Finally, a day of rest

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. – Ronald Wilson Reagan went to his final rest on a California hilltop Friday in a cinematic finish to a life that took him from a small town in the Midwest, to the glamour of Hollywood, to the role of a lifetime as the nation’s 40th president.

The sunset burial service at Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., closed the curtain on six days of remembrance, pageantry and patriotic ritual for a larger-than-life figure whose influence was felt around the globe. It was a fitting finale for an actor-turned-politician who retained a showman’s flair to the end.

After maintaining her composure in public all week, Nancy Reagan wept after receiving the carefully folded flag that had encased her husband’s casket. She rested her head on the coffin and cried softly while her children and her stepson, Michael Reagan, tried to comfort her.

Earlier, the Reagan siblings offered emotional tributes to their father as the sun slipped slowly toward the Pacific Ocean.

“I don’t know why Alzheimer’s was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death,” daughter Patti Davis, 51, said of Reagan’s 10-year struggle with the debilitating ailment. “But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes, eyes that had not opened for many, many days, and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.”

After sharing some reminiscences, son Ron Reagan veered into a politically sensitive area by seeming to deliver a warning to President Bush and other politicians who talk about their religious faith at political events.

Ron Reagan said his father was “a deeply, unabashedly religious man, but he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his religious faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage.” He added that while Reagan “came to believe that God had spared him” from a 1981 assassination attempt, he concluded that the divine intervention left him with “a responsibility, not a mandate – and there is a profound difference.”

The intensely personal burial service came hours after another memorial at the Washington National Cathedral earlier in the day, where world leaders remembered the 40th president as a man of humor, humility and bedrock American values.

“With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world,” former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in a tribute delivered on videotape because of her failing health. “And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself – mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.”

Reagan, who died Saturday at age 93, began planning his funeral in 1981, his first year as president, and the carefully choreographed sendoff was filled with the patriotic flourishes and symbols of democracy that he so loved.

Minutes after Friday’s service, churches across the country rang their bells 40 times for the 40th president. U.S. military bases around the world marked the burial with a 21-gun salute at noon, followed by a 50-gun salute at day’s end.

In a quieter moment Friday morning, a tired and frail Nancy Reagan leaned over and kissed her husband’s flag-draped casket minutes before it was carried out of the Capitol Rotunda at the close of a 34-hour vigil. She appeared to have a final whispered message for her deceased husband of 52 years.

More than 200,000 Americans filed past Reagan’s casket at separate vigils on both coasts, first at his presidential library in California on Monday and Tuesday and then in the Capitol from Wednesday until Friday morning. The return of his body to California, in a Boeing 747 borrowed from the presidential fleet, followed a route that he took often during his White House years.

Thousands of people turned out to watch the funeral motorcade make the 25-mile trip from the Point Mugu Naval Air Station to the library. Traffic on the opposite side of Highway 101 came to a stop as drivers jumped out of their cars to see the hearse carrying Reagan’s casket.

Onlookers on the side of the road waved flags. A banner strung across a baseball field backstop read: “Thank you President Reagan.”

At the earlier church service in Washington, the powerful shared the pews with the once-powerful at the majestic Gothic cathedral in northwest Washington, the world’s sixth-largest cathedral.

The front two rows across from the Reagan family were reserved for President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and four former presidents – Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. They sat next to their spouses in the order of their elections.

Reagan’s 720-pound casket rested steps away from the crypt holding the remains of former President Woodrow Wilson, who was elected the year after Reagan’s birth in 1911.

Also in attendance were British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain’s Prince Charles, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who forged an alliance with Reagan that helped end the Cold War and then presided over the breakup of the Soviet empire, sat beside Thatcher, the “iron lady” whose resilience has been tested in recent years by a series of small strokes.

The gray, rainy skies outside the cathedral matched the somber mood inside.

“Ronald Reagan belongs to the ages now, but we preferred it when he belonged to us,” President Bush said from the church pulpit. “As he showed what a president should be, he also showed us what a man should be.”

Drawing on snapshots that helped define a decade, Bush recalled the images from Reagan’s White House years, “that tilt of a head and snap of a salute, the big-screen smile, and the glint in his Irish eyes when a story came to mind.”

Although he and the other eulogizers praised Reagan’s policies, giving him credit for the defeat of communism and for boosting the nation’s spirits, they became more animated when talking about the man behind the headlines.

Bush traced the former president’s remarkable life from his boyhood in Dixon, Ill., to his days as a radio sportscaster in Des Moines, Iowa, to his Hollywood career, to his service as governor of California and president.

“As an actor, he was the handsome, all-American, good guy, which in his case required knowing his lines and being himself,” he said.

As they paid tribute to Reagan, they also paid tribute to his widow, Nancy Reagan, who nursed the former president in his declining years.

Reagan, who once said that his life began when he met the former Nancy Davis, didn’t recognize her by the end of it.

The 82-year-old widow hasn’t spoken publicly since her husband’s death, other than to murmur thanks to admiring crowds, but she summed up her life with Reagan in a brief essay for the latest edition of Time magazine.

Her opening line said it all: “I think they broke the mold when they made Ronnie.”