Richard Nixon lay near death Friday.
Two Marine sergeants arrived at the hospital Thursday, ready to serve as the former president's honor guard if he dies from the stroke he suffered Monday."His condition has deteriorated. He's in a very deep coma," Kathy Robinson, a spokeswoman for New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, said late Thursday. "His family is at his bedside."
His condition remained the same Friday morning, Robinson said. Nixon's daughters, Tricia Cox and Julie Eisenhower, were with him, she said.
Hospital officials announced earlier that the 81-year-old Nixon had slipped into unconsciousness after developing swelling of the brain, a potentially deadly complication of the stroke.
Doctors sometimes try to reduce such swelling by using a respirator to speed up breathing, but Nixon was not on a respirator, and news reports said he had left instructions that he not be resuscitated.
Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's spokeswoman, confirmed he has a living will, but she would not discuss it.
Nixon had been partially paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak even before the coma.
"His chances of dying are much greater," and his chance of surviving without major damage to his speech and movement is "very, very small," said Dr. Gregory Albers, director of the Stanford Stroke Center at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif.
For Nixon, that would be a cruel sentence.
In the 20 years since he was forced from the presidency by the Watergate scandal, he has re-emerged as an elder statesman in foreign policy matters. He has traveled widely - five times to China - and published eight books.
"He dedicated his life to that quest out of office and was universally recognized as the leading American spokesman and a student of foreign policy," Henry Kissinger, Nixon's foreign policy expert, said Friday on CBS.
Nixon's stroke, which occurred at his home in Park Ridge, N.J., apparently was the result of a blood clot that formed in his heart and moved to the brain's middle cerebral artery. The blockage cut off oxygen to the region, damaging some brain tissue and causing swelling.
His descent into a coma indicated the swelling may have continued despite preventive measures.
"It could, in effect, be squishing the brain," said Dr. Paul Katz, a stroke specialist at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.