She did it all. And it might not have been such a big deal, except that Patti Davis wasn't just any rebellious baby boomer. Her dad just happened to be president of the United States, and her mom the first lady: Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Her rebel years were played out in front of the world.

"I was such a punk," Davis, 52, says in the first print interview she has given in a decade. The occasion: publication of "The Long Goodbye," a sentimental and thought-provoking memoir about her sometimes sweet, sometimes stormy relationship with her father, his decline from Alzheimer's disease and his death in June.

"I'm not the angry, rebellious child that I was," she says at a Santa Monica hotel where she often stayed when she visited from New York to help care for her father during his 10-year battle with Alzheimer's. "You can remain a child for a long time. I certainly did. I was a slow learner."

Davis still fights political battles — her mother and brother now join her in the battle for stem-cell research because it shows promise in leading to cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's. She was "disappointed" when John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, supports gay marriage and favors any number of liberal positions.

But instead of giving interviews, she writes her own magazine essays on topics ranging from stem-cell research, advice — and admiration — for other first daughters, to calls to prevent John Hinckley Jr., the man who tried to assassinate her father, from having unsupervised visits into the community.

Patti Davis escorts her mother, Nancy Reagan, aided by Army Maj. Gen. Galen Jackman, to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif., after Ronald Reagan's death in June. Bob Riha, Jr. • USA Today

"I didn't get that I was being very warlike for the purpose of helping world peace," she says.

The surviving children (Davis' half-sister Maureen Reagan died of cancer in 2001) are all political.

Ron Reagan, a political commentator for MSNBC who spoke in favor of stem-cell research at the Democratic convention, was a vocal Kerry supporter; Davis' half-brother Michael Reagan is a conservative talk-show host for Radio America Network; and Maureen also took after her father politically.

But politics no longer divides this famous family, where personal rifts were public and frequent. When Ronald Reagan disclosed in a letter to America in November 1994 that he had Alzheimer's, all the Reagan children rallied around him. And these days, they rarely surprise each other in public. In fact, Nancy Reagan gave Davis' book her blessing but declined through Davis to be interviewed about it.

Story of learning

"Politics isn't what defines a person, and it shouldn't define a relationship," Davis says. "I made the mistake of letting that intrude on my relationships."

During her father's illness, Davis regularly flew from her adopted home in Manhattan to Los Angeles. In 1997, she moved back to Los Angeles to live minutes from her parents. She still speaks with her mother daily.

Davis began keeping a journal in April 1995 that evolved into the book, which weaves together many aspects of a complicated relationship.

There are the childhood memories — the way her father taught her how to ride a horse, catch a wave or demonstrated how green shoots always emerge after a land-scarring fire. There is the bittersweet regret of her youthful actions. And then there is her obvious affection for a strong and loving father as she watches him retreat into the shadows of Alzheimer's.

To Davis, the book is "at its root, a father-daughter story. Yes, it's about Ronald Reagan. But you could substitute Joe Smith. It's still a story about learning to lose a parent and the enormity of that."

It's a phenomenon rippling throughout America as its 78 million baby boomers increasingly confront the mortality of their parents.

"I thought it was a beautiful, very touching first-person account of something that's almost inescapable," says Reagan family friend and movie producer Lucy Fisher. "It's almost like every person I know has a spouse or a parent or a grandparent suffering from some form of Alzheimer's or dementia."

Tucked within the pages of Davis' book is the cultural subtext: If Davis once symbolized the rebellious phase in boomer life, perhaps she now stands for a different stage — that of reconciliation, coming home and taking care of parents.

In fact, an estimated 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's, and that number is expected to triple by 2050. There is no cure for the disease, in which the brain slowly deteriorates, causing severe memory loss and a host of symptoms often including radical personality change and physical impairment.

Davis is sparing on the often excruciating details, but she does not ignore the effects either.

"My father is getting smaller," she writes. "He's being whittled down, trimmed, reshaped by a disease that has its own blueprint."

Complex reconciliation

There is an expression in the Alzheimer's world: If you've read one book on Alzheimer's, you've read one book on Alzheimer's. In other words, every experience is different.

Though some people with Alzheimer's become violent and belligerent, Davis says, her father always maintained his gentleness.

"He was a magnetic, mesmerizing person even 10 years into Alzheimer's," says Davis, sitting next to the bike path where nine years earlier she held her father's arm and strolled to the water's edge to watch surfers. She writes of recalling youthful days when her dad smelled like Coppertone and patiently showed her how to duck under large waves.

She and many others may have disagreed with him politically, but she also understood why so many were drawn to him.

"I think it's his spirit — who he is at the core of his being," says Davis, still statuesque and model-thin. "That sweetness pulled everyone to him" — especially his children.

"Even though we were always sort of reaching for more and wanted to be closer to him — it was because we loved him so much," she says.

Like all parental relationships, this one was thick with complications, all the more because of the Reagans' place in the world.

There were times when Davis and her parents famously stopped speaking. She reconciled with her mother shortly before her father's diagnosis.

Her reconciliation with her father was more complicated.

But she also says that she did feel a sense of completion with him. Although his intellectual capacity was already diminished, he still was able to speak for some years. And even after he lost language, "the communication and the sharing of feelings happened between souls," she says. "His soul didn't have Alzheimer's."

Reconciliation is always complex, says Laura Davis, author of "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again: The Road From Estrangement to Reconciliation." It requires the maturity to hold onto a duel reality where "the hurtful things that happened in the past (coexist with) the fact that you want to move on," she says.

Patti Davis puts it this way: "I needed to run away in order to come home," she writes.

"I did the best I could as my father was leaving this world. That's really, really important."