Reagan death confirmed by White House

Former president Ronald Reagan has died, it was announced tonight. The news was confirmed by the White House.

Ronald Reagan died tonight after a long twilight struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a family friend said.

He was 93.

He died at his home in California, according to the friend, who did not wish to be named.

The White House was told his health had taken a turn for the worse in the last several days.

Five years after leaving office, the US’s 40th president told the world in November 1994 that he had been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, an incurable illness that destroys brain cells.

He said he had begun “the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life”.

Reagan’s body is expected to be taken to his presidential library and museum in Simi Valley, California, and then flown to Washington to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

His funeral is expected to be at the National Cathedral, an event likely to draw world leaders.

The body will then be returned to California for a sunset burial at his library.

Reagan lived longer than any US president, spending his last decade in the shrouded seclusion wrought by his disease, tended by his wife, Nancy, whom he called Mommy, and the select few closest to him.

Now, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton are the surviving ex-presidents.

Although fiercely protective of Reagan’s privacy, the former first lady let people know his mental condition had deteriorated terribly.

Last month, she said: “Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him.”

Reagan’s oldest daughter, Maureen, from his first marriage, died in August 2001 at the age of 60 from cancer.

Three other children survive: Michael, from his first marriage, and Patti Davis and Ron from his second.

Over two terms, from 1981 to 1989, Reagan reshaped the Republican Party in his conservative image, fixed his eye on the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism.

Taking office at age 69, Reagan had already lived a career outside Washington, one that spanned work as a radio sports announcer, an actor, a television performer, a spokesman for the General Electric Co, and a two-term governor of California.