MORTAL COIL

"Even though the day must ultimately come, it will be hard to say goodbye."

For years Jim Hooley had been dreading the phone call, even though he knew it was inevitable that Ronald Reagan, the man to whom he'd devoted much of his life, was going to die.

Soon.

Days were now down to hours and maybe even minutes.

It was early June 2004 and the private word from California about President Reagan's condition was getting steadily worse. No one who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's ever got better. People frequently recovered from surgeries and cancers and broken bones. But no one ever got better who was diagnosed with the horrible disease — about which so little was understood — that ravages and ultimately does fatal damage to the brain and the body.

Hooley and other key Reaganites had already had one false alarm just a week earlier, getting an urgent phone call from the president's chief of staff, Joanne Drake, telling him Reagan's time was nigh and he'd better get on the next plane. Reagan, according to sources, had been unconscious for a week.

But then the ninety-three-year-old Gipper rallied, as if pushing back against death, as he'd pushed back his whole life: against Eureka College administrators who wanted to fire professors during the Great Depression; against Hollywood moguls who refused to share residual profits with actors and actresses; against political opponents, both Republican and Democratic; against the entrenched Washington bureaucracy; against dictators who ran Evil Empires.

Just a few days earlier, on Memorial Day weekend, Robert Higdon received a call from Nancy Reagan. "I just wanted to call and tell you, you need to get ready." He pulled the car over to the side of the road to give Nancy his undivided attention. "As in?" he gravely replied. "The doctor's just here and he said we need to get ready ... I think by the end of the week," she said. Higdon was a family friend who'd been asked to help raise money to get the presidential library off the ground many years earlier.

One week later — on June 4 — Drake called Hooley again and said, "Things are looking close."

Those involved in the planning of the Reagan funeral — Fred Ryan, Joanne Drake, Higdon, Rick Ahearn, Hooley — had been on call for years. As a longtime advance man for Reagan, Hooley — and many others — had to make sure the rites came off without a hitch. There were thousands of moving parts involved. Ryan, Drake, and Higdon had been personally close to the Reagans for many years and knew how many friends and associates and admirers and detractors and critics and enemies they'd picked up over the years.

The logistics for the movement of a president were difficult enough, but for the funeral of a president they were mind numbing. Imagine every ego in Washington jammed into a small animal cage, each armed with a sharp knife, an American Express card, and battery acid.

Reagan had always believed he was the master of his own fate but also, as a man of God, believed in divine destiny. Reagan used the phrase "Man with God" because he believed he, like all people, was made in the image of his Creator. But he also embraced Immanuel Kant's rational being because God wanted man to be a rational being. He was going to go when God called him but not one minute sooner.

The disease was named after Alois Alzheimer, the Bavarian German scientist who'd first undertaken the use of high-performance microscopes to study brain tissue nearly a century earlier while searching for the causes of dementia. According to How We Die, "The fundamental pathology of Alzheimer's disease is the progressive degeneration and loss of vast numbers of nerve cells in those portions of the brain's cortex that are associated with the so-called higher functions, such as memory, learning and judgment."

Twenty-one years earlier — in the fall of 1983 — President Reagan designated November as "National Alzheimer's Disease Month." This was just as nationwide attention was slowly beginning to awaken and become more familiar with the affliction. He himself went through the seven stages as defined by the Alzheimer's Association, from Step One "no impairment" to Step Seven "very severe decline." Still, the fact that it took ten years was a testament to his physical endurance and capacity. Lou Cannon noted that Reagan was very proud of the weight room that he'd installed in the White House after the shooting and that did much to help him recover, "but, there's a price that he paid. If he hadn't been a healthy man, he probably wouldn't have lived all those years." Many Alzheimer's patients — such as his old friend Jeane Kirkpatrick — went very quickly, in a matter of months or a few years.

For months, Hooley had had a suitcase packed and waiting by the door for the phone call, so he would be ready to head out to Andrews Air Force Base and go west to perform one more task for his beloved old boss. Still, no one could accurately forecast how long Reagan would live. "It could be weeks, it could be months," said one individual with knowledge but unidentified to the Associated Press. That same day, however, the wire service had already moved several stories on Reagan's sudden decline but again without attribution and few details.

Also on June 5, President George W. Bush — "43" — was in Europe and while there met with the ailing Pope John Paul 11, who gave Bush an earful about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the Vatican had opposed. Thousands were protesting Bush as he moved around the continent. "There is a lot of hatred of Bush in France, real hatred," said an aide to French president Jacques Chirac. Protesters burned American flags and carried Palestinian flags and signs denouncing Bush as a terrorist. Simultaneously, anti-Bush protests were underway in Lafayette Park, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

The mood of the American people was guarded and somewhat demoralized. The terrible events of September 11, 2001, still hung over the country as the War on Terror continued unabated. Some felt that Bush had made a mistake in praising Islam too effusively and too often, as it muddled the picture as to who the enemy was.

On the other hand, the French had routinely denounced American presidents with the only exception being JFK and that was in part because his wife Jackie was of French descent and she spoke the language fluently. Dwight Eisenhower got rough treatment from the French even though he'd led the D-day invasion that liberated their country from the Nazis and the Nazi accomplices in...