former President Ronald Reagan had prosopagnosia?

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Prosopagnosia is a difficulty or inability to recognize faces. It can be part of the autism spectrum, or it can be unrelated.

Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America, Jonathan Darman, Random House, 2014.

https://books.google.com/books?id=1vw5A ... 22&f=false

pages 124-25:

' . . . Reagan never looked too closely at his audiences. Since childhood, he'd been frightfully nearsighted. His parents paid for thick eyeglasses, which he wore dutifully, but without them, his visible world was mostly blotches of color and drifting shapes. He had adapted without much questioning, the way children can, forgoing baseball for football, . . . '

' . . . He'd started his show business career on radio, where the audience was invisible. . . '

' . . . In Hollywood, too, seeing had never been that important. Arriving in Southern California in the late 1930s, he'd looked up Joy Hodges, an acquaintance from back home who was working as an actress in the film colony. "I have visions of becoming an actor," he confessed to her. "What I really want is a screen test." Hodges looked at the man in front of her --- dressed like the Midwest, unsophisticated in the ways of the world, but tall, broad-shouldered, and undeniably handsome. "I think I might be able to fix something," she said. "Just don't ever put those glasses on again."

'So he'd learned to get by without seeing things too closely. In time, it became the habit of his life. Eventually, he'd gotten contact lenses. Though they could correct his vision, their effect was strangely limited. His children, rushing into a room at day's end to greet their father, would find him looking puzzled, as if they were strangers. Have we met? It was as if, after all the years of seeing ill-defined blotches, the part of his brain that processed the particulars of a person's face had corroded irreparably due to lack of use. Or maybe it had never been there at all. [Emphasis Added] Once, at his son Michael's high school graduation, where he was the commencement speaker, he'd greeted a line of graduates. “My name is Ronald Reagan,” he said to a grinning boy in cap and gown. “What’s yours?” The graduate removed his cap. “Remember me? I’m your son Mike.”

‘When he spoke to large audiences, he didn’t focus on the faces before him. Years later, after he’d become a national politician, his aides persuaded him to use a teleprompter. He’d always preferred note cards, filled with his shorthand block writing. But he was not afraid to improve his performance, and he accepted the new technology. Just before going onstage, he would remove the contact lens from his right eye. From the corrected left eye, he read the words from the moving monitor. With his right eye, the one without the lens, he looked at the crowd. He wanted to look at his audience, but he did not want too much detail. Seeing their faces was not important.

‘What mattered was knowing, feeling, just exactly what they wanted most. This was Reagan’s great gift. . . ’

I think it’s a possibility former President Ronald Reagan was on the spectrum.

I also think it’s important to go slowly, cautiously, respectfully.

With someone still living, we generally do not want to ‘out’ them at a pace faster than the person’s own pace. With someone who has died, we want to wait a respectful period of time, at least six months, maybe longer, and this certainly is the case with President Reagan, and then we can talk about the possibility that he or she was Spectrum even if they never brought it up themselves.


PS If anyone can tell me how to increase the size of text within a quote, I'd certainly appreciate it!

I think its highly unlikely that Ronald Reagan was on the spectrum. Wasn't he called the great communicator? We can argue about the merits of his presidency, but I think the quoted article is not an accurate reflection of how he came across to people.

I don't think the Great Communicator. As I posted last August I think Nixon was the one and maybe Calvin Coolidge

Reprint of my August post on the 40th anniversary of his resignation
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It do think he was co-morbid paranoid also.
Autistic or not that someone who is socially and psychically awkward would become a politician nevermind president is rare and fascinating.

This is a video of a speech by the author of "President Nixon: Alone in the White House"

Except for the first few minutes of introductions it is well worth your 50 minutes if you are interested him or that period in US history. The author talks about his "architectural mind" mentions he thinks Nixon had a neurological disorder, and his greatest flaw was thinking other people were like himself. He mentions Nixon ordered state dinners should be one course short so he can minimize being in that situation. His staff regularly ignored his orders.

He was viewed as many of the spectrum are as shifty (sound familiar) he was known by his detractors as "Tricky Dick" . His Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon in the "Personality and public image" section mention was extremely formal to the point of wearing a coat and tie when home alone.

One incident that showed a lot of traits was the much talked about 4AM visit to anti war protesters at the Lincoln memorial just after national guardsmen killed 4 Kent State university students. The visit shows a lack of understanding of danger. At the times most of the campuses were closed due protesters and troops were guarding the White House because it was feared protesters would storm it. A 2011 Atlantic Monthly article on the incident shows a man desperately trying to connect and failing http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... _page=true
"I hope it was because he was tired but most of what he was saying was absurd," one of the Syracuse students told the press afterwards. "Here we had come from a university that's completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team."

Another student told the media, "He didn't look anyone in the eyes. He was mumbling. When people asked him to speak up he would boom one word and no more. As far as sentence structure, there was none."

In 1975 at a time autism was thought of as a children only condition and only the most severe end of the spectrum was recognized a book reviewer for the New York Times would claimed that Nixon was borderline autistic. Theodore White was a influential chronicler of the Chinese and American political scenes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_White. His book about the Watergate Scandal was entitled ?Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon?. The reviewer for The Times wrote ?He very nearly suggests ? and I wish he had- that in the extremity of his loneliness, Richard Nixon?s behavior bordered on the autistic.?
The review as reprinted by the ?Daytona Beach Morning Journal?
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1 ... 481,673747.

Of course none of this "proves" Nixon was autistic and nothing ever will. But I think he was.

Another "shy" American President was "Silent" Calvin Coolidge
End of original post

Testimony by Alexander Butterfield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Butterfield Start at about 1:55. Very similar to what the students said.

It seems really unlikely to me that Reagan was on the spectrum - film of the time sees him comfortable and engaging with foreign heads of government in a way that you could see their warmth. Nixon maybe, sure, I don't know - but completely a possibility. Calvin Coolidge - no idea, but reading his Wikipedia entry it seems likely.

Gordon Brown, PM of the UK. (And I know he's still alive) but seems quite likely to me. I've never met him, but I've been in the same room with him and I know civil servants who worked with him. Everything they say about his behaviour in private seems spectrummy.

On the question of whether President Richard Nixon was on the Spectrum:

Okay, he was socially awkward. And I prefer to call this patchy social skills. And every human being on the face of the Earth has patchy social skills. Just we on the Spectrum have more patchy skills than average.

Did he have intense interests which he spent a lot of time on? I think he did. And then we need to ask:

Did he have sensory issues?

Did he stim in private to relieve tension?

Did he have meltdowns?

Now, none of these are slam dunks. For example, take a quiet stroll through or around the perimeter of any casino poker room and see how many poker players are fiddling with chips. Presumably, to maintain concentration and/or relieve stress, just we on the Spectrum do. Not all of us have meltdowns. I think I do where I remember an incident of mistreatment or disrespect and then rapidly rub the back of my head in a flash of anger as I indulge in a violent fantasy of revenge. Does it help? Actually, not really. In part because I believe in Buddhism and nonrevenge and forgiveness as a free gift to myself, but all that's too much, it's too high a standard. There has to be a middle way. Anyway, my point is that meltdowns can be rather subtle even to the person having them.

Sensory issues I think actually are pretty close to a slam dunk as far as whether or not a person is on the Spectrum. I guess as close to a slam dunk as anything can be. From a talk by this same author Richard Reeves on C-SPAN's Book TV, I think it was Haig on reported that Nixon liked to write in the dark, which I took to mean way subdued lighting. Maybe a sensory issue. But did Dick Nixon have other sensory issues?

There is nothing that would make me think that President Reagan was autistic. The thought itself is absurd.

Just because many people on the spectrum have prosopagnosia, it does not follow that everyone with prosopagnosia is on the spectrum.

One thing I do think was that he was slipping toward the end of his second term and possibly much earlier.