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>From Capitol Hill Blue
Ain't This America. . . Nation Says Goodbye to Ronald Reagan By LISA HOFFMAN Scripps Howard News Service Jun 12, 2004, 06:34
All five living U.S. presidents, the mighty from five continents and leaders of five religious faiths joined prayers Friday in a tribute to Ronald Reagan's starring role in the 20th-century history of America and the world.
Washington National Cathedral became an international stage for a midday service attended by 3,000 chosen domestic and foreign dignitaries, who included 24 past or present prime ministers and presidents from former communist countries, new republics and longtime allies.
Those who eulogized the 40th president called upon the assembled to reflect on the late president's personal decency, political vision, never-dimmed optimism and the conviction he always carried that the light of democracy and freedom would ultimately reach even the darkest corners of the globe.
"He believed America was not just a place in the world but the hope of the world," President Bush said in his eulogy.
The cathedral service concluded three days of simple pageantry in Washington, rich with symbols and significance, that marked the June 5 passing of Reagan, the longest-lived of all 43 American presidents at 93.
The final farewell from the nation's capital, a city Reagan never warmed to, came as the national day of mourning ebbed on the East Coast. On the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, an honor guard loaded Reagan's casket onto a presidential 747 jetliner that headed west to a private burial set for sunset in his beloved California, after one more cross-country pass over the nation he loved even more.
Friday's ceremonies began when the doors to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda closed at 7 a.m., after more than 84,000 people had filed by Reagan's flag-draped casket to pay their respects, some after a seven-hour wait, during the 34 hours the late leader lay in state there.
Before the motorcade to the cathedral, Reagan's widow, Nancy, who turns 83 next month, lingered at the casket, murmuring, then smoothing and kissing the American flag encasing it. Descending the stairs from the west front of the Capitol, where her husband took the oath of office 23 years ago, she seemed even more frail than she had before the long days of formal farewells to her husband.
In the stately cathedral's nave, Nancy Reagan watched dry-eyed as the one-hour, forty-five-minute service unfolded, sticking mostly to the script she and her husband had created long in advance.
Presiding instead of the ailing Rev. Billy Graham, Reagan's first choice, was former Missouri GOP Sen. John Danforth, an Episcopal minister whom Bush recently nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Also present were clergy from the Catholic, Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Muslim faiths.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Reagan nominated to be the first female on that bench, read a passage of a Pilgrim's sermon from which Reagan took his trademark description of America as "a shining city upon a hill."
Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a close friend of the Reagans, extolled the late president's graciousness and wit. Former President George H.W. Bush, who once vied with Reagan for the GOP presidential spot and later served as Reagan's vice president, choked up when he remembered Reagan's kindness and humility.
"I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life," Bush said.
Staunch Reagan friend and fellow Cold Warrior Margaret Thatcher, who joined fellow widow Nancy Reagan on the flight to California for the burial, sat front and center in a pew. Beset by small strokes that have stolen her short-term memory, the former British prime minister taped her eulogy months in advance.
In it, she delivered a paean to "Ronnie's" unbending political backbone and lifelong battle against communism. Dubbing him the "Great Liberator," Thatcher said his legacy was a renewed American spirit, the global spread of free markets and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
"He won the Cold War _ not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends," said Thatcher, 83.
One of those unlikely friends was former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who, in a twist of history all but unimaginable when Reagan's presidency ended in 1989, sat in a nearby pew. Not far away was former Polish President Lech Walesa, who freed his own country from the Soviet grip.
Prominent in the dark-suited crowd were former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, along with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Britain's Prince Charles, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
In the nave before the service, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan stood locked in serious conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Democratic presidential contender John Kerry greeted several world leaders, then chatted jovially with former President Bill Clinton and Canada's Mulroney.
But though Reagan began his political career as a Democrat, no one from that party spoke either at the cathedral service or one Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda.
After the ceremony, past members of Reagan's Cabinet, former top aides and other luminaries hailed Reagan as an original whose cowboy boots would be difficult to fill.
"He really was who he seemed to be and ... he was also very comfortable in his own skin," said former GOP Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, who served as White House chief of staff in the latter years of the Reagan administration.
Henry Kissinger, a secretary of state during Richard Nixon's presidency, marveled at the devotion that Reagan engendered from those close to him and from the American public at large.
"I think he will go down as one of history's seminal presidents, by which I mean he was one who really made a difference," Kissinger said. "He was a great president who left a different world from what it was before."
Though the cathedral service was closed to all but invitees, hundreds of ordinary Americans demonstrated that devotion at they stood in a chill rain along the route the Reagan hearse traveled to the cathedral and, later, to Andrews.
Outside the stately cathedral, residents of the tony neighborhood waited next to U.S. immigrants, Pennsylvania dock workers, a New York City subway driver who caught a 2:45 a.m. Amtrak train to Washington and two clutches of protesters. One group accused Reagan of not doing enough to end homosexuality, the other objected to his policies in Central America, what they considered Reagan's inaction against AIDS, and the prison abuse by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
But even the protesters fell silent as the hearse passed by. Quietly applauding was Michael Gorsky, 50, a Colorado Springs, Colo., dentist who served in the Navy during Reagan's term and flew in to pay his respects to his former commander in chief.
"He made it popular again to put your hand over your heart at a ball game," Gorsky said.
Next to him was Polash Chowdhury, 51, a Washington department-store worker, who wore a tie emblazoned with the U.S. flag. "I arrived very early to pay tribute to a great American in history," said Chowdhury.
(E-mail Lisa Hoffman at HoffmanL at shns.com. SHNS reporters Bill Straub and Jessica Wehrman contributed to this report. Also contributing were interns Alex Da Silva, Elizabeth Owens, Marcela Carrera, Jacquelyn Cole and Collin Haba.)