Michael Reagan's ire toward half-brother Ron Reagan over Ron's revelation that his father, darling-legend of the GOP Ronald Reagan, may have shown signs of Alzheimer's Disease, is a public family feud.
Mother Jones has a fascinating piece on CBS reporter Lesley Stahl's encounter with a sitting president who was a shell of the man Ronald Reagan had been. It's terrifying.
Stahl recounts a disturbing encounter she had with Reagan in the summer of 1986. Stahl was finishing up a stint as CBS News' White House correspondent, and she was awarded the customary farewell audience with the president. As she, her husband, and her eight-year-old daughter were about to enter the Oval Office, Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, told Stahl, "No questions at all, about anything." Stahl was angered by this, but she soon saw why Speakes had issued this instruction. When she and her family entered the office, the 75-year-old Reagan was standing by a Remington sculpture of a rearing horse, and Stahl immediately began to fret:
Reagan was as shriveled as a kumquat. He was so frail, his skin so paper-thin. I could almost see the sunlight through the back of his withered neck...His eyes were coated. Larry introduced us, but he had to shout. Had Reagan turned off his hearing aid?
...Reagan didn't seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he's gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import...I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.
Stahl tried to fill the silence, telling Reagan that her daughter used to tell everyone that the president works for her mommy, but after Reagan took office, she started saying that her mother worked for the president.
I wasn't above a little massaging. Was he so out of it that he couldn't appreciate a sweet story that reflected well on him? Guess so. His pupils didn't even dilate. Nothing. No reaction.
After Stahl mentioned that her husband, Aaron Latham, was a screenwriter, Reagan became animated, and pulled Latham to a couch to discuss a movie idea he had for a film in which he could star. Stahl recalls she was "too astonished to move." A few minutes later, the session was over. Reagan was now beaming, and after Stahl and her family left the Oval Office, Reagan chased after them and told her daughter, "I worked for your mother, too."
I don't get Michael Reagan's anger over Ron's observations - apart, that is, from some misguided urge to protect his father's legacy, facts be damned. To many of us who lived through the Reagan years, his doddering was infamous; the man fell utterly silent before the European Parliament when his teleprompter broke. One minute he was "The Great Communicator," the next, the lights were out and no one was home.
When the Iran-Contra scandal came to light, Ronald Reagan answered questions in hearings on the affair with the phrase "I do not recall" dozens of times. At that point, we really had only two likely options:
Either:
- The man was a vile, evil, calculating monster who over saw the selling of drugs here in the U.S. and the selling of weapons to terrorists in order to illegally fund the Contras, a bunch of murderers, rapists, arsonists and thieves, or
- Ronald Reagan was losing his memory.
This man held the most powerful elected office, arguably, on the planet.
This man had the keys to our nuclear arsenal.
And, frighteningly, this man was a hollow shell, a caricature of the human being most people thought they had elected, the man who Leslie Stahl encountered, the man with the distant look, the milky eyes, whose pupils didn't even dilate as she asked him questions.
The lights weren't on. No one was home in there.