Michael Smerconish: Ron Reagan Jr.'s loose lips

YOU HATE to see brothers fight - whether they're unknowns or the sons of a deceased president.

This week, Ron Reagan Jr., son of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, released "My Father at 100: A Memoir." (Ronald Wilson Reagan would have turned 100 on Feb. 6.)

Among those unhappy with the book is Michael Reagan, the adopted son of the former president and his first wife, Jane Wyman. Michael is particularly upset that half-brother Ron wrote that their father had Alzheimer's while still in the White House. Reagan's presidency ended in January 1989, but there was no formal diagnosis until 1994.

"My brother was an embarrassment to his father when he was alive and today he became an embarrassment to his mother," Michael Reagan posted on Twitter on Saturday. "My brother seems to want [to] sell out his father to sell books," he wrote in another tweet.

U.S. News and World Report was the first to publish excerpts from the book, in which Ron recounts a few episodes of his father's behavior and examples of "an out-of-touch president" as alleged signs that Alzheimer's had begun manifesting itself while the Gipper was still in office.

ON PAGE 205, he writes of experiencing "the nausea of a bad dream coming true" during his father's first debate with Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984. At 73, Reagan was vying to be the oldest president ever re-elected.

Ron writes of seeing in his father voters' fears of "grandpa - who can never find his reading glasses - in charge of a bristling nuclear arsenal."

"My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words," Ron writes. "He looked tired and bewildered."

Then, on Page 218, the son brazenly says that his father "might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be" on an August 1986 flight during which Reagan couldn't recall the names of a familiar range of canyons north of Los Angeles.

Ron's conclusion: "The question of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer's while in office more or less answers itself."

I agree with him.

Not about the Gipper having Alzheimer's while in office, but with regard to something else he's written, which perhaps he should apply to himself.

See, Ron Jr. also reports that six months after leaving office, his father was bucked from a horse and treated in San Diego, which, if true, has never before been revealed.

Writes the son on page 217:

"Surgeons opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain emerged from the operating room with the news that they had detected what they took to be probable signs of Alzheimer's disease. No formal diagnosis was given, as far as I know. I have since learned from a doctor who happened to be interning at the hospital when my father was brought in that surgeons involved in his care, in what my informant characterized as 'shameful' behavior, violated my father's right to medical privacy by subsequently gossiping about his condition."

In other words, Ron makes it a point to cast the physicians who supposedly treated his father as "shameful" for gossiping about President Reagan's condition - even though their accounts apparently never made it into print - while going them one better with a memoir sharing that news with the world.

Shameful, indeed. But, unfortunately, typical of the politically and emotionally charged times.

And of course, there's room for the split screen.

Two sons. One a liberal atheist, a commentator for MSNBC. The other a conservative GOP strategist frequently seen on Fox News.

Both will publish books roughly coinciding with their father's 100th birthday. (Michael Reagan's "The New Reagan Revolution: How Ronald Reagan's Principles Can Restore America's Greatness" was also released Tuesday.)

Neither is willing to give an inch when it comes to the legacy of one of the more popular presidents in American history.

Even when that man is their father.

Is nothing above the political fray?

According to the man at the center of the kerfuffle, "All great change in America begins at the dinner table."

Here's hoping his sons sit down around that table and get the message.

Contact Michael Smerconish via the Web at www.smerconish.com. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer.