Ronald Reagan's son said that had his father known he was ill, he would have resigned. Son: Reagan suffered Alzheimer's while in office

President Ronald Reagan’s son says in a new book that he believes his father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease while serving in the White House — years before the diagnosis was made.

In “My Father at 100,” a memoir being released Tuesday, the late president’s youngest son, Ron, said he saw evidence that his father was losing his mental faculties during his first term, which began in 1981.


“Today, we are aware that the physiological and neurological changes associated with Alzheimer’s can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise,” the younger Reagan wrote. “The question … of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more or less answers itself.”

The 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth is on Feb. 6th. He died in 2004 at the age of 93.

Reagan said that had his father known he was ill, he would have resigned.

“I’ve seen no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office,” he wrote. “Had the diagnosis been made in, say 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have.”

The former president wasn’t formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until 1994, but Ron Reagan said there was clear evidence that his father was ailing well before then.

During a presidential debate in 1984, Ron Reagan said he “began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true” as his father faced off against Democrat Walter Mondale.

“My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered,” he wrote.

Reagan added that his father “might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be.”

In 1986, the then-president “had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names,” Reagan wrote.

Doctors saw the first signs of Alzheimer’s in July 1989 when Reagan underwent brain surgery following a fall from a horse.

The excerpts of “My Father at 100” were first published on the U.S. News & World Report’s Washington Whispers blog.