LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 1994
MORNING
The man with ten years to live has been dealt a stunning blow.
His daughter, forty-one-year-old Patti Davis, is now fully exposed for the entire country to see. Playboy magazine is on newsstands everywhere, its cover promising a father’s ultimate humiliation. Patti wears nothing but a smile as the hands of a muscular unseen man cup her bare breasts. The magazine’s lurid headline promises that “Ronald Reagan’s Renegade Daughter” will tell all.
As Patti Davis has intended, her father is deeply wounded by his estranged daughter’s latest attempt to embarrass him. For years, Reagan has struggled to deal with his rebellious children. But Patti has always been the biggest problem. From her defiant liberal politics to her open use of marijuana, she has striven to be the polar opposite of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in every way.
Just two years ago, Patti published a tell-all memoir about life in the “dysfunctional” Reagan family. The book revealed Nancy’s dependence on tranquilizers and diuretics, along with the fact that Patti was so afraid of becoming pregnant and parenting as her mother had that she had herself rendered infertile with a tubal ligation at the age of twenty-four. In addition, Patti openly led a lifestyle that flaunted a libertine attitude on social issues. One writer described her as “an angry daughter with scores still to settle.”
Now, grinning on the cover of Playboy, she has humiliated her mother and father—and the whole world knows it.
Patti Davis publicly states that her rebellion is Nancy’s fault, saying that her mother was physically and emotionally abusive, a chronic prescription drug user who slapped her daughter when she ate too much and even slapped her when she began menstruating at a very young age. When she told her father about the abuse, Davis alleged, Ronald Reagan called her a liar.
“Patti you are hurting us—your parents—but you are hurting yourself even more,” Reagan wrote to his daughter in 1991, when word leaked that she was writing her tell-all memoir.
“We are not a dysfunctional family,” Reagan’s letter continues. “Patti, in our meeting at the office you said your mother didn’t like you. That’s not true. Yes, she’s unhappy about the way things are but again I can show you photos in which the love between you is unmistakable. And these pictures are at almost every stage of your life. Pictures don’t lie.”
Reagan concludes: “Please Patti, don’t take away our memories of a daughter we truly love and who we miss.
“With Love, Dad.”
But Patti Davis did not listen, and her defiance is clear in each and every photo in Playboy. She looks straight into the camera, knowing that every click of the photographer’s shutter publicly will humiliate the man whom she considers a failure as a father.
It is a stunning betrayal.
* * *
Two months earlier, Ronald Reagan experienced another episode of public embarrassment.
The date is April 27, 1994. Ronald and Nancy Reagan are attending the funeral of Richard Nixon. Twenty years after the Watergate scandal brought him down, and less than a year after his beloved wife, Pat, succumbed to lung cancer, the thirty-seventh president of the United States is dead of a stroke at the age of eighty-one. Nixon is being laid to rest on the grounds of his birthplace and presidential library in Yorba Linda, California. Despite hitting afternoon traffic on the drive south from Beverly Hills, it takes the Reagans just a little over an hour to arrive for the 4:00 p.m. ceremony.1
There are four former presidents and the current chief executive, Bill Clinton, at the funeral. In addition, a crowd of four thousand sits in folding chairs, awaiting the start of the ceremony. Among the last to be seated are the former presidents and their wives. There is no formal introduction, but as a Marine Corps band plays light triumphal music, each couple walks to their seats, to polite applause.
Gerald and Betty Ford, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, George and Barbara Bush, and President Clinton and wife Hillary all take their seats.
But it is the arrival of Ronald and Nancy Reagan that steals the show. As the television audience and those in attendance look on, Reagan’s confusion is apparent. Making their way down the steps after Ford and before Carter, the former president holds tight to Nancy’s hand. She leads him like a child, walking in front and pulling him along. Reagan looks bewildered and frequently swivels his head. He wears a fascinated smile, as if not sure what all the hoopla is about. As the audience breaks into applause, Nancy whispers to her husband, telling him to wave to the crowd.
He dutifully obliges.
As the Reagans take their seats between the Carters and Bushes, Ronald Reagan’s physical decline is clear as well. Compared to Gerald Ford, who at age eighty is just two and a half years younger, Reagan looks frail and wrinkled. Ford thinks he looks “hollowed out,” and Bush is telling friends that he is deeply worried about Reagan. Carter, for his part, thinks that Reagan’s responses to everyday questions are “not right.”
Ronald and Nancy Reagan at President Richard Nixon’s funeral
But even as these former presidents are well aware of Reagan’s decline, there is a general consensus among the media that the matter must be kept hushed until the Reagan family chooses to make it public.
Nixon’s funeral is Ronald Reagan’s last major appearance. After a lifetime of performing, the actor has now left the stage.
* * *
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.”