President Reagan’s test results symptoms indicating the possibility of early stage Alzheimer’s Disease,” reads the diagnosis. “Additional testing and an extensive observation over the past few weeks have led us to conclude that President Reagan is entering the early stages of this disease.
“Although his health is otherwise good, it is expected that as the years go on it will begin to deteriorate. Unfortunately, at this time there is no cure for Alzheimer’s Disease and no effective treatment exists that arrests its progression.”
* * *
Three months after his Mayo Clinic physical, Ronald Reagan joins past presidents and First Ladies who have made public their health woes. It was Franklin Roosevelt whose frank admission about polio in 1938 launched the charity known as the March of Dimes. Betty Ford’s honesty about her breast cancer, and later her battle with alcoholism, helped make those two emotional topics open for public discussion.
Now, despite his growing confusion and forgetfulness, Ronald Reagan is still alert enough to be aware of the fate that has befallen him. On good days, he understands he is helpless to stop the advance of Alzheimer’s. The disease is fatal, killing its victims in four to twelve years. The only drug currently on the market, Tacrine, is not a cure but a stopgap to improve memory temporarily.
The world is still learning about Alzheimer’s. They lump it together with terms such as senility and dementia. The date is November 5, 1994, as Ronald Reagan takes pen to paper to tell the world.
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 & I had to decide whether as private citizens we 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
* * *
With his fate sealed, Ronald Reagan sits in a pew at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church. A tall wooden cross rises from behind the pulpit as senior pastor Michael Wenning leads the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father,” says Reagan, in words he memorized as a child. He fixes his eyes on the cross. “Who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
Next to Reagan sits Nancy, who also prays aloud.
And next to Nancy is Patti Davis. After years of bitter isolation and estrangement, Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis has finally brought his daughter back. Incredibly, she is about to move home, mending a lifetime of wounds to be near her father in his last days. Patti Davis’s turnaround is amazing.
Like her siblings, she has set aside the past. Gone are the days of angrily mocking her father’s politics. Her aim is now reconciliation instead of rebellion.
“Amen.”
* * *
It is a February afternoon in 1996, a day of cool sunshine and clear skies in Southern California. George Shultz sips tea with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at their Bel-Air home. The azaleas along the driveway are just beginning to bloom. The former secretary of state has come to say hello to his former boss, a man whom he served for six and a half years. Together, they spent countless hours crafting the foreign policy that would come to define the Reagan administration, ending the Cold War and bringing an end to Communist influence around the world. They traveled together aboard Air Force One and sat together at the bargaining table as Reagan coolly negotiated a new arms treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
But Ronald Reagan remembers none of that. He has even begun to forget that he was once president of the United States. And although he keeps regular hours at his nearby office in Century City, his time is spent mostly reading the comics and sitting in the nearby Armand Hammer Park, watching children at play.
On the outside, Reagan still looks healthy. On the inside, he is dying. Sometimes Reagan wakes up in the middle of the night thinking it is time for breakfast. He can still dress himself, sometimes tying a neat Windsor knot. His handshake is still firm. And when he ventures out to the Los Angeles Country Club to play golf, he is very much like other golfers on the course, exulting in good shots and swearing angrily when his drives go astray. But Reagan’s round is limited to one or two holes instead of eighteen.
Perhaps the most telling sign that the end is near is that Reagan’s beloved Rancho del Cielo is for sale. No longer able to ride a horse or clear brush, Reagan never goes to the ranch. It is now up for sale to the highest bidder.
Of this, Ronald Reagan has no idea.
As George Shultz and Nancy Reagan continue to visit on this warm winter afternoon, Reagan finally stands and leaves the room, followed by a nurse.
“Who is that man sitting on the couch with Nancy?” the former president asks the nurse. “I know him. He is a very famous man.”
32
ST. JOHN’S HEALTH CENTER
JANUARY 20, 2001
9:05 A.M.
Nancy Reagan sits in a chair next to her husband’s hospital bed, watching a new president being sworn in.
“I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear…”
Ronald Reagan also watches the ceremony, completely unaware that he took that same oath twenty years ago today. There is a faraway look in his eyes as he gazes at the television. It is now seven years since the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Reagan will turn ninety in two weeks. Eight days ago, he broke his hip in a fall at home, and upon his release from the hospital he will be bedridden for the rest of his life. The former president’s rugged physique has grown frail, his daily workouts a thing of the past. His once-broad shoulders are shrunken; the bones in his back are clearly visible, pressing through his thin flesh.
But Ronald Reagan is unaware of his physical condition. He also does not even recognize his own wife. “My mother speaks of the loneliness of her life now,” daughter Patti writes in her journal. “He’s here, but in so many ways he’s not. She feels the loneliness in small ways—he used to put lotion on her back. Now he doesn’t. And in the huge, overwhelming ways—a future that will be spent missing him.”
Nancy knows that her unswerving devotion to her husband made her a target of scorn in their White House days, and for that she makes no apologies. “I’m the one who knows him best, and I was the only person in the White House who had absolutely no agenda of her own—except helping him,” she stated in her autobiography.
The Reagans’ good friend Jimmy Stewart once noted that if “Nancy had been Ron’s first wife instead of his second, he would have been a real star in Hollywood, with a couple Oscars to show for it.”
Instead, Nancy guided him to the presidency. “As much as I love Ronnie,” she writes, “I’ll admit he does have at least one fault: He can be naive about the people around him. Ronnie only tends to think well of people. While that’s a fine quality in a friend, it can get you into trouble in politics.”
In this way, Nancy Reagan had a hand in changing the world. Now, as she and her Ronnie watch the presidential inauguration just hours before Reagan will be released from the hospital, her commitment to him continues. Since the fall, he never leaves the house anymore, other than on those occasions when he is placed in a wheelchair and rolled outside to the patio.
“My father is the only man in the house these days, except for members of his Secret Service detail who occasionally come in,” Patti Davis will write. “It’s a house of women now—the nurses, my mother, the housekeepers.”1
It is a tedious life for Nancy. She remains at her husband’s side night and day, leaving only occasionally to have a Cobb salad and chocolate chip cookies with friends at the nearby Hotel Bel-Air. The relief is needed because Ronald Reagan can no longer do anything for himself. His home office has been turned into a bedroom. There, next to the desk on which he once wrote so many letters and speeches, he spends his days on a hospital bed, tended to by his staff and Nancy. He cannot feed himself or even speak.
He is simply waiting to die.
* * *
“I christen thee United States Ship Ronald Reagan, and God bless all those who sail on her,” says Nancy Reagan on March 4, 2001, standing before a crowd of thousands in Newport News, Virginia. She swings the traditional bottle of champagne, shattering it against the ship’s steel hull. Nancy smiles as the audience of naval personnel and dockyard employees breaks into applause. Her husband would love knowing that a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is being commissioned in his honor.
On this day, she and Ronald have been married forty-nine years. But Ronald Reagan does not know this as he lies almost still, day after day, in California.
“It’s lonely,” Nancy will tell Mike Wallace in a rare televised interview for 60 Minutes. “When you come right down to it, you’re in it alone. And there’s nothing that anybody can do for you.”
* * *
So it is that one year after the USS Ronald Reagan is launched, the Reagans’ landmark fiftieth wedding anniversary comes and goes without fanfare. “There were times I had to catch myself,” Nancy will recall of March 4, 2002. “Because I’d reach out and start to say, ‘Honey, remember when…’”
* * *
Two years later, it is clear that Nancy Reagan’s lonely vigil will soon come to an end.
Ronald Reagan, asleep, is struggling to breathe, unaware that his daughter Patti sits atop his old desk, watching him slip away. Ron Jr. has cut short a Hawaiian vacation and is on his way to California. “We are witnesses to the end of a life,” Patti will write, “and even though we have known this is coming for years, it feels as if we have never considered it as a reality.”
But Nancy Reagan will not say good-bye to her husband. Throughout his decade of decline, she has tended to him as if he were still sound of body and mind. Nancy still sleeps in their bed, keeping as many traditions alive as possible.
From the day they met in 1949, she made it her mission to marry Ronald Reagan and then mold him into the man she thought he could be. She has endured years of scathing attacks, all because of her loyalty to her husband.
Even now, in the midst of what doctors are calling “continual neurological degradation,” Nancy protects the former president. No outsiders are allowed to see him, other than family. Right to the end, she is managing the legacy of Ronald Reagan, even as she struggles to imagine life without him.
“He’s there,” she once told an interviewer, explaining why she could not say good-bye to this man with whom she’d shared a wondrous lifelong journey. “He’s there.”
Two days later, on June 5, 2004, a sobbing Nancy finally acknowledges the reality.
Ronald Reagan is gone.
33
NATIONAL CATHEDRAL
WASHINGTON, DC
JUNE 11, 2004
NOON
The whole world is watching.
“We have lost a great president, a great American, and a great man, and I have lost a dear friend,” says Margaret Thatcher, her face appearing on the big-screen monitors arrayed throughout the cathedral. “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself.”
Nearly four thousand mourners fill this century-old Episcopal church, watching as Thatcher praises her dear friend on videotape. Among the crowd are the Reagan family, President George W. Bush, and former presidents Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton. Thatcher herself is in attendance, dressed all in black with an enormous hat, seated up front next to Mikhail Gorbachev. She is frail and hunched, her doctors having ordered her not to travel. Thatcher has ignored them out of respect for her longtime friend. However, fearing that she might embarrass herself by speaking live at the service, Baroness Thatcher videotaped her anticipated eulogy for Reagan months ago in London.
* * *
But not everyone is giving tribute. In Communist Cuba, the government greets Reagan’s death with a proclamation attacking his conservative policies, stating, “He should never have been born.”
And in America, the far left’s opinion of Reagan’s passing is summarized in Slate magazine: “He was as dumb as a stump,” writes Christopher Hitchens. “I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.”
* * *
Reagan’s funeral is the largest in America since that of President John F. Kennedy more than forty years ago. Security is extremely tight, as this is the first major national event since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. But once Reagan’s body rests inside the Capitol Rotunda and the doors are opened to the public on the evening of June 9, a wave of humanity arrives to pay their respects. Many have been waiting two days for this opportunity. All through the night and the next day, five thousand visitors per hour walk past the casket of
Ronald Reagan.
On the morning of June 11, which President George W. Bush has declared a national day of mourning, the body of Ronald Reagan is delivered to the National Cathedral for the first state funeral since that of Lyndon Johnson in 1973.
With a global television audience looking on, and 3,700 mourners in the pews, Margaret Thatcher’s taped eulogy concludes.
“Ronald Reagan’s life was rich not only in public achievement, but also in private happiness. Indeed, his public achievements were rooted in his private happiness.
“The great turning point of his life was his meeting and marriage with Nancy. On that, we have the plain testimony of a loving and grateful husband. ‘Nancy came along and saved my soul.’”
Nancy Reagan kisses her husband’s coffin.
Television cameras and all within view turn to Nancy. Despite the ten long years of Reagan’s decline, and the ample time she has had to prepare for this moment, she is consumed by grief.
“We share her grief today,” Thatcher continues. “For the final years of his life, Ronnie’s mind was clouded by illness.
“That cloud has now lifted. He is himself again, more himself than at any time on this Earth, for we may be sure that the Big Fellow upstairs never forgets those who remember him. And as the last journey of this faithful pilgrim took him beyond the sunset, and as heaven’s morning broke, I like to think, in the words of John Bunyan, that ‘all the trumpets sounded on the other side.’”
A subtle smile creases Thatcher’s lips on the screen as she ends her eulogy. As she does so, it is possible to see the slight facial paralysis from her recent series of strokes, and yet her voice is clear and deliberate.
“We here still move in twilight, but we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had.
“We have his example.”
* * *
That evening, the body of Ronald Reagan is buried in California. Margaret Thatcher is there. So is Jane Wyman. Nancy Reagan kisses the coffin and whispers, “I love you,” before stepping away for good. Nancy, clutching the American flag that once draped her husband’s coffin, dissolves in tears. She looks pale, fragile, and frightened.
Killing Reagan Page 24