I remember him being asked about the time when he was president of a union. (actors?)
And he replied, I don’t remember that.
This kinda nailed it for me.
Don’t remember the date.
In 1990 Reagan had surgery for a blood clot on his brain. He was given cognitive test every year after that. He did not exhibit any decline on those tests until 1993.
Yeah, I remember the general trope being that he was not mentally up to the task of president, but not due to senility. However, the guy was a top-line Hollywood star, head of the actors guild (a union) and governor of a state. He had demonstrated executive ability and command of the issues, despite how much I disagreed with his policies.
Yeah, I mean Reagan had somewhat of a GWB affectation in which he was not a deeply “erudite” man by any means, and would deliberately affect folksiness. In a lot of matters back in the 1970s and at least in his first campaign, Reagan was a lot smarter and more shrewd than he let on. As far back as the 1960s before he had even been Governor of California he was a shrewd political operator. He also had a history of “not remembering” when remembering would probably expose a personal foible.
For example what I think harmonicamoon might be misremembering, is Reagan was investigated for anti-trust related issues in the early 1960s because of some corrupt shit he did as SAG President that benefited himself. During his interview with the authorities he basically “was hazy” and “couldn’t recall” on a long series of very damaging questions. The general public didn’t really care that Reagan lined his own pockets at the expense of the actors in his guild, because actors aren’t a very sympathetic lot, and the matter never appeared to hurt his later political career.
George W. Bush dropped the folksy act in his last two years in power. Today, a decade out of power whenever he appears in public he actually seems to be smarter then he appeared when President.
I heard rumors in 1986-87. Specifically the son of a physician told me his father watched Reagan carefully on television. I wasn’t shocked by the rumor: indeed I strongly suspect I had been familiar with it for a while.
I don’t recall hearing any rumors. I heard plenty of people say he was dumb, but that’s quite different from Alzheimer’s
Well, I am one such person. During the Iran Contra hearings, I assumed Reagan was lying. But after I learned he had Alzheimer’s, I thought perhaps he honestly didn’t recall all that stuff. Of course, that was fairly late into his presidency.
IMHO, but I would suggest that jokes about an old man being senile is du rigeur, not evidence. Trump got the same thing, and Biden would get the same thing from the comedians of the opposite party. It’s an easy win.
Old people also do get forgetful, inattentive, etc. to at least some extent, no matter what. That’s not Alzheimer’s, that’s just age. But it would be relatively credible for a son to be cautious of any behavior that seemed like Alzheimer’s and fret over it - even if it was just manifestations of regular old age. Having a son think he saw symptoms a decade earlier than makes sense, when in fact there were not, for the disease progression doesn’t seem unrealistic.
Looking into this a bit more, it seems that Donald Regan - the person who made this statement - did not leave the White House on good terms with the Reagan’s. Based on what I can tell, he felt that Ronald was letting Nancy control the Presidency - and that she was, in turn, being controlled by an astrologer - while the Reagans felt like Donald was trying to usurp power from them, by failing to report up, issuing commands unilaterally, etc.
On the whole, it seems that Ronald left hiring and firing up to Nancy. She was, in some senses, the real White House Chief of Staff, just not officially. It seems likely that Regan didn’t appreciate having to abrogate part of his role to her, so they were both prone to see the other as malevolent in some way.
Now you could make the argument that Ronald allowed Nancy to run things because he was frail, in the throes of dementia, etc. But you could also make the argument that Regan couldn’t believe that the President would let some crazy lady be his boss, if he wasn’t in such a state.
Factually, Nancy was in a management role under Reagan. They do seem to have been a “power couple” in much the same way as Bill and Hillary were. That didn’t start late in his Presidency, it goes back through his career:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-06/nancy-reagan-he-needed-only-her?context=amp
This isn’t to say that Regan was wrong, but there’s sufficient reason to believe that he was a biased source that Howard Baker and everyone else’s statements to the contrary seem more credible (to me), particularly when added to the timeline of the diagnosis.
People can be forgetful. It happens. It doesn’t mean that someone has or even is at risk of having Alzheimer’s. I’ve been a forgetful person since I was a toddler. If I get Alzheimer’s in a few decades, everyone will say that my forgetfulness was evidence that it was coming. But, factually, the disease doesn’t work like that and I suspect that I would pass any memory, attention, etc. tests that you could they’re at me, just as Regan did (as puddleglum noted) and if you cut my skull open it would be a fresh, plaque free brain inside.
Eye witness testimony is a pretty bad set of evidence. A man can make a hundred beautiful, of the cuff speeches in front of huge audiences, and if someone is predisposed to believe that the man is senile, then one line flub will be all it takes to prove the case, regardless of the hundreds of hours of flub free material.
Feel free to look around at my posts and you’ll see that I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but let’s look at an innocuous, easy going interview with him from just a year and a half ago:
His sentences are perfectly fine for conversational English. He clearly knows where he is, what he’s being asked, and how to ensure that his answer is self-agrandizing no matter what the question was.
Are there instances of Trump talking word salad? Sure. But are those evidence that he’s senile? Or, can it be explained by him having just woke up and is calling in to Fox and Friends before he’s had his caffeine?
Nothing has happened in a year and a half. You could find video of him from yesterday, talking about any random subject, and he’ll just sounds like a regular person. And yet, there are hordes of people making the claim that the 1% of word salad that Trump has produced is evidence that he has Dementia, ignoring the wide variety of other options like:
It was late
It was early
Sometimes people just forget things
Sometimes people just get tongue tied
He was under stress
Etc.
With a highly partisan topic, you have to be very careful to make sure that neither you nor anyone else is jumping to conclusions.
Reagan may have been suffering Alzheimer’s while in office, but the evidence to that is all explainable as other things, the disease isn’t generally that slow, and he was passing cognitive tests for years before getting diagnosed by a real live doctor. The safe bet would be that he was clean.
I pulled this interview response from an interview Reagan gave about the Start I treaty (which had a long process of development from 1982 to 1991 when GHWB and Gorbachev came to a final preliminary agreement); this interview was conducted in 1987 near the end of his Presidency and the interviewers were asking about a range of issues around the treaty:
Reagan appears both well informed on the facts and particulars of the treaty, as well as technical issues related to it–I do not believe our current President could give an interview response like this today, and he passed a cognitive test 6 months ago or whatever.
The first time I saw it was I think the Summer of 1984. I’m not good at remembering time periods, but I’m sure that the Contra funding was up for a vote. I was at the White House with my boyfriend to pick up his mother who worked for the Reagans. Mr. Reagan was on his way to a vacation on the ranch, and bf decided to surprise me by arranging a formal photo with him.
The whole story is too long to type, but suffice it to say that bf, Adm. Poindexter and I were arguing about the Contras. Mr. Reagan came out of the oval office and stopped to chat with bf. I tried to ask him about one point in the argument. He. Had. No. Idea. what we were talking about.
He was not plausibly denying or trying to avoid the subject; he was clueless. He was just a sweet, trembling, elderly man who wanted to be certain that no one had been rude to the young lady who seemed to be upset about something. When I shook his hand it was so fragile in mine that I was afraid to squeeze.
When I went home I called my Dad in extreme distress about the state of our government. I had learned more than I wanted to know about the way our government works that day. Dad laid down a few more truths, including the fact that a Republican President was merely a figurehead, chosen by name recognition and ability to charm the public. If I wanted to know who was really running the country, he suggested I keep my eye on Rep. Dick Cheney and his ilk.
It’s not unusual in early dementia for people to have good and bad spells. Especially for them to lose it under stress. Mr. Reagan was no genius, and not a particularly strategic thinker. But he was not intellectually lazy either, and he was very good at memorizing lines. He also listened carefully to his advisers and his briefings.
As for President Trump, he considers it beneath him to learn in depth about anything. To his mind he can “wing it” and get better outcomes than any amount of planning and knowledge will create. He honestly believes there is some sort of magic attached to being him. I think his defects of character are far more dangerous than any illness.
Well yes. He was deliberately kept in the dark about it. That all came out in the hearings.
The big problem, of course is that his opponents desperately wanted Reagan to be senile (or whatever). And Democrats today desperately want him to have been senile. As such, statements in that vein made by people other than qualified medical professionals can safely be dismissed as at best wishful thinking.
You misunderstand. He didn’t know where he was headed to that afternoon. Don’t try to replace a first-hand account with your suppositions.
Some people who have dementia still retain some skills, habits or implicit knowledge like tying their shoelaces, playing an instrument, doing polite small talk or taking walks from their home to the park. Reagan was an actor and could be charming and slick. Could he have acted his way, “pretended to be president”, through many interactions even if, in terms of conscious deliberation, not much what going on?
When would the GOP-president-as-figurehead phenomenon have begun?
Then perhaps you should have said that in your post. Your post was about Poindexter and the Contras.
I feel like this kind of anecdote is not very useful. Random story from a person on the internet we can’t possibly verify vs I and millions of other Americans were alive for the entirety of Reagan’s presidency and saw him in countless interviews etc. I basically don’t trust your judgment based on what you claim happened, you’re not to my knowledge a medical expert trained in the diagnosis of cognitive decline, and if you were you didn’t conduct such an assessment on President Reagan.
Even being generous to your unverifiable anecdote it would suggest Reagan was illucid for a moment in time, without any more information it has little probative value. You could catch me on days where I’m not going to seem all there because I’ve just woken up, am hungover, etc. Reagan was also a trained actor, he may have found your questions stupid and intrusive and just feigned apathy/ignorance to it all.
As I’ve noted as far back as the 1960s Reagan had a habit of acting “confused” when in trouble, and there’s no evidence the man had a 40 year case of Alzheimer’s.
Reagan wasn’t sequestered in the White House for his entire Presidency, he gave interviews, live and on air, 1 on 1, with reporters. There’s no way to fake lucidity in that scenario.
People in early dementia will generally not pass cognitive tests, they’ll start to show problems on those–we know Reagan never failed a cognitive test until his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. For the lay person it’s very easy to not be able to correctly differentiate between an old person’s normal memory decline and Alzheimer’s (and other dementias.)
I’ll also note that as someone who lived through the Reagan administration as a Republican, I saw a very similar treatment to the President as we saw of George W. Bush (a man with no actual proven cognitive issues at all, who was relatively young when elected President), that he was called stupid, “retarded”, a “moron”. This stuff had been said about Reagan since at least 1976 when he primaried President Ford, and I think it’s for similar reasons these things were said about George W. Bush–they were political attacks against a person that spoke in a way the mainstream liberal media felt was unpolished or unprofessional.
I personally enjoy good oratory skills and wish all politicians I support have them, but the reality is as lot of smart people sound dumb if you put a microphone in front of their face. I don’t think Reagan was a “great mind” at any point in his life, nor do I think that of George W. Bush. But both men were college graduates, had held multiple high pressure jobs and etc. Neither dude was going to win a Nobel Prize in Physics but neither person was an imbecile. Reagan actually had a very impactful/powerful speaking style, albeit he was very bad about getting specific facts and details wrong–although in truth most politicians are not good at nitty gritty details. Generally the degree to which someone gets called “stupid” for getting details wrong is going to be determined by the partisanship of the critic.
I wasn’t overly impressed by your passage, but then again I’m not drawing a bright line between early onset dementia and “age-associated memory impairment”, which affects about 40% of the population.
Nit pick though: the cognitive test Trump took was very basic. Here it is. Exercises include drawing a clock face and getting the numbers right. See a picture of a mouse and correctly identify the animal. Be given two words (orange and banana) and discuss their similarities (they are both fruit).
A Kindergartner could pass Trump’s test. Many nursing home residents could not.
I feel like this is the closest thing to a GQ answer.
Totally in agreement. Especially with your final sentence. Really, how much of a worsening effect could dementia even have on Trump’s behavior? If anything, I imagine it’d have a somewhat mitigating effect on some of more compulsive and narcissistic “flights…or at least bumpy moped rides of fancy”.