President Ronald Reagan dies at age 93
By MARTIN MERZER AND ROBERT A. RANKIN
mmerzer@herald.com
Former President Ronald Reagan died Saturday, and his nation mourned.
Immediate details were scarce, but he apparently succumbed to complications from Alzheimer's disease, the brain malady that long afflicted him but could not dim his sunny disposition or the affection he generated and harvested.
Reagan was 93. He was widely beloved and he was sometimes bewildering and he was greatly respected, even by his rivals. He was, many said, the grandfather of his country. He lived longer than any other U.S. president.
Doctors said Reagan died at his home in the Bel-Air area of Los Angeles, according to reports. Nancy, his wife of 52 years, was believed to be at his side.
In January 2001, 13 years after leaving the White House, Reagan was briefly hospitalized for a broken hip. During the first four days of his hospitalization, his family received more than 8,500 e-mail messages, another indication of his enduring popularity.
When his two terms in office ended in 1988, one poll found that 63 percent of the American public believed he had done a good job. Another poll came in at 68 percent. Both results were among the highest ever recorded for a departing president.
In a handwritten note, Reagan disclosed in 1994 that he suffered from Alzheimer's, an incurable disease that affects 4.5 million Americans, robbing them of their memory and then their independence and sometimes their dignity.
''I now begin the journey that will lead me to the sunset of my life,'' Reagan wrote. ``I know that for America, there will always be a bright dawn ahead.''
Born poor, blessed with a magnetic personality, Reagan led a storybook life that swept him from small-town America to the spotlights of Hollywood's movie studios and the power, prestige and pulpit of the White House.
Elected at the age of 69, he was the nation's 40th president. He maintained a notoriously loose hold on the reins of his government, yet he shaped his times more than all but a few predecessors.
Reagan led the nation into economic recovery -- and a mushrooming national debt. He strengthened the military -- and moved down the path of nuclear disarmament. He reinvigorated the Republican Party -- and resuscitated the conservative movement.
He undermined the Soviet Union with his policies and his rhetoric, and he helped bring about its collapse.
He survived an assassination attempt, and his presidency survived the Iran-contra scandal.
Ronald Reagan left an enormous legacy.
''Over time, he converted much of the country to his own views and values,'' said David Gergen, once Reagan's communications director. ``His more important legacy is how much he changed our minds.''
Though a late bloomer as a politician, Reagan's success stemmed from a combination of rock-hard convictions and monumental personal charm.
Reagan stood for clear, firm principles -- individual liberty, small government, free markets, low taxes, anti-communism, military strength. He presented these views with such selfless, patriotic sincerity that even his critics respected and admired him.
His aides fed him lines on cue cards, but they called him The Great Communicator and he was. His easy, avuncular manner and his warm, husky voice helped persuade people to trust and believe in him, and his message touched many of his fellow citizens.
''I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference,'' Reagan said in his farewell address in 1988. ``It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation -- from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries.''
Codenamed ''Rawhide'' by his Secret Service contingent, a ruggedly handsome man who looked as comfortable in a cowboy hat and jeans as in a tuxedo, Reagan exuded that unambiguous brand of optimism so common to his generation, so appealing to the generations that followed.
'The poet called Miss Liberty's torch, `The lamp beside the golden door,' '' Reagan once said. ``Well, that was the entrance to America and it still is. . . .
``The glistening hope of that lamp is still ours. Every promise, every opportunity is still golden in this land. And through that golden door, our children can walk into tomorrow with the knowledge that no one can be denied the promise that is America.''
He knew that promise very well.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico, Ill., population 849. His father, John Edward Reagan, was a shoe salesman with a flair for storytelling and an attraction to alcohol. Somewhere along the line, John Reagan began calling his son ''Dutch,'' and the nickname stayed with him.
His mother, Nelle, taught him to read at age 5 and encouraged his interest in theater. He had one brother, Neil, two years older.
A lifelong admirer of heroes, Reagan was heroic himself as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, a recreational area on the Rock River. Over seven summers, he claimed to have saved 77 people from drowning.
He displayed an early knack for politics, winning election as president of his high school student body. The motto beneath the picture in his senior yearbook: ``Life is just one grand sweet song, so start the music.''
An athletic scholarship in swimming and football brought Reagan to nearby Eureka College, where he majored in economics and sociology. This was during the Great Depression. He washed dishes to pay some of the bills.
After graduating in June 1932, Reagan worked as a radio sports announcer in Davenport, Iowa, and then at radio station WHO in Des Moines.
In 1937, he went to Hollywood to cover the Chicago Cubs in spring training. A friend introduced him to an agent, who arranged a screen test. Reagan won a $200-a-week movie contract, and he was on his way.
Among the most notable of his 53 films: Kings Row (his favorite), Brother Rat, Dark Victory, Knute Rockne, All-American and the unfortunately titled Bedtime for Bonzo.
Weak eyesight kept him out of combat in World War II, but he made Army training films while living at home with his actress wife, Jane Wyman.
After giving birth to daughter Maureen in 1941 and adopting son Michael in 1945, Wyman slowly grew distant from Reagan. She divorced him in 1948.
Maureen died in August 2001 after a five-year battle against cancer. She was 60, and she had lobbied on behalf of the victims of Alzheimer's disease.
One reason for the end of Reagan's marriage was his growing immersion in union politics. In 1947, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, a post he held for six terms.
He found the great love of his life, actress Nancy Davis, in 1951 and married her the following year. Daughter Patricia was born in 1952, son Ronald in 1958.
The love shared by Ronald and Nancy Reagan seemed obvious to many, but its depth went unrevealed until the release several years ago of a book of letters written by Reagan to his wife. He once called himself ``the most married man in the world.''
One passage from a letter written in 1963:
``Do you know that when you sleep you curl your fists up under your chin and many mornings when it is barely dawn I lie facing you and looking at you until finally I have to touch you ever so lightly so you won't wake up -- but touch you I must or I'll burst?''
Reagan's union duties placed him at center stage in controversies involving mobsters and communists, and fueled his interest in public affairs.
A Democrat then, he campaigned for Harry S. Truman in 1948. Soon, his political sentiments and affiliations changed, partially through his connection with corporate giant General Electric.
Every Sunday night for years, Reagan hosted GE Theater on television, sometimes starring in its productions. He toured company plants and communities as a GE spokesman, emerging as a champion of conservatism.
A stint as host of the Western TV series Death Valley Days from 1962 to 1964 closed his entertainment career, and he became a national political force on Oct. 27, 1964, when he delivered a 30-minute TV address on behalf of Barry Goldwater's doomed candidacy for president.
''This is the issue of this election,'' he told the audience. ``Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.''
Many may have disagreed with his perspective, but Reagan's eloquence transformed a fading actor into the rising leader of conservatism.
His message was the same he would trumpet the rest of his career: Government had become too big, encroaching on individual freedom. It must be shrunk, taxes cut, business regulations eased. The people must take charge of their destiny.
He rode those themes to a landslide victory over incumbent California Gov. Pat Brown in 1966, and easily retained the office four years later.
In 1968, he traveled to Miami Beach and launched an almost quixotic 11th-hour bid for the GOP presidential nomination. In 1976, a deadly earnest struggle with incumbent President Gerald Ford brought Reagan within an eyelash of his party's top prize.
Finally, in 1980, he defeated George Bush, John Connally and Howard Baker to win the Republican nomination. That autumn, President Jimmy Carter portrayed him as a reckless would-be warrior, but Reagan's genial warmth blunted the attack.
After one Carter broadside during a televised debate, Reagan replied mildly and memorably, more in sorrow than in anger. ''There you go again,'' he said, and the phrase entered the political lexicon.
Reagan won 51 percent of the vote to Carter's 41 percent, and he became the oldest person ever elected president.
''Let us begin an era of national renewal,'' Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address. ``We have every right to dream heroic dreams, and after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.''
Reagan's presidency almost ended tragically on March 30, 1981, when would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old drifter, shot him in the chest. The bullet came to rest an inch from the President's heart.
As his life hung in the balance, Reagan's gallant emergency room wit warmed his countrymen.
To his worried wife:
``Honey, I forgot to duck.''
To the doctors preparing him for surgery:
``Please tell me you're Republicans.''
He survived and went on to dominate his decade as few presidents ever have, sweeping in 1984 to a stunning, 49-state reelection victory over Democrat Walter Mondale.
Highlights of his presidency included his ambitious 1981 tax-and-spending cuts; his appointment of the first woman justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, to the Supreme Court; and his crushing of an air traffic controllers' strike -- he simply outlawed their union.
He also brought an actor's touch to his special gift for ceremony. He embodied America's grief after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, which killed all seven astronauts aboard.
''We will never forget them,'' he told the nation, 'nor the last time we saw them -- this morning, as they prepared for their journey, and waved goodbye, and `slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God.' ''
In 1987, he consoled the nation again, this time during a memorial service in Mayport, near Jacksonville, for 37 sailors killed in the Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark. This is what he said:
``Because they were heroes, let us not forget this -- that for all the lovely spring and summer days we will never share with them again, for every Thanksgiving and Christmas that will seem empty without them, there will be other moments, too.
'Moments when we see the light of discovery in young eyes, eyes that see for the first time the world around them and know the sweep of history, and wonder: `Why is there such as place as America? And how is it that such a precious gift is mine?' ''
Still, as commander-in-chief, Reagan frequently exhibited machismo.
He sent the World War II battleship New Jersey to shell Lebanon. As Americans still absorbed the deadly 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, he launched the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada.
After Libya was caught sponsoring a terrorist attack on Americans in Berlin, he ordered warplanes to bomb Moammar Khadafy's capital city. And he supplied a steady stream of military aid to anti-communists in Central America, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But Reagan also took risks for peace.
He repeatedly challenged Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to join him in cutting both powers' nuclear arsenals, eventually succeeding.
And despite widespread skepticism, he stubbornly insisted on pursuing his vision of a shield to protect America from nuclear missiles -- even offering to give Moscow the technology to lower the risk of war.
''A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,'' Reagan proclaimed.
The expensive quest for his space shield -- the Strategic Defense Initiative, or ''Star Wars'' -- was scaled back after he left power, but analysts credit his crusade as pivotal in persuading Moscow to end the Cold War.
Reagan's most grave error as president was the Iran-contra affair. It involved repeated sales of weapons to Iran from mid-1985 to late 1986, directly violating his stand against arming nations that sponsor terrorism.
He hoped the arms sales would help free U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian terrorists, and also might ease relations with Iran, a hostile power. It didn't work.
The other half of the double-barreled scandal involved the diversion of profits from the weapons sales to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua -- the contras -- despite a law forbidding such aid.
After months of public denial, Reagan admitted in a March 1987 TV address that he tried to swap arms for hostages. He called it ``a mistake.''
He always denied knowledge of the contra connection, and investigations never proved otherwise. Still, the Iran-contra affair seriously wounded his credibility and undermined his second term.
After two full terms, Reagan left the presidency to George Bush, his vice president, in January 1989 -- and he left office with the highest public approval rating, 63 percent in the Gallup Poll, of any departing president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Alas, history is another matter and it yields a mixed review.
• Upon taking office, Reagan sharply cut taxes and spending, but by the time he left office, the government was bigger and spent more than ever -- and the national debt had tripled.
• He shepherded the nation out of its worst recession since the 1930s and presided over one of the richest periods of prosperity in history. But he did little to shrink the gap between rich and poor, and many social programs withered during his watch.
• He often was a remote, seemingly disinterested manager of the White House. Early in his second term, when a largely new staff stumbled into Iran-contra, Reagan almost faced impeachment before others led him out of the mess.
''He thought of himself as the leading man, not the producer or the director, and he usually counted on his aides and sometimes on his wife to know what was best for him,'' wrote Lou Cannon, his most authoritative biographer.
``Reagan thought in terms of performance, and those closest to him approached his presidency as if it were a series of productions casting Reagan in the starring role.''
So, in the end, many of his greatest achievements came in the political and symbolic and maybe even spiritual realms.
He led the Republican Party into an era of dominance, as his conservative values reshaped American politics. Democrats could not win the presidency again until Bill Clinton refurbished liberal ideology in 1992 with Reaganesque themes.
He helped restore the power and the majesty of the presidency.
And he re-energized the American spirit, that brash let's-just-get-to-work optimism, after almost 20 years of doldrums from Vietnam, Watergate and economic stagnation.
''Let us renew our determination, our courage and our strength,'' Reagan said during his first inaugural speech. ``And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams.''
Former President Ronald Reagan died Saturday, and his nation mourned.
www.miami.com/mld/miamihe...564.htm?1c
Seriously, just yesterday i was asking myself when that asshole was going to fucking croak
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