Ron Reagan Jr. Says Father May Have Had Alzheimer's While President

Ron Reagan Jr. kept his silence all these years, letting sister Patti take the spotlight when it came to analyzing their parents. But now he's caught up with a book titled, "My Father at 100," timed to coincide with the centennial next month of President Reagan's birth.

I covered the Reagan White House and reported on the First Family's strained relations with their adult children. Ron Jr. is candid about his conflicted relationship with his father, writing in an excerpt featured in Sunday's issue of Parade: "He was easy to love but hard to know. You couldn't help wondering sometimes whether he remembered you once you were out of his sight." It's an assessment that the other Reagan children have voiced, with oldest son Michael recounting how his father didn't seem to differentiate him from his peers at his high school graduation. Daughter Patti Davis has written that her parents were so tight in their love for each other, it's almost as though there was no room for their children.

The most stunning revelation that Ron Jr. makes is his suspicion that his father entered the early stages of Alzheimer's disease long before it was made public. "Three years into his first term as president, I felt the first shivers of concern that something beyond mellowing was affecting my father," he writes, explaining they had always enjoyed vigorous argument, and Ron, an outspoken liberal, relished the give and take. But Reagan wasn't as sharp as he had once been, and Nancy told her son to back off, that he was making his father feel stupid.

"I didn't want my father to feel stupid," Ron writes. "If he was going to shoulder massive responsibility, I wanted him to feel on top of his game. If he was going to fulfill his duties as president, he would have to be . . . I don't want to give the impression that my father was mumbling incoherently during this or any period. But by the time he turned 76, he had survived a near-fatal shooting and surgery for colon cancer. As old men will, he'd learned to conserve his energy for crucial moments."

Suspicion that Reagan might have Alzheimer's surfaced during the 1984 election when he lost his train of thought in his first debate with Democrat Walter Mondale. But he recovered in the second debate when he jokingly promised he wouldn't exploit his opponent's youth and inexperience. It wasn't until well after Reagan had left office that he revealed in a poignant handwritten letter to the country that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Ron believes if Reagan had gotten that diagnosis earlier, say in 1987, that he would have stepped down. We'll never know, but having covered the Reagan White House and witnessed the protective cocoon around the president, I'm not so sure that those who loved and believed in him would have allowed his presidency to end prematurely on that note. I do remember the whispers about his occasional lapses, and there was an event at the Reagans' ranch in Santa Barbara when the president was asked a question and Nancy Reagan in a stage whisper prompted him with his reply.

The bond between them was strong and real, and Ron writes of his father's distraught reaction when Nancy underwent a mastectomy to treat her breast cancer. Sitting alone, waiting for her to return from surgery, Ron reports that the physician had asked a nurse, Paula Trivette, to check on him, "and in her arms he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. That he could do nothing to spare his Nancy from suffering was more than he could bear."