Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Ron Reagan: Alzheimer's seen during presidency

Reagan should have retired for health reasons at the end of his first term, if not before that. We have a system in place that will keep up a facade even when a president is incapacitated, dismissing anyone protesting as partisan.

Throughout his years in Washington, Mr. Reagan had been portrayed by many pundits and political opponents as absent-minded, inattentive, incurious, even lazy. And his Presidency was marked by a succession of very public mental stumbles -- most notably his dismal performance in the first debate of the 1984 campaign, and his confused and forgetful accounting of his role in the Iran-contra affair.

But even with the hindsight of Mr. Reagan's diagnosis, his four main White House doctors say they never detected any evidence that his forgetfulness was more than just that. His mental competence in office, they said in a series of recent interviews, was never in doubt. Indeed, they pointed out, tests of his mental status did not begin to show evidence of the disease until the summer of 1993, more than four years after he left the White House.