......at least, it was Nancy that ran the whole show. Have we forgotten he had alzheimer's disease? Nancy helped him with all his speeches. They had a hearing device on his ears & she often even finished his sentences. She took care of every little detail & made all the decisions for him. Nancy successfully hid all this from the public until almost the end of his presidency. Yet she got no credit, go figure!
I'm not saying he was or wasn't great....that is for others to decide. I'm only pointing out that Nancy got no credit for her part in "keeping it all together" in the last 2 or 3 yrs & that the GOP kept his condition hidden until the end of his term
I asked this question yesterday & people with short memories asked for my source. Here it is:
“Alzheimer's disease overtakes a person very gradually, and for a while can be indistinguishable from such mild memory loss. But eventually the forgetting reaches the stage where it is quite distinct from an absentminded loss of one's glasses or keys. Fleeting moments of almost total confusion seize a person who is otherwise entirely healthy and lucid.
By 1992, the signs of Reagan's illness were impossible to ignore. At the conclusion of a medical exam in September, as the New York Times would later report, Reagan looked up at his doctor of many years with an utterly blank face and said, "What am I supposed to do next?" This time, the doctor knew that something was very wrong.
Sixteen months later, in February 1994, Reagan flew back to Washington, D.C., from his retirement home in Bel Air, California, for what would turn out to be his final visit. The occasion was a dinner celebrating his own eighty-third birthday, attended by Margaret Thatcher and twenty-five hundred other friends and supporters.
Before the gala began, the former President had trouble recognizing a former Secret Service agent whom he had know well in the White House. This didn't come as a total shock to his wife, Nancy, and other close friends, but it did cause them to worry that Reagan might have problems with his speech that night.
The show went on as planned. After an introduction by Thatcher, Reagan strolled to the podium. He began to speak, then stumbled, and paused. His doctor, John Hutton, feared that Reagan was about to humiliate himself. "I was holding my breath, wondering how he would get started," Hutton later recalled, "Then suddenly something switched on, his voice resounded, he paused at the right places, and he was his old self.
Back at his hotel after the dinner, Reagan again slipped into his unsettling new self, turning to Nancy and saying, "Well, I've got to wait a minute. I'm not quite sure where I am." Though the diagnosis and public announcement were both months away, Reagan was already well along the sad path already trod by his mother [and] his brother.”
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/147/story_14713_1.html
2007-03-26
02:52:43
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Anonymous