The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

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maybe nobody else noticed it; probably the Wicks did, because they know him very well—but he was a distracted man; very withdrawn.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 protecting 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