Senility, the Press, and a Tale of Two Presidents

One president incomprehensively spoke of “if we finally beat Medicare” and stared vacantly at his shoes on CNN. The other, roughly around the same age, discoursed on the solution to what ailed the flailing Soviet Union and why Saddam Hussein erred in invading Kuwait.

Strangely, some of the same journalists who slimed the latter as senile during his presidency cover up for the latter’s on-display dementia at last week’s debate as he seeks a second term in the White House.

In January 1991, Ronald Reagan appeared live for an hour with a liberal interviewer on a hostile network (though the conversation, like so many of Larry King’s, came across as warm and not adversarial). Compare Reagan’s discussion with one CNN host (watch here) two years after his presidency ended with Joe Biden’s appearance before two friendly CNN hosts at what he imagines as the mid-point of his presidency. (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: The Worst Week in Memory for Democrats Who Can Remember)

Reagan spoke not in phrases or sentences but in full paragraphs. He addressed Margaret Thatcher’s pending visit to the opening of his presidential library, his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, the B-2 bomber, and, in an insightful and honest answer, the frustrating effects age imposes on memory. After discussing the difficulty of attaching names to the 1,200 faces he encountered in the White House, the former president turned to his distant past in a field other than politics.

“I have been surprised when I have looked at a movie that I made quite some time ago,” he told King. “What really surprises me is, yes, I remember that movie and the whole story and everything except there will come a scene on there in which I am involved and I find that I have no memory whatsoever of doing that particular scene. And it bothers me.”

Rather nasty people pushed the idea, during and after his presidency, that Reagan suffered from some neurodegenerative disease while in the White House.

Lesley Stahl, for instance, later claimed that, while serving as White House correspondent for CBS in 1986, she “had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile.” She reflected that aides and family “covered up his condition.” The president’s namesake also pushed this idea in pushing a book. A study, pushed by The New York Times, of words used by the 40th president and his successor by Arizona State professors implied, but admitted it did not prove, possible onset of Alzheimer’s during Reagan’s presidency.

Contrast that obsession over the cognitive abilities of a robust man who left the Oval Office at 77 — and received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis nearly six years later — with the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil mentality of an albeit shrinking number of Democrats and their press auxiliary with a weakened man who seeks to leave office more than four years from now at 86.

A testy George Stephanopoulos (unsurprisingly chosen by Biden to interview him Friday) recoiled last summer when Nikki Haley suggested that Joe Biden’s decline made the prospect of him finishing a second term an impossibility. Rachel Maddow chalked up Biden’s freezes, catatonic stares, and “beat Medicare” non sequiturs to “the debating incumbent curse.” Just weeks ago Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes of The Wall Street Journal took friendly fire from other journalists for a report, derided by Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post as “shoddy” and a “faceplant,” that Biden showed signs of slipping.

Reagan, long after journalists pushed the idea of dementia afflicting him, clearly understood the slanted approach of the news media.

“There seemed to be a hostility,” he said in 1991 after Larry King suggested a warm relationship between the former president and the press. “I felt, and I think properly, that in every press conference there was an adversarial relationship.”

But even within journalism, a profession in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by 10-to-1, limits to one-sided credulity exist. Editorials by The New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Boston Globe calling for Biden to withdraw, and the suddenly pointed questions at Karine Jean-Pierre’s press conferences this past week, indicate many no longer go along with the 81-going-on-18 charade. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History)

Still, denial persists.

As Reagan observed about journalists, “I’m afraid that sometimes they have goals of their own. They aren’t as responsible as they should be.”

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