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
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.”
