Nation Mourns the Death of Ronald Reagan

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Ronald Reagan, who spoke 10 years ago about his final journey, was being mourned by a nation while plans called for the late president’s body to travel from California to the nation’s capital and back home again for burial.

Reagan, 93, died at home Saturday of pneumonia.

On Monday, his body was to be moved from a Santa Monica funeral home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Following a private family ceremony, it will lie in repose at the library through Tuesday night, giving Reagan’s fellow Californians a chance to pay their final respects to the man who was their governor from 1967 to 1975.

On Wednesday, the former president’s body was to be flown to Washington, D.C. Following a state funeral, it will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda until Friday.

The funeral, undoubtedly attended by world leaders, will be at Washington National Cathedral. Bush will speak at the funeral. The body will then be returned to Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley for a private burial service.

Throughout the day Sunday, mourners milled around the Santa Monica funeral home, many leaving behind American flags, flowers and jars of jelly beans – Reagan’s favorite treat.

“Thank you for changing the world,” said a handwritten note among the tokens of remembrance.

People did the same at Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon, Ill.

Ken Dunwoody, who grew up outside Dixon, said Reagan, while an icon of Republican politics, transcended political partisanship. “I just think of him as being an American,” said Dunwoody, 82. “I wish we all could get back to that.”

The Reagan family’s spokeswoman said former first lady Nancy Reagan was thankful for the thousands of expressions of sympathy and, despite her sadness, relieved that her husband was no longer struggling with Alzheimer’s disease that had robbed him of his memory.

When Reagan announced in a letter to the public in 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s, he said he was embarking on “the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.”

“I can tell you most certainly that while it is an extremely sad time for Mrs. Reagan, there is definitely a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering, and that he has gone to a better place,” said spokeswoman Joanne Drake. “It’s been a really hard 10 years for her.”

In a piece written for Time magazine before Reagan’s death, Mrs. Reagan remembered her husband as “a man of strong principles and integrity” who felt his greatest accomplishment was finding a safe end to the Cold War.

“I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie,” she wrote in the article appearing Monday. “He had absolutely no ego, and he was very comfortable in his own skin; therefore, he didn’t feel he ever had to prove anything to anyone.”

Former President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that the death of Reagan, who defeated him in the 1980 presidential election, was “a sad day for our country.”

“I probably know as well as anybody what a formidable communicator and campaigner that President Reagan was. It was because of him that I was retired from my last job,” Carter said before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Ga.

President Bush, in France to commemorate D-Day, recalled that 20 years earlier Reagan had come to Normandy on the anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion.

“He was a courageous leader himself and a gallant leader in the cause of freedom, and today we honor the memory of Ronald Reagan,” Bush said Sunday.

Reagan will be buried in a crypt beneath a memorial site at the library some 45 miles north of Los Angeles.

A curved wall adorned with shrubbery and ivy lines the memorial and has a three-line inscription from Reagan: “I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life,” the inscription reads.

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On the Net: http://www.ronaldreaganmemorial.com