NPR mentioned Reagan didn't campaign for Poppy because of ''early'' signs of Alzheimers.

[Octafish]

Last edited Wed Jun 8, 2016, 11:02 AM - Edit history (1)

Not quite right, Mara.

Somewhere near the GOP Convention, Detroit, 1980



Mara Liasson's story about presidents campaigning for their vice presidents' presidential runs ran today:

NPR June 7, 2016

EXCERPT...

LIASSON: This is actually the first time in a long time that a sitting president will be going all-out to help elect his successor. Ronald Reagan endorsed George H. W. Bush, but he didn't campaign the way Obama plans to. Partly because Bush wanted to establish himself as his own man after eight years as number two. And also perhaps because Ronald Reagan was already suffering the early effects of Alzheimer's disease...

CONTINUED...

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137406/ready-to-hit-the-stump-obama-expected-to-endorse-clinton-this-week

The thing is: The people who knew Reagan -- Ed Meese, Michael Deaver, Oliver North -- knew he was out of it from the earliest days of his administration.

Thanks to the corrupt press, they kept it from the American people. I think that was on purpose, as it's easier to control a puppet if he doesn't know he is one.

Through a Glass Darkly

Alexander Cockburn
Lies Of Our Times (p. 12-13)
November 1991

"What was surprising to me was Reagan’s condition. He was exhausted to the point of incoherence throughout much ofthe interview and could not remember the substance of any subject that had been discussed apart from Mitterrand’s expression of anticommunism. I had not seen Reagan at such close rangesince the assassination attempt nearly four months earlier, and was shocked at his condition.... Reagan simply was unable to recall the contents of the talks in which he had just participated.... The interview concluded at a signal from Deaver,who did not seem to find the president’s condition unusual.”

Thus ran Lou Cannon’s recollections of an interview with the Commander-in-Chief in 1981, as set forth in his book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster,1991), published earlier this year. But how did Cannon describe Reagan’s condition to the readers of the Washington Post when he wrote up his interview? In the July 23, 1981, Washington Post,Cannon’s story appeared under the headline “Reagan Describes Summit Meeting as ‘Worth Its Weight in Gold.’ ” Cannon’s report gives the impression of a lucid chief executive returning home after a fruitful colloquy with other western leaders at the economic summit held in Ottawa in mid-July. Cannon did mention in the tenth paragraph that “Reagan appeared tired to the point of near-exhaustion,” but this observation was quickly qualified by the opinion of “aides” that the president had been doing a lot of prep for the conference and was also worried about the Middle East.

Cannon shared his brief session with Reagan aboard Air Force One with Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, who similarly gave his readers the impression of a president in touch with things rather than the incoherent old man they had actually encountered. As did Cannon, Smith wove the few quotable remarks from Reagan into a tapestry of attributed presidential dicta passed on — and no doubt confected— by Meese, Deaver,and Speakes. It is clear from Cannon’s account of the conference itself that Reagan was fogged up throughout the actual conference, occasionally interjecting trivial observations or homely jokes into the proceedings and then relapsing into bemused silence. Cannon’s memoir is one more indication of the cover-up that took place in the wake of Hinckley’s assassination bid on March 30, 1981. At the time of the shooting, the press was full of phrases like “bouncing back,” “iron constitution,” and other terms indicating that Reagan had emerged from the ordeal in good shape. In fact Reagan very nearly died on the operating table and was a dotard afterwards. He never fully recovered.

Conclusion: Unless a president is actually dead, the WhiteHouse press corps can be relied upon to present him as both sentient and sapient, no matter how decrepit his physical and mental condition.

SOURCE in PDF form:

http://liesofourtimes.org/public_html/1991/Nov1991%20V2%20N10/Nov1991%20V2%20N10.pdf

Wish more people knew the guy's mental state. Maybe he would never have been president and Bush vice president.

ETA Link to NPR

[Zen Democrat]

1. I have a feeling the Alzheimer's set in after he was shot.

My dad had it and the first signs of it came after he was under general anesthesia. I've heard this is not uncommon.

FYI: He probably didn't campaign for Bush because he couldn't stand him. I remember when Barbara Bush told a reporter before they entered the White House in 1989 that the Reagans had never invited them to the residence, and she had never seen it before they moved it.

[Octafish]

2. I think you are correct. Poppy Bush leveraged his time as President Pro Tem.

"Leverage" being the operative word:

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

SNIP...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

[font color="green"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

Thus, the rich got richer and it's been war, bankster bailouts and attendant austerity for the rest of us ever since.

Nancy may have had a problem with Barbara over the reports Neil Bush was scheduled to have dinner with John Hinckley's brother, Scott, the day Reagan was shot.

John Chancellor of NBC reported it. DailyKos has more details...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/06/09/32836/-Bush-Knew-Hinckley#

DU talked about it decades later...

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Octafish/12



Most importantly: I am truly sorry for your father's suffering. Alzheimer's has affected my immediate family, also.

[Warpy]

3. Yeah, he was never the same after that

I couldn't stand to see him on TV so I always flipped the channel but my mother spotted it in 1982.

He was seriously blowing his lines by the time Poppy was campaigning. Also, Nancy was the one who couldn't stand Poppy. She knew the Bushes and Hinckleys were friends and always suspected Poppy of putting the kid up to it. By that time, she controlled what Reagan was doing and where he was going and he needed her to.

[Thor_MN]

4. Alzheimers is thought to be a steady progression, but people can cope and deal up to a point.

The analogy I have heard is walking towards a cliff, you are OK until you get to the edge. One can work around the damage that is occurring, until it gets to be too much.

My uncle started listening to right wing talk radio and started adopting conservative viewpoints shortly before he was diagnosed. He served two tours in Viet Nam as a helicopter mechanic, but was OK with W ducking his service.

[Octafish]

5. More research on AD is needed, including its relationship with military duty.

What I learned this morning:

Curr Alzheimer Res. 2013 Nov;10(9) 07-30.

Military risk factors for cognitive decline, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Veitch DP1, Friedl KE, Weiner MW.

Abstract

Delayed neurological health consequences of environmental exposures during military service have been generally underappreciated. The rapidly expanding understanding of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis now makes it possible to quantitate some of the likely long-term health risks associated with military service. Military risk factors for AD include both factors elevated in military personnel such as tobacco use, traumatic brain injury (TBI), depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other nonspecific risk factors for AD including, vascular risk factors such as obesity and obesity-related diseases (e.g., metabolic syndrome), education and physical fitness. The degree of combat exposure, Vietnam era Agent Orange exposure and Gulf War Illness may also influence risk for AD. Using available data on the association of AD and specific exposures and risk factors, the authors have conservatively estimated 423,000 new cases of AD in veterans by 2020, including 140,000 excess cases associated with specific military exposures. The cost associated with these excess cases is approximately $5.8 billion to $7.8 billion. Mitigation of the potential impact of military exposures on the cognitive function of veterans and management of modifiable risk factors through specifically designed programs will be instrumental in minimizing the impact of AD in veterans in the future decades.
PMID: 23906002 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

SOURCE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23906002

Military duty may be the most stressful situation a person can experience. Combined with genetic and environmental factors, a person may not be able to escape its impact on the mind.

While I disagree with the rationale for that war, I owe your uncle who served in Vietnam thanks.

There are persons who looked at War in Vietnam as a business opportunity. Take George Herbert Walker Bush, who apparently toured that nation on behalf of Big Oil and the CIA (before he said he worked for CIA).

[bullwinkle428]

6. Any intellectually honest person that watched debate #1 in 1984 knew

he had a shit-ton of problems at that point. And I know of which I speak - I watched my own father suffer with Alzheimer's and eventually succumb to it, beginning in the late days of the Reagan administration.

[Gormy Cuss]

7. ^^^This^^^

He was obviously impaired in his second term. There was nothing "early" about his dementia by 1988.