The United States began saying a long farewell to Ronald Reagan on Sunday at the start of a week of commemoration that will culminate in a state funeral the like of which has not been seen in Washington since the death of Lyndon Johnson in 1973.
After lying in state at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, Reagan’s body will be flown across the country on Wednesday to Washington, where it will lie in state at the US Capitol.
On Friday, the day of the funeral, the procession will pause near the White House on its route to Washington’s National Cathedral.
President Bush and other world leaders are expected to attend, as are luminaries from Reagan’s own era, including Margaret Thatcher.
Services are to be conducted by the newly appointed ambassador to the UN, John Danforth, a former Republican senator who is also an ordained minister. With the G8 summit taking place in Georgia this week, several foreign dignitaries are expected to attend.
Pallbearers will combine the worlds of politics and show business, including the entertainer Merv Griffin, and Reagan’s former White House aide, Michael Deaver.
Reagan’s body is to be flown home immediately after the service for a sunset burial at his presidential library.
The death on Saturday of America’s oldest surviving president, at the age of 93, was expected to bring a pause to campaigning for November’s elections, with John Kerry, the Democratic challenger, suspending rallies.
At weekend sports fixtures, spectators stood for a moment of silence. Television programming was given over to round-the-clock reminiscences of those who knew Reagan during his political career, or potted documentaries harking back to his B-movie career — with repeated recollection of his most famous film line, uttered as a dying football star, to “Win one for the Gipper”.
Commentators also mentioned the extraordinary closeness of his marriage to Nancy Reagan, whom he married following his divorce from actor Jane Wyman.
President George Bush, who considered Reagan a hero, paid tribute during the D-day commemorations in France. “Twenty summers ago, another American president came here to Normandy to pay tribute to the men of D-day,” Bush said. “He was a courageous man himself, and a gallant leader in the cause of freedom.”
Former presidents George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton also offered tributes, hailing Reagan’s charm as much as his conservative legacy. “He could take a stand… and do it without creating bitterness or creating enmity on the part of other people,” Bush Sr said.
Clinton said Reagan had expressed the “indomitable optimism of the American people”. Kerry said: “Even when he was breaking Democrats’ hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate.”
The tributes came in even from Reagan’s former foes. From Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the state branded by Reagan as the “evil empire”, said he was distressed to learn of the death.
“Reagan was a statesman who, despite all disagreements that existed between our countries at the time, displayed foresight and determination to meet our proposals halfway and change our relations for the better, stop the nuclear race, start scrapping nuclear weapons, and arrange normal relations between our countries,” Gorbachev told Interfax news agency.
There was no sign of bitterness, either, from Walter Mondale, who suffered a humiliating defeat against Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “One thing that I feel strongly about is how civilised that campaign was,” Mondale told CNN television. “Ronald Reagan was not a mean man. In the campaign, there was no meanness, there was no viciousness, there were no personal attacks.”
Not everyone was so generous. The Libyan leader, Moammar Gadaffi, said he regretted that Reagan had died, but only because he would never face trial for an air strike he ordered that killed his adopted daughter and 36 other people.
The bombing, in April 1986, was in response to a discotheque bombing in Berlin, allegedly ordered by Colonel Gadaffi, that killed two soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 229 people. – Guardian Unlimited Â