Chuck Thompson and his family left home in Indiana after dark and arrived in Washington at dawn on Thursday after 10 hours driving, just as the sun was beginning to reflect off the Capitol’s gleaming white dome.
After queuing for two hours in the rapidly rising temperature, the Thompsons were still 200 metres away from the building’s grand steps and about an hour’s wait from the grand rotunda where Ronald Reagan’s coffin was lying in state.
Their two children, who had slept in the car, were now playing happily in the parched grass of Washington’s Mall, which was heating up like a long thin griddle along the Potomac river.
But the family had at least reached a line of giant green fans set up on the lawn to ward off heat exhaustion in the crowd.
Thompson was ebullient. President Reagan had been a lifelong hero, and with every step he was taking his family closer to history. ”For me, he was so strong, so certain. That’s unusual in politics, where everybody is so flimsy,” he said. America’s current leader, Thompson thought, was ”more of a compromiser”, but he still backed President Bush and the military effort in Iraq.
His T-shirt urged Americans to ”Support Our Troops” on the front, and ”Pray for our Nation” on the back.
Lili Campbell had come even further. She had travelled from Cape Cod in Massachusetts and began queuing at 4am. She had campaigned for Reagan in 1976, and her loyalty still burned intensely.
”Americans like straight-talking presidents. They don’t like lip-biting, poll-taking presidents,” she said, and nodded towards the Capitol. ”If it was Clinton up there you would have had four people.”
At one point on Thursday morning, there were 30 000 people waiting for a two-minute audience with the late president. The official prediction was that 200 000 Americans will have viewed the coffin in the 34 hours of lying in state before Friday’s funeral.
The long lines of mourners here and in Reagan’s Californian home have been mostly portrayed on television as a moment of national unity at a time of peril and bitterly polarised politics. But the outpouring has not been entirely spontaneous.
Reagan’s long farewell has been planned for years by a small coterie of supporters, with the aim of elevating him above the ranks of other modern presidents to a higher pantheon occupied by America’s Founding Fathers. The intricate plans were apparently codenamed ”Operation Serenade”.
”We need every opportunity to show the media, who might be sceptical, that this is the way America feels about the guy,” Jim Hooley, a former Reagan aide and one of the main organisers behind the week’s events, told the Wall Street Journal.
Reagan was a self-made man, but his legend has been largely manufactured since his days in the White House. The last touches were being applied to the finished product on Thursday.
His average popularity while in office was a very ordinary 54%, lower than both presidents Bush and Bill Clinton. And Thursday’s funeral queue was far from a cross-section of the nation. Only one side of the deep national divide had turned out to mourn. The overwhelming majority were from a country the political pundits call Red America — conservative, mostly evangelical Christians from the American heartland between the more cosmopolitan, coasts. They fly the flag on their lawns and they are almost entirely white.
In a city that is two-thirds black, less than one mourner in 50 was African-American. The exceptions were mostly retired soldiers and policemen but they also included Elton Watkins, a 23-year-old whose baseball hat and basketball singlet set him apart from the pressed shorts, straw hats and short-sleeved shirts of the rest of the crowd.
Nostalgia
”We did work on him when we were at school, so I wanted to come and see him,” Watkins said. As a Democrat, he doubted he would have voted for Reagan, but he thought some of what America’s 40th president had done sounded admirable. ”He tore down that wall,” he said.
Reagan’s image as the conqueror of the Soviet bloc and the destroyer of the Berlin Wall was further burnished by the homage paid by old familiar faces. Margaret Thatcher communed with the late president one last time soon after his flag-draped coffin was set down in the Capitol rotunda on Wednesday night. Mikhail Gorbachev arrived just after sunrise on Thursday. They appeared by the casket like frail envoys from another age — an era of greater certainty in which an Evil Empire was vanquished and even America’s mortal enemies, the communists, were obliged to acknowledge their faults.
Nostalgia for that age flourished in the condolence books laid out on trestle tables outside the Capitol.”You erased my childhood memories of nuclear war,” wrote Michael from Vermont. ”Thanks for freeing us from the evil empire,” wrote Al Kazon from New Jersey.
Reagan is being buried in different times. The country’s foes are harder to spot, they threaten to strike the homeland at any moment and the battle is not going well. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have led even some of the faithful to question the nation’s course.
If there was a division in Red America on Thursday, it was between those, like Lili Campbell, who believed that President Bush had been made in Reagan’s image, and those who felt the current president had fallen short of the Reagan ideal.
Senior airman Mike Ford was in the second camp. He joined the queue outside the Capitol while on leave from his base in Djibouti, one of the far-flung US garrisons in the war on terrorism.
”Bush is not in the Reagan mould,” he said. ”I don’t think he has the same faith in the people that Reagan had. You expect a president to do what people think. Not dictate to people what to think.”
Dignitaries to attend funeral
Among the foreign dignitaries expected to attend the former president’s funeral are:
Baroness Thatcher; Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president; Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor; Tony Blair; Prince Charles; Mary McAleese, Irish president; Thabo Mbeki, South African president; Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerian president; Ion Iliescu, Romanian president; Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state; Brian Mulroney, former Canadian premier; Lech Walesa, former Polish president; Yasuhiro Nakasone, former Japanese premier ; Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan president; Michel Barnier, French foreign minister; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former French president; Silvio Berlusconi, Italian premier; Vaclav Klaus, Czech president. – Guardian Unlimited Â