World pays tribute to Ronald Reagan
SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Ronald Reagan was remembered Sunday with jelly beans, flowers and American flags at memorials in his hometown and outside the mortuary where the former president’s body lay.
“Thank you for changing the world,” said a handwritten note among the tokens of remembrance left in Santa Monica for the nation’s 40th president, who was 93 when he died Saturday of pneumonia as a complication of Alzheimer’s disease.
The family’s spokeswoman said Nancy Reagan was thankful for the thousands of expressions of sympathy over the death of her husband and, despite her sadness, was relieved he no longer was suffering.
“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,” Joanne Drake told a news conference outside the mortuary where Reagan’s body lay.
“It’s been a really hard 10 years for her,” Drake said of Nancy Reagan as nearly a week of tribute to the former president was detailed.
In a piece written for Time magazine before Reagan’s death, Nancy 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 today. “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.”
President Bush, in France to commemorate D-Day, recalled that 20 years earlier, Reagan had gone to Normandy on the 40th 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.
The Reagan family was to travel today in a motorcade with the body to the presidential library in Simi Valley, northwest of Los Angeles. After a private ceremony, the body was to lie in repose for public visitation through Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the body will be flown to Washington, D.C., and then driven to the U.S. Capitol for a state funeral. Reagan’s body will then lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda through Thursday.
Friday morning, a motorcade will take the casket to the National Cathedral for a national funeral service. It will then be flown back to California for a motorcade to the library for a private interment service.
At Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon, Ill., mourners left flowers, flags and packets of Jelly Belly jelly beans – his favorite – at the feet of a life-size statue of Reagan in the front yard.
At Bel Air Presbyterian Church, which Reagan attended during and after his presidency, the Rev. Mark Brewer opened Sunday’s first service with a remembrance, saying, “As a nation, we grieve this week.”
“He brought with him not only a love for the nation but also a sense of humor,” Brewer told about 500 people. He lauded Reagan’s leadership in the Cold War, calling it the “third great war” of the century.
Reagan’s “Star Wars” program drew the Soviet Union into an unaffordable arms race, and his 1987 declaration to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” – was the ultimate challenge of the Cold War.
Gorbachev on Sunday looked back on those tensions with equanimity and forgiveness.
“I take the death of Ronald Reagan very hard,” Gorbachev told reporters. “He was a man whom fate set by me in perhaps the most difficult years at the end of the 20th century.”
“It was his goal and his dream to end his term and enter history as a peacemaker,” he said.
Reagan died at 1 p.m. Saturday and his body was taken to a Santa Monica funeral home. A shrine that sprouted outside grew to include a cowboy hat, personal letters, flags and jelly beans.