Poignant Memories Of Reagan Shared Aides Recall His Quirks, How He Changed After Hinckley’s Bullet

At a dinner party, then-President Ronald Reagan once snubbed several Cabinet officers to chat with a butcher from Baltimore for 45 minutes. It was a typical story of the former president who was warmly recalled by former aides and colleagues Thursday, a day before his 87th birthday.

They reminisced at the National Press Club while Congress completed work on renaming the capital’s Washington National Airport in Reagan’s honor.

As the congressional deliberations were going on, Reagan’s friends and colleagues shared funny and sad memories of the president, who’s living out his final years in a struggle against Alzheimer’s disease.

Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris, recalled a somber moment toward the end of his presidency.

On a Friday night in October 1987, Morris said, Reagan wrote in his diary that Nancy Reagan’s brother and his wife “came up to dinner and things immediately livened up as soon as they arrived.” But the following day, Morris said, Reagan wrote in his diary: “Oh, I was mistaken. They didn’t come down until lunchtime today.”

“He was so divorced from reality at that time that he didn’t even realize these people had not shown up, which is funny but is also scary,” said Morris, adding he was not intimating that Reagan had Alzheimer’s at that time.

Morris said Reagan changed after the attempt on his life in March 1981 two months after he became president.

“He became much more devout and evangelical. … His thoughts became slower, his speech became slower, he deliberated more, he hesitated more when he spoke, he lost his quickness, and for the rest of the presidency it was a very, very slow and steady mental and physical decline,” said Morris.

At a preview of a PBS documentary on Reagan, his one-time deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver joked about Reagan’s short attention span.

“Sometimes, he would … become preoccupied and be thinking about other things, and you had to take a two-by-four and hit him over the head and say: ‘Listen to this. Be sure you pay close attention to what this man is saying.”’

On the Iran-Contra affair, Richard Perle, Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense whose father-in-law was the butcher at the dinner party, said Iran was not an area of the president’s expertise. Although he didn’t know how the issue was presented to Reagan, Perle said, it “must have seemed a largely insignificant transfer of weapons that would make no difference.”

Deaver said one memory he cherishes is flying with Reagan years ago on a plane someone had lent him.

“We’d just finished our chateau-briand, and … we were on the demitasse … just the two of us sitting in this $60 million airplane flying along at 35,000 feet,” said Deaver. “I said to him: ‘Can you believe this?’ He looked out the window and said: ‘The wonderful thing about America is that anybody can do this.”’