Remember Ron Reagan’s Book that I wrote about last night? Well, looks like Brother Michael is not happy about it.
Michael ripped the excerpt from Ron’s book, “My Father at 100,” that appears in Sunday’s Parade magazine. Ron Jr. cites a 1989 post-presidential visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota after a riding accident. “Surgeons opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain emerged from the operating room with the news that they had detected probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Further tests conducted the following year confirmed those suspicions.”
Ron dates his suspicions about the disease to the 1984 re-election campaign. “I felt the first shivers on concern that something beyond mellowing was affecting my father” during the first debate against Democratic nominee Walter Mondale. “My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses. He looked tired and bewildered.” Ron Jr. also notes that by 1986 his father couldn’t remember the names of familiar canyons when flying over California, adding that doctors now know the disease can go unrecognized for some time. “The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more or less answers itself,” he writes.
“Nobody was happy with the debate,” Michael told me by phone from Miami. But Ron’s suggestion of early onset of the disease “is the last thing I would have expected from him, to take this kind of shot at his Dad with no evidence except he watched a debate between Dad and Mondale.”
The semi-siblings who haven’t spoken in years, are political and religious opposites. Michael Reagan, 65, is a conservative former radio talk show host who was adopted by Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman. He sired the Gipper’s only two grandchildren with longtime wife, Colleen, and is a regular churchgoer.
Ron, 52, the natural son of Reagan and his second wife, actress and former first lady Nancy Davis Reagan, is a liberal former talk show host on the defunct left-ish Air America network. He is also a self-professed atheist. — Michael Reagan Rips Half-Brother Ron Over Book and Alzheimer’s Claim
You know something to me stands out here and that being this book is less about Ron Reagan Jr. and has dad’s health; and more about Ron Reagan having a grudge against his Dad and his brother. There is obvious bitterness there and Ron Jr. is still angry with his father for leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican. Ron Reagan Jr. is obviously a committed liberal and it burns him to his core that his father became a Republican. So, this is just another potshot at his Dad. I can understand Michael’s feelings, and I can only imagine what Nancy is feeling about right now.
I think that it this point the best thing for everyone in the Conservative world can do, if you are a Christian; pray for the Reagan family —- Pray that peace would come to the siblings. That is what, I believe President Reagan would want us to do.
Like most liberals, Ron Reagan is a bitter, classless ass with no respect for or loyalty to his father’s memory. It was apparent as far back as the 80’s that Ron was a loser and it’s obvious now that nothing ever changed.