Former aides say Reagan lost some sharpness during his last two years in office. Briefers said that on occasion he forgot key names and policy details. But his talented staff made up for his lapses and he was able to rise to the occasion when the situation warranted.

This pattern continued after he left office. Before his speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992, a senior adviser in his administration found Reagan "befuddled" and weary backstage. The former president, never good at remembering names, did not recognize his former aide, who quickly reintroduced himself. Yet minutes later, Reagan managed to deliver a stirring speech to the delegates. "Afterward," the former aide recalls, "he was drained." In 1995, the Reagans announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. His mental lapses grew more serious. During one visit, a member of his White House team mentioned that he loved Reagan's performance in a particular film and Reagan said, "I wasn't in that movie." The guest said, "Yes you were, Mr. President, and you were terrific." Reagan got up, went to a bookshelf and looked up the title in an encyclopedia on the cinema. "You're right," Reagan said, shaking his head sadly. "I was in that movie." As his mind deteriorated, he grew anxious whenever his wife left the room, and he "followed her around like a puppy," a family intimate said.

When he was up to it, he received old friends at his office in Los Angeles. Sometimes he played golf to get some exercise. And he would occasionally visit a park in Los Angeles with a few bodyguards and watch the children play—seemingly just another elderly gentleman whose mental faculties were fading inexorably. During the increasingly long periods during which he could not remember having served as president. As time passed, Nancy confided to friends that his illness robbed him of the trait that had endeared him to so many, his sunny personality.

From the day he walked into the Oval Office, Reagan considered himself an ordinary fellow with some extraordinary skills. As Garry Wills wrote in 1987: "What must strike the candid observer is the president's almost preternatural security, the lack of inner division that he maintains despite so much contained diversity. . . . Reagan does not argue for American values; he embodies them." Now that he is gone and the nation is searching for a set of enduring truths that will guide its progress into the new century, perhaps it is most appropriate to remember Reagan for the simple personal precepts that he represented: a lifelong belief in the goodness of the American people and their "shining city on a hill," and the notion that if an individual sticks to his guns, he can change the world.

Kenneth T. Walsh, White House correspondent for U.S. News, covered the Reagan presidency and is the author of Ronald Reagan: Biography, published by Park Lane Press, a division of Random House, in 1997.

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