Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Former President Reagan Dies at 93

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former U.S.

President Ronald Reagan, who forged a conservative revolution that

transformed American politics, died on Saturday after a decade-long

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battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 93.

His wife, Nancy, and family members

had gathered at his bedside at his house in the Bel Air district of

Los Angeles.

The White House said President Bush

had been informed of Reagan’s death.

A White House spokeswoman said Fred

Ryan, Reagan’s chief of staff in California, had telephoned White

House chief of staff Andrew Card to inform him. “Andy told the

president that President Reagan had died,” spokeswoman Claire

Buchan said in Paris, where Bush is on a European tour.

She said the White House planned to

issue a statement shortly about the death.

All U.S. TV networks broke into

programming to announce Reagan’s death just after 4:45 p.m. EST on

Saturday

Reagan’s body will be flown to

Washington to lie in state before a funeral service at the National

Cathedral at a date to be announced later. His body will then be

returned to California for burial.

Reagan suffered from the

brain-wasting Alzheimer’s disease since 1994 and his condition is

believed to have worsened in the past week.

Reagan, a film star turned

politician, was U.S. president from 1981 to 1989. He was voted into

office in a conservative revival that changed America’s political

and economic landscape for years.

He became the first right-wing

president in 50 years; the first in 30 years to serve two terms;

and the first to spend a trillion dollars on peacetime defense and

witness a doubling of the national debt.

He was thrust into his gravest

crisis with the disclosure in November 1986 that the United States

had sold arms to Iran in 1985-86 and diverted proceeds to

U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.

Reagan declared himself guilty of

nothing but poor judgment, and Congressional hearings in 1987

backed him on one central point: witnesses said he was never told

about the Contra funds.

He left office two weeks shy of his

78th birthday, by far the oldest president the United States had

ever had and more popular than any predecessor in history.

It was typical of the amazing

physical resilience he had shown in office, surviving a 1981

assassination attempt that put a bullet near his heart, a 1985

colon cancer operation and 1987 prostate and skin-cancer surgery.

When diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in

1994, Reagan disclosed it in a “My fellow Americans” letter.

“When the Lord calls me home … I

will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and

eternal optimism for its future,” he wrote on Nov. 5, 1994. “I know

that for America there will always be a bright dawn

ahead.”

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