Reagan, shown in a file photo, can no longer speak coherently, says his daughter Maureen

January 24, 2000
Web posted at: 11:56 a.m. EST (1656 GMT)

In this story: 'He can't do that anymore' 'Click of awareness' RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON -- The health of former President Reagan, who has Alzheimer's Disease and turns 89 next month, has deteriorated so much that he can not speak coherently, according to his eldest daughter, Maureen.

She also says that because his motor skills are failing, he no longer can join her in working simple jigsaw puzzles.

In an essay in Newsweek magazine, Maureen Reagan said friends sometimes ask the condition of her father.

"My response is, `Not so good.' But it is hard to say that, because he makes it so easy for us," she wrote. "In other words, it's still him. But his motor skills are going."

Maureen Reagan and her father began doing the puzzles -- first 300-piece projects, then 100 pieces -- shortly after the diagnosis more than five years ago that he had the incurable brain disease.

The puzzles mainly were of animal scenes.

"Unfortunately, he can't do that anymore," Maureen Reagan wrote. "It was great fun, and he had a tremendous sense of accomplishment" in completing them.

It was the same with an art book. He looked at it, enjoyed the pictures and read the words out loud.

"He could recognize the words even after aphasia had robbed him of his ability to put his thoughts into words," she wrote. Aphasia is the loss of the ability to use or understand words.

Maureen Reagan, the former president's eldest daughter, wrote that a conversation she had with her father in late 1993 should have triggered concern about his health.

It occurred six months before he complained to his doctor of feeling disoriented in unfamiliar surroundings and a year before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Maureen Reagan said she was talking with her father about a movie he made in the 1950s, "Prisoner of War." They had talked about it often.

"Finally he looked at me and said, 'Mermie, I have no recollection of making that movie,'" she said. Maureen Reagan calls that moment her first "click of awareness" about her father's illness.

"No actor ever forgets a role," she wrote, "so I should have realized something was wrong."

She says Nancy Reagan, the president's second wife and Maureen Reagan's stepmother, gives her father "wonderful care" at the couple's home near Beverly Hills, California.

Last month, Nancy Reagan said in a television interview that Reagan no longer is capable of having a conversation that makes sense.

She said friends were no longer invited to the Reagans' California home because he does not recognize them. He also no longer swims or takes walks, she said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.