Ronald Reagan Turns 89

Former first lady Nancy Reagan says that her husband is ``doing as well as can be expected," five years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

She made her comments on the former president's condition during a phone call made Friday night during the Larry King Live show on CNN.

The show was a tribute of sorts to the former world leader, who turns 89 years old Sunday.

Daughter Maureen Reagan and several of Ronald Reagan's close advisers were also on the show, including Howard Baker, Jr., Reagan's former chief of staff; longtime political adviser and deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver; Marlin Fitzwater, the president's press secretary, and former Secretary of State James Baker.

Nancy Reagan side-stepped most questions about her husband's health.

She said her husband still doesn't look his age, and you really have to look hard for any gray hairs.

A taped birthday message from President Clinton also was played.

Recently, Maureen Reagan said her father cannot speak coherently and, because his motor skills are failing, no longer can join her in working simple jigsaw puzzles.

Maureen Reagan said friends sometimes ask about her father's condition.

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

Reagan said she 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 incurable brain disease.

The puzzles mainly were of animal scenes.

"Unfortunately, he can't do that anymore," 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.

Reagan recounted an incident she described as her "click of awareness" about her father's illness. It came six months before he complained to his doctor of feeling disoriented in unfamiliar surroundings and a year before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

It was late 1993, and Reagan was talking with the former president 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.' That was my 'click of awareness,'" which she said relatives of every Alzheimer's patient experience at that first realization.

She wrote that Nancy Reagan, the president's second wife and Maureen Reagan's stepmother, gives her father "wonderful care."

Last month, Mrs. Reagan said in a televisin interview that the former president 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.