(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog Favourite Living Canadian)
Top Commenter Judy Clay passed along a tip on a column that ran on CNN this week. For a while now, there’s been some informed speculation as to whether the president*'s mentis is fully compos or not. The fact that his father died of complications from Alzheimer’s has lent some weight to the speculation, especially with the publication of Michael Wolff’s book. This is a topic of some interest to me for a number of reasons, most of them personal. In response to these concerns, the president* Went There.
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For decades now, Reagan loyalists have resisted the notion that the former president was symptomatic while he was president. (I posited that he was in my book, and heard later that the Reagan people were not happy about it.) So, when the current president* broached the subject, Craig Shirley, a career Reagan hagiographer, and John Heubusch, the president of the Ronald Reagan Foundation, leaped into print at CNN.com to argue that Reagan had not shown any symptoms until the official announcement of his diagnosis in 1994. Their evidence is, well, a bit selective.
They begin by asserting that Reagan had won election twice despite constant references to his advanced age. In terms of evidence, this is almost the same as the current president*’s assertions that his victory in the Electoral College is proof of the popularity of his policies. They write:
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Actually, ever since Ronald Reagan's first substantial run for president in 1976 at the age of 65, those opposed to Reagan labeled him as "old" and proclaimed his age a huge disadvantage compared to his opponents. Of course, they'd say the same thing four years later when he won the White House and four years beyond that when he won a second term -- both by landslides, in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The vote margins were massive, among the biggest in American history, and no one ever claimed that he was an illegitimate president.
All of which is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. They then spend a couple of paragraphs ridiculing Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan, in which Reagan’s slide is exacerbated by the attempt on his life in 1981. Beyond this, however, they cite the opinions of people like Ed Meese, and vague references to the opinions of “others who worked closely with the president.” They also assert that there are no medical records that mention Reagan’s having been symptomatic in the White House. In 2011, Ron Reagan, Jr. wrote a memoir in which he speculated that the process of the disease may have begun while his father was president. At the time, this was widely taken as a son’s assertion that his father had been symptomatic.
Getty
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The younger Reagan pushed back against that interpretation and, as Shirley and Heubusch write, Dr. Lawrence Altman wrote about the book in The New York Times and concluded:
"In my extensive interviews with his White House doctors, key aides and others, I found no evidence that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia as president," he wrote. "No other family member -- and not Edmund Morris, the biographer who spent seven years with Mr. Reagan in the White House -- publicly hinted that he showed evidence of Alzheimer's as president."
Again, this is interesting, but hardly dispositive. For example, Altman hand-waves Reagan’s vacant performance in his first debate against Walter Mondale in Louisville, in which Reagan clearly didn’t know where he was, by saying that the president did better in the second one. But anyone who’s lived with someone in the early stages of the disease knows how typical that in-and-out phenomenon is. (For that matter, as far as the younger Reagan’s attempt to divide the onset of the process of the disease with the onset of symptoms themselves, this is scientific nonsense. Alzheimer’s patients know when the beginning of the slippage is.) A respected Alzheimer’s researcher in Boston cited the Louisville debate unprompted when I asked him about Reagan. “I saw that look in my clinic every day,” he said.
Trump's Insane WSJ Interview Got Lost in the Mix
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Moreover, almost every memoir of every figure of that period, from Lawrence Walsh to Tip O’Neill to Oliver North to Lesley Stahl, mentions at least one anecdote in which Reagan was absent while present. John McCain told me personally about one of his encounters with Reagan in which McCain was puzzled by the president’s lack of affect. Alzheimer’s doesn’t happen all at once. For example, I sent my parents to Ireland for their 25th anniversary. Much later, I discovered that my father was consistently confused on the trip. He kept getting in the wrong lines on the tour. It was 11 years later when he went out to buy flowers and disappeared for three days. If the process has begun in the brain, so has the disease.
I don’t know why the Reagan loyalists insist that it is impossible that the president was symptomatic while president, much less why they make the implausible case that the disease wasn’t present until five years after he left office. It’s always been strange.
The late Mike McAlary was one of my best friends in the business. He was starting out as a sportswriter at The Boston Herald when I was at The Boston Phoenix, and there were many fine times, including hitting tennis balls down the Green Line tracks in Allston at midnight in the middle of a snowstorm. Mike went on to fame and fortune as a city-side columnist in New York, winning a Pulitzer for his coverage of the police assault on Abner Louima. This week, however, science came around and brought back to light one of Mike’s less auspicious moments.
In 1994, a woman told police she had been raped in Prospect Park. Citing sources in the NYPD, Mike wrote a series of columns intimating that the woman had fabricated her story. Martin Garbus, one of the most prominent First Amendment lawyers in the country, took up the woman’s cause. The episode figured prominently in the play, Lucky Guy, written about Mike by the late Nora Ephron. And, this week, the case finally was closed. From the NYT:
No one was ever accused of being the rapist, however, until Tuesday, when the police said that technology unavailable in 1994 had allowed them to match the suspect’s DNA with a serial rapist serving life in prison in Sing Sing. Even though the suspect, James Edward Webb, 67, cannot be charged because of an old statute of limitations, the remarkable announcement brought a small, final measure of closure to a case that had roiled the city and spurred a debate about journalistic integrity.
Mike was as good a reporter as I ever met. This was a bad episode in his career. It also should be a cautionary tale about how you can get misled by sources, something that the NYT political staff, and a lot of the elite political press, should keep in mind.
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This just in!
The Wall Street Journal adds the one thing that’s been missing in the sordid saga of Camp Runamuck: porn stars!
A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
Make it stop. Please, god.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Old Molly Hair” (Fiddlin’ Powers Family): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Ninety years ago Thursday, Thomas Hardy died. Here’s his funeral. The crowd is obviously not madding. History is so cool.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, CNN? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
"Skeletons of dinosaurs from Australia are very rare," Matthew Herne, the lead paleontologist on the study, wrote in an email. This discovery shows for the first time that there were at least two closely related dinosaur species living in southeastern Australia. So what did D. pickeringi look like when it was alive? This dinosaur was roughly the size of a turkey, Herne said, although its tail would have made it a lot longer, at around 7½ feet. It probably munched on things like leaves, pine nuts, mosses and possibly fruits. It was also a runner, evident from its long foot bones… The name Diluvicursor pickeringi translates to "Pickering's flood-running dinosaur" and honors David Pickering, a highly respected Australian paleontologist who died in 2016.
The flood-running dinosaur. Translate something from the Latin and it sounds like something out of a translation of Homer. Dinosaurs lived then, and ran from floods, to make us happy now.
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I’ll be back on Monday with god-alone-knows what news will break over the weekend. (I’m tempting fate in a giant way just saying that.) Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, because it’s goddamn crazy down there on the ground.
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