#40 Ronald Reagan Part 2

Really Cool Stuff about Ronald Reagan
1. During his tenure as lifeguard at Lowell Park, Ronald Reagan saved 77 lives. “But a delegation of men and women who owe their lives to ‘Dutch’ was on hand to present him a clock bearing the simple message, ‘From 77 Grateful People’” (p. 184).
2. Reagan loved horseback riding and because of it, joined the Cavalry Reserve. “So on March 18, 1935, ‘Ronald W. Reagan, Civilian’ enrolled at 322d Cavalry HQ, Des Moines, and began to take extension courses toward a commission in the Army” (p. 123).
3. There are rumors that Reagan, at one point, tried to join the Communist Party. “So what if Dutch, young and ardent in 1938, thrilled to the message of Marx for a few experimental months? Minds colder and clearer than his fortunately he saw that he was not socialist material” (p. 159).
4. I thought it was so cute that, during the war, Reagan was enlisted by the First Motion Picture Unit. “Jack [Warner] told Hap that what the Air Corps needed was ‘a very effective propaganda department’ to stimulate recruitment by means of movies. What could be better than a special military production unit at Warners, headed by himself in full uniform?...Undertook to produce at least 6 big pics and 18 to 26 shorts a year—all inspirational & educational & instructional” (p. 190).
5. As governor, Reagan pushed through the legislature an extremely extensive welfare reform program. “The California Welfare Reform Act finally became law on August 13, 1971. Reagan did not exaggerate when he called it ‘probably the most comprehensive’ such initiative in American history…While fully compatible with AFDC (a reluctant concession on Reagan’s part), it would save three hundred million dollars a year through sheer operational efficiency” (p. 376).
6. Reagan has the largest presidential library in the United States. “The largest archive of its kind, it is also the least patronized by serious scholars” (p. 381).
7. Gerald Ford tried time and again to get Reagan on his side by trying to appoint him to important posts. “President Ford, suspicious of Ronald Reagan’s future intentions, kept trying to distract him with appointments. He asked him to serve on the Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities during the Watergate era, and offered him another Cabinet job, this time, Secretary of Commerce” (p. 391). The original offer was for Secretary of Transportation.
8. As president, Reagan sent through a revolutionary budget bill. “There was no doubt, however, that Reagan and his economic aides had brought about the largest spending-control bill, and the largest tax reduction, in American history. Their budget was revolutionary in that it reversed—or, more properly, inversed—an economic theory dating back the final days of the New Deal. Hallowed by Franklin Roosevelt, intellectualized by John Maynard Keynes, trumpeted by John Kenneth Galbraith, and codified by the social engineers of the Sixties and Seventies, the theory called for high, progressive tax rates, manipulative government spending, welfare-state ‘entitlements’ centering around Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, plus forcible downward redistribution of wealth and capital” (p. 446).
9. Reagan was the first to place a woman on the Supreme Court. “Polls and media commentary showed a tendency to regard the Administration as a club for rich white men, notwithstanding his widely praised appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court” (p. 451).
10. The 1983 bombing of an American barracks in Beirut is one of the worst in our history. “That total was finally drawn at two hundred and forty-one, making the barracks bombing the worst surprise attack on a US military installation since Pearl Harbor” (p. 502).
11. The election of 1984 held a couple of interesting moments. First of all, Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president of the United States and secondly, he received one of the largest electoral votes in American history. “Had the Speaker been in government since 1800, he still would not have witnessed such an electoral-vote landslide. Reagan had swept every state but Walter Mondale’s own Minnesota, and, even there, the popular majority could barely have filled a football stadium. Every age group in the national franchise had voted four more years for the oldest President in history” (p. 512).
12. He won the Medal of Freedom. “Four years later Ronald Reagan returned to the White House, at the reluctant invitation of President Bush, to receive the Medal of Freedom before William Jefferson Clinton took office” (p. 655).

On page one, I fell completely in love with Morris’ magical prose. I’m not even kidding. Right then and there, I knew that I was reading a biography that was completely beautiful and masterfully well-written. But then I had to put the book down. It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for good writing and that a well-turned phrase can seriously spike my endorphins but I didn’t want to be hypnotized into loving Ronald Reagan. I wanted him to stand on his own merits and not because Edmund Morris spoke luscious poetry into my ear. Hmmm…

It didn’t help either that, for this particular book, Edmund Morris came up with an interesting new style of biography. I’ll admit that it took me several chapters to pick up on it but when I did, I was absolutely blown away with the possibilities of it. Morris decided to write himself into the story. Not necessary himself but…well…let’s just call him the “narrator.” In this biography, aptly named a memoir, the narrator knows Dutch Reagan from childhood and therefore can describe scenes and events as if he had been there himself. It is deftly done. What’s fun about it is that Morris even includes the pictures that he used to describe scenes in such detail. I enjoyed this treatment of Reagan due to the fact that Morris, through his use of fictitious people and events, is able to give both sides of the story. The narrator, for the most part, restrains judgment over Ronald Reagan but there are numerous ancillary characters of the book that dislike Dutch or are surprised by him. Initially I thought it odd that Morris used yin-yang symbols to break up chapters instead of the usual bullet points or dots. At first, I thought the yin-yang symbol referred to Reagan’s famously difficult personality to understand but after finishing the book, I’ve determined that the yin-yang stands more for the author’s ambivalent and uncertain view of Reagan. Even now, and like Edmund Morris, I’m not quite sure whether Ronald Reagan was a truly great man or simply in the right place at the right time.

Another bonus about this biographical style was the oodles of local color and historical background that Morris effortlessly pours into each moment of Reagan’s life. From his humble beginnings in mid-west of 1911 to the war years in Hollywood to the tumultuous Sixties and life in the governor’s mansion, we, the readers, are a part of it all and not only from Reagan’s perspective but the narrator also has his own opinions on each matter. For instance, the narrator’s son, Gavin, is a student at Berkeley for the riots in 1969 and he writes letters to his dad that include all the odd phraseology and slang of that time. “All this I learned later, since Gavin, like most young destructors, was more interested in pulling down pillars that pondering the rights of women, let alone babies. He delightedly reported that some armed Black Panthers (‘bad cats I dig in Oakland”) had managed to bluster their way into the State Capitol. His only regret was that they had not gotten into the Executive Wing ‘and scared the shit out of Reagan’” (p. 354).

Morris also makes some fascinating connections, such as the abortion bill that Reagan signed as governor of California. It was called the Therapeutic Abortion Act and “he [Reagan] signed it into law nevertheless, comforting himself that he had helped purge it of eugenics and that no abortions of any kind would be permitted without strict medical or legal review. Only as time went by and abortion became an extension of welfare, would he wish he had paid more heed to the bill’s manipulative language…Before the end of his first term as Governor, some eighty-two thousand souls would be debited to that signature, as against the seventy-seven he took credit for as a lifeguard” (p. 352). I also thought it significant that out of all the presidential biographies I’ve read, this was the first to mention the MLK riots in Washington DC. How did those other biographies miss something like this!?!

As you may imagine, Morris had plenty to say about Reagan himself. In fact, I loved the detailed daily routine that Morris included as a real means of getting to know this guy. And not only that but it was awesome to get a picture of what a president of the United States is faced with on a daily basis. Also I knew that Reagan did not care for Ford at all but it was neat to finally figure out why. “Pressed again, he [Reagan] explained, ‘The people never voted for him; he was appointed to that position for two years’” (p. 391).

This next quote is actually about Jimmy Carter and his administration and not Reagan but it’s so well-said that I had to include it. “Contraction, or the state of self-withdrawal Germans describe as innigkeit, was indeed the characteristic of the Carter years, at least what I perceived of them as I labored to complete my Roosevelt book. An obsession with allegedly dwindling national resources; a smallness of outlook, from the cancellation of supersonic transports to the issuance of bills for White House hospitality; public lights dimmed, cardigans unbuttoned, hemorrhoids proclaimed, human rights called for, the Panama Canal forfeited; fifty-two American hostages taken hostage in Iran; eight helicopters sent in to rescue them, in a demonstration of dragonfly wrath; and finally, a front-page image that burned itself, I should think, onto the retinas of every citizen who saw it: two bearded hostage-holders using the Stars and Stripes to carry garbage out of the US Embassy in Tehran. The flag’s heavy curve represented the nadir (nadir-es-semt, as they say in Arabic) of American prestige in the post-Eisenhower era” (p. 407).

I’ll leave you with a cute little story about Reagan. In 1985, Reagan flew to Switzerland for a meeting with Gorbachev and while there, he and Nancy stayed in a private residence (Masion de Saussure, Prince Karim Aga Khan’s lakeside villa) where it was up to the President to feed the young son’s fish. On the last day of the conference, tragedy struck. “He [Reagan] shamefacedly confirmed the death of one of young Hussain Aga Khan’s goldfish, despite his conscientious feeding. An urgent search of Geneva pent shops had yielded two identical replacements, who were now happily swimming at Saussure. Any normal head of state would have decamped without further notice, but Dutch had felt impelled to leave behind a not explaining the mysteries of death and transfiguration:
‘Dear Friends
I put the white half dome in the tank according to the directions and fed them with 2 good pinches morning and night from the big food container.—Now and then I added some of the colored flakes…
On Tuesday I found one of your fish dead in the bottom of the tank. I don’t know what could have happened, but I added 2 new ones (same kind0. I hope this was alright.
Thanks for letting us live in your lovely home.
RONALD REAGAN’” (p. 575).

#40 Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

Now here’s a president that I can really remember! Not anything important, mind, but his craggy countenance was certainly a familiar part of my childhood. In recent years, though, I’ve noticed that Ronald Reagan is, to this day, still a controversial figure. Either people loved him passionately or they detested him but there are not many who are truly indifferent. That makes him an interesting case and one I’m really looking forward to cracking.

As a youngster, I have one good memory of our 40th president. Growing up I was aware of who he was and if shown a picture I could have proudly displayed my knowledge. But there came a moment when I—yes, I—was nonplussed by Ronald Reagan. My mother was (and is) a great adherent of old movies (a quality that I take from her, no doubt) and since we didn’t have cable at home, she would watch gads of them during our annual beach trip to Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I have a very clear memory of watching movies with my mom one particular rainy day when the movie Bedtime for Bonzo began. Suddenly I sat up straight. “Mom, who is that man?” And I’ll never forget her calm voice saying the words Ronald Reagan, our president. Worlds were shifting together, colliding. “But…but…,” I choked, “he’s so…handsome!” The point is this, people: there was a time, decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was the not merely the grandfatherly gent in the White House. There was a time when he was a pretty hot Hollywood actor and it totally Blew My Mind.

Now that I’m a bit older I have to admit that it’s still hard to wrap my mind around that concept but after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, and Jesse Ventura all were voted into public office, the idea that Ronald Reagan, B-movie extraordinaire, became the head of our country is not as fantastical as it once seemed. Ah well. God Bless the USA. On the other hand, I was fairly eaten up with curiosity. How on earth did an actor seriously become President of the United States? As I should know, we’ve had an odd myriad of men assume the presidency from its inception but Ronald Reagan is the first of his kind.

It was with a spring in my step that I headed to the library. The details of his rather remarkable presidency are distinctly hazy so it was important that I get a good bio! I really thought that I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a good comprehensive work on the life of Ronald Reagan but when I was faced with the selection before me, I knew that I had been mistaken. Most of the books on Reagan’s life were entitled “Ronald Reagan and the Cold War” or “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.” Where, oh where, was a simple tome focusing on this guy alone!?! Well I found one and it was better and more entertaining than anything else I could have selected. There before me was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris (New York: Random House, 1999). My squeal of delight, however, was less for the actual book and more for the author who had written a truly awesome trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt (I own Theodore Rex—book #2—but for obvious reasons did not include them in the PRP)! Edmund Morris is a masterful biographer and I looked forward with nerdy delight to getting my hands (and mind) on Ronald Reagan’s whole story. Allons-y, y’all!

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911 in Tampico, IL to an alcoholic salesman of a father and a religious, actress-y mother. Almost immediately upon birth, his father nicknamed him “Dutch.” “He weighed ten pounds. Perhaps it was this amplitude of flesh, and the durchkomponierte quality of his crying, that made Jack Reagan compare him to a ‘Dutchman.’ For the next twenty-six years, the boy would be known as ‘Dutch’—and ‘Dutch’ he has remained to all who knew him in his midwestern days” (p. 14). Due to the intransient nature of his father’s work, the Reagans (Ronald also had a younger brother, Neil) would move quite a bit in the coming years. In 1915, they moved to the south side of Chicago and after that it was Galesburg, Monmouth, Tampico (again), and Dixon.

Amidst all the chaos of moving, little Ronnie continued to thrive. “He turned out to be an extraordinarily bright pupil, with perfect marks in spelling and arithmetic, scoring a 97 percent average in his final report of March 1, 1918” (p. 28). By the time, he arrived in Dixon, Reagan was a force in the schoolroom and outside it. In high school, he dated a pretty girl named Margaret Cleaver and he worked as a caddy, a surveyor, a contractor and finally, a lifeguard during the summers. His one true love, however, was football. Unfortunately, he wasn’t Gerald-Ford good at football; in fact, Reagan was routinely picked for Team B but he loved it unrequitedly nonetheless.

In 1928, Reagan was admitted to Eureka College in Eureka, IL. “For the rest of his life he [Reagan] would insist there was no lovelier college in the United States, and even after he let the silks of Notre Dame and Oxford fall on his shoulders, he made plain that the only degree he ever cared for was his B.A., Eureka 1932” (p. 66). While at Eureka, Reagan was something of a BMOC, if you know what I mean. He majored in sociology with a minor in economics and he participated in the school paper, the dramatic society, Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and he was president of the senior class. He also was blessed with a phenomenal photographic memory.

After graduating, Reagan tried getting a job in radio and was hired by WOC Davenport as a sportscaster. He moved to Iowa and by 1933 he working for WHO Des Moines where his voice went national. “Here, over the next three years, he mastered the essentials of radio announcing, with the exception of sight-reading, a process that bother him well into middle age. The natural equipment of a sportscaster he already had: lucidity, enthusiasm, an eye for visual detail, and a mouth that moved as fast as his mind” (p. 117). He got a big break in the summers of 1936 and 1937 when he was sent to Santa Catalina, CA to cover spring training. It was here, in Southern Cal, that he began to dream about being in movies. In fact during his second trip, he even made an audition video and worked with an agent which led to Warner Brothers hiring him on April 2, 1937.

Reagan packed up his meager belongings, put them in his little car, and drove to his new home, Los Angeles. It took him several days to familiarize himself with the Warner Bros way of life. “The giant studio lay like a compressed and teeming city on the far side of the Los Angeles River, geographically separated from Hollywood. In practical fact, it was a city, walled and gated. It had its own police department and fire company and power plant and hospital and school, not to mention four cinemas, thirty miles of streets, a working railroad, and a rather dusty-looking quay, whence a seventeenth-century galleon seemed about to sail for San Bernardino” (p. 134). After sitting around for a bit, Reagan got his first acting job on the movie, Love is On the Air, where he met a young newly-remarried Jane Wyman. He joined the Screen Actors Guild.

On January 26, 1940, Reagan married the newly-divorced Jane Wyman and immediately began the prime of his acting career with his role in Knute Rockne: All American. Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, World War II began and movies, such as they were, needed to change with the changing times. Since he was legally blind, Reagan was never to see active duty but he was made a colonel, then a captain, with a special unit at Warner Bros that made war movies. By 1943, Reagan was a top box office star.

By 1945-46, the years of the Hollywood strikes, things were looking grimmer for our boy. He contracted acute viral pneumonia and almost died while, at the same time, his premature daughter did not live. Reagan was looking noticeably older after all this and his stock as a leading man declined. In the ultimate irony, Jane, also looking older, saw her stock as an actress rise when she won a Best Actress Oscar for Johnny Belinda (1948). It was sad but things had gone rather cold for Ronald and Jane and in 1948, Jane divorced him.

Meanwhile, Reagan had become president of SAG in 1947 and was even made to testify at the House UnAmerican Committee’s hearings in October of that year. (This was before the hearings went very mean.) He was also made Chairman of the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC) and even continued to star in some limp flicks, such as A Hasty Heart with Patricia Neale. It was also around this time that Reagan began to notice a young actress named Nancy Davis.

Reagan left SAG in 1951 and then married Nancy on March 4, 1952. They retired to their newly-purchased ranch, Yearling Row, where they bred and raced horses. However, they needed money. Reagan was used to earning a steady income from the movies but that had all but dried up (In 1957, he and Nancy would star in their only picture together Hellcats of the Navy) so he hired himself out to General Electric as a corporate spokesman. For years, Reagan travelled around the country, meeting GE employees and giving speeches on the glories of electricity and technology. Also he appeared regularly on “GE Theater,” a weekly television show.

All this speechifying gave Reagan a hankering for political life. In fact, the GE speeches at this time held a marked resemblance to a great many political speeches; so much so that Reagan was eventually let go by the CEO of GE. Also Reagan went through a personal political shift at this point. He had grown up Democrat and had greatly admired FDR and the New Deal (not to mention, most people working in movies were Democrat as well.) However, as he grew older, he became increasingly unhappy with the Democratic ideal of Big Government so beginning in 1960 and continuing on, he threw his support behind the Republican candidates of the time. He campaigned for Richard Nixon for Governor in 1960 and then for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. It was due to the Goldwater campaign that a large segment of the population began to see Ronald Reagan as something more than just your average movie star—he had a real knack for propounding political prose in a familiar and easily-understood manner. “The brilliance of his performance [an emergency television address], beamed nationwide on October 27, transformed him overnight into a serious contender for the governorship of California” (p. 329). It didn’t hurt either that a small group of Republican millionaires asked to fund any future political effort on behalf of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s backers convinced him to write a political autobiography during his own 1966 campaign for the governorship of California. The product was entitled Where’s the Rest of Me? and despite its odd title, it helped propel Reagan to victory on November 8. Next move: Sacramento. Reagan had hitherto held very few executive positions so it makes perfect sense that “Dutch’s first remark to his senior staff, when the joined him to take up state business on January 5, has become legendary: ‘What do we do now?’” (p. 347).

During this term in office, he put down a particularly-vicious student strike at Berkeley and he signed a controversial abortion bill into law. He easily won reelection in 1970 where he spent most of his time battling welfare and working with Nixon. Actually Nixon liked Reagan so much that he sent him, as the special envoy to Taiwan in 1971, to try to explain to the Taiwanese (our allies) that the United States was going to change policy and become friends with the Chinese communists on the mainland instead. Reagan complied and even returned to the US in time to campaign heavily for Nixon in ’72. “Reagan emerged as a potent campaigner for Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the West and Southwest…Nixon appreciatively asked Reagan to undertake another roving embassy, this time to Europe in July, and afterward to serve as chairman pro tem of the Republican National Convention” (p. 379).

Reagan decided not to run for a third term as governor in order to run for president of the United States. In 1975, he announced his candidacy and began campaigning in the primaries against Gerald Ford. Ford won the Republican nomination and so Reagan “retired” to his new ranch, Rancho del Cielo in Malibu, CA (helped paid for by the ‘backers’).

Carter beat Ford in the next election and created a situation ideal for Republican candidates in 1980. Economic, political and international problems simply abounded during the Carter presidency and it allowed a growing conservative majority to finally nominate Ronald Reagan to confront Big Government. “From that moment on, as the hostage crisis worsened, there was an inevitability to Reagan’s forward motion. The liberal press, incredulous that a man so old, so Western, so quaintly sure of himself could sweep this far, cited poll after poll to show that President Carter would hold him back” (p. 408-9). Unfortunately, Carter was unable to solve the hostage crisis in time for the election and so Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide. Next move: Washington, DC.

On March 30, 1981, only months after assuming office, Reagan was caught in a spray of bullets in an attempted assassination. He had been leaving the Washington Hilton after giving a speech when John Hinckley (to impress Jody Foster) began firing while several men around Reagan were hit. One bullet lodged itself near Reagan’s heart as he was thrown into his limo. It says something for medical technology that Reagan was able to walk out of the hospital just eleven days later. (See James Garfield for more information on this topic).

Afterwards, and back in the presidential saddle, Reagan thought up the idea of the “Program for Economic Recovery” which included trickle-down economics. “And so he committed the American economy to eight years of self-compounding deficits, and a trillion-dollar shortfall, greater than the entire debt of the past two centuries” (p. 447). He engaged in the G7 summit between all the major democratic leaders of the world (aka Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Canada’s PM, etc), broke the air controllers strike, and sent ships to Libya. He signed National Security Directive 13 which “authorized a menu of nuclear-war plans for him to choose from in the event of strategic attack” (p. 453). There were also American soldiers, under the Multinational Force (MNF), dying in a war in Lebanon (241 died total). And there was the American invasion of Grenada, a small British-affiliated island in the Caribbean. Grenada was flirting with the Communists so several neighboring island nations begged the US to do something about it or communism might just overpower the whole area. “’Operation Urgent Fury’ was an embarrassingly clumsy success. The world’s ranking superpower, hampered by old tourists maps and incompatible radio frequencies, needed two full days to overcome the resistance of an island not much bigger than Washington, DC” (p. 504).

Reagan won the 1984 presidential election versus Walter Mondale with ease.

In 1985, Reagan, on the advice of the West German prime minister, scheduled a visit to Germany to visit an old Nazi cemetery at Bitburg. Of course, this situation enraged the Jewish community because Reagan was not also scheduled to visit a concentration camp. In the end, he went to Bergen-Belsen to quell the furor (no pun intended. Ha!) Upon his return, he found that he was suffering from colon cancer and so he went under the knife for prostrate surgery.

Also internationally, it was leaked that the hitherto-indomitable USSR was in a fix. Occupying Afghanistan was draining their treasury while decades-long mismanaged farming practices were leading to a severe economic crisis really, really soon. Gorbachev, the young new leader of the Soviet Union, was certainly feeling the pressure and so announced not only perestroika, or reconstruction of the whole system, but also a meeting with Reagan to be held in Iceland. The subsequent meeting did not finalize a whole bunch of stuff but many people site it as a key event in the end of the Evil Empire.

The next year was a serious one in terms of deadly incidents. There was the explosion of Challenger and the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in the USSR. The Libyans bombed an American disco in Berlin and, of course, we followed that up with a retaliatory strike. Reagan visited Tokyo. 1986 was also the year that saw the Iran-Contra scandal blow up.

Ooo, this was one doozy of a scandal too (and I think that I have the authority to make that remark). Reagan and, let’s be honest, all his senior advisors, were obsessed with the idea that Central America could possibly become Communist Any Minute Now. In order for Nicaragua to remain safely pro-West then, the Reagan administration, beginning in 1981, secretly funded the contras to subvert the ruling pro-Communist Sandanista government. “Initially set at twenty-million dollars, to allow Argentina to train a Honduras-based guerrilla band, this commitment had now, in 1983, escalated to twenty-six million dollars in support of an army of nearly eight thousand insurgents, including not a few nostalgic Somocistas” (p. 482). Confused yet? Just wait—you will be. Ok, add to that the fact that Americans in the Middle East kept getting kidnapped and you’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So, also secretly, Reagan, in desperation, decided to trade missiles for the release of the hostages. It was only later that he found out that some of the money the US received from the missiles had magically found its way into funding the contras in Central American. “If we are to believe Donald Regan, a man of generally accepted honesty, the blood drained from the President’s face when Meese told him at 4:30pm that some of the money paid by Iran for TOW missiles had been siphoned off from Israel by Colonel North and funneled, through a Swiss bank account, to the contras” (p. 615). Classic! Let me break it down for you: missiles for hostages in Middle East + money received from Iran - missile money to support dubious anti-Communistic coup in Central America=1 effed up situation. Ha! Now you know.

In 1987, Reagan declared that AIDS was Public Health Enemy #1. Nancy Reagan was diagnosed with breast cancer, Gorbachev visited Washington DC and signed the INF Treaty and the stock market crashed. The very next year Reagan, in a reciprocal visit, went to Moscow and upon returning to the United States, handed the reins of government over to his former Vice President and the newest President of the United States, George Bush.

The Reagans retired to their ranch in Malibu and soon dedicated Reagan’s presidential library. Unfortunately, it was clear the Ronald was not well. In fact, in 1994, he was diagnosed with “degenerative cognitive dementia,” otherwise known as Alzeimer’s. It soon became so bad that he had to distance himself from public life and lived the next ten years in self-induced obscurity. He died of pneumonia in 2004.