Did Reagan Decline?

• In Event: Presidents and the Public

Abstract

On November 5, 1994, Ronald Reagan released a handwritten letter announcing he had Alzheimer’s disease. The disclosure raised an obvious question: did dementia affect Reagan during his 8 years in the White House?

In many ways, it is an unanswerable question. Without calibrated, consistent testing throughout Reagan's tenure, there is simply no compelling method for assessing the President's mental acuity.

Or is there? In a clever study, Berisha et al. coded specific markers of Ronald Reagan’s speech patterns during each of his 46 formal press conferences. The results: “President Reagan showed a significant reduction in the number of unique words over time and a significant increase in conversational fillers and non-specific nouns over time” (2015, 959). Interestingly, an equivalent analysis of President George H. W. Bush’s press conference speaking revealed no comparable patterns.

Obviously, evidence confirming Ronald Reagan had early-onset dementia was newsworthy. In fact, the New York Times covered the study in a full article: “In Reagan’s Speeches, Early Clues to Dementia” (March 31, 2015). Acknowledging some limitations and caveats, the article ultimately stated the bottom line: “Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994” (ibid).

While Berisha et al. were clear that their study did not (and could not) “prove” whether President Reagan suffered from dementia, the evidence seemed compelling, which made the inference tempting. To wit, Michael Eysenck and Mark Keane’s college textbook, Cognitive Psychology, summarizes Berisha et al.’s contribution thusly: “[Reagan] showed a substantial reduction in the use of unique words during his time as president,” presumably “due to mild cognitive impairment” (2020, 518).

In this note, I revisit Berisha et al.’s results. I begin by using their data and redoing their analysis, which reveals one press conference was omitted from their analysis. Adding that case back into the analyses actually strengthens the results.

That said, I then contemplate the method Berisha et al. used to facilitate comparability across press conferences – namely, restricting their analyses to Reagan’s first 1400 words (excluding any prepared statement). I propose that the nature of presidential press conferences - reporter questions followed by presidential answers – introduces questions as a potential confound. In fact, I then show reporters increasingly asked “follow-up” questions during Reagan’s 8 years in office.

To conclude, I adopt an empirically related but substantively distinct method to test Reagan’s performance during press conferences. Specifically, by homing in on the President's responses to the first 10 “distinct” questions posed to him, I find Reagan's performance remained consistent throughout his time in office.

Author

• Matthew N. Beckmann, University of California, Irvine