Ronald Reagan: A Light Extinguished, A Legacy That Endures

From now until President Reagan is laid to rest, I will be posting a selection of his speeches, that, in my humble opinion, best define him as a man and a leader. - Sailor


Ronald Reagan: A Light Extinguished, A Legacy That Endures
Posted June 5, 2004
By Peter Roff


The memory and accomplishments of those whom broadcaster Tom Brokaw dubbed "the Greatest Generation," are very much in mind these days. Just one week ago, the United States dedicated a memorial on the National Mall in their honor, just before the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the liberation of Europe.

Ronald Reagan, who died Saturday at the age of 93, never forgot that struggle, never forgot how the world's democracies were imperiled by regimes that drew their power from tyranny and how that unnecessary struggle came to be.

Twenty years ago, at ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Reagan gave what may be his most enduring speech, setting down plainly and simply what it all meant.

"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc," Reagan said to the surviving crowd of old men, some infirm, some still hampered by injuries sustained in that battle and that long ago war. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war."

In his own way, Reagan, as leader of the Republican Party, leader of the nation and leader of the free world, took his own cliffs, helped free several continents and helped end a war.

There were many who loved Reagan for what he was and what he represented and there were many who hated him for the same reasons. He always found a way to remind us that the United States' best days were yet to come, even when it seemed they were long past. Reagan represented the United States at its best, with an infectious optimism that let everyone know that things would turn out okay because American was a special place, full of remarkable people and founded on the ideal that all mankind is, simply by virtue of its creation, equal.

At a time when many counseled compromise with the Soviet Union as it marched down the road to world domination, Reagan said "No." To him, communism was not just a different political system; it was an evil thing that needed to be stamped out if liberty and humanity were to endure.

At a time when there were many who, at home and abroad, believed the United States, because of its economic, military and cultural power was a force for ill, Reagan strode across the world stage, a colossal figure, a giant in a time of other giants, to set out the truth as he saw it and to unashamedly pursue that truth.

Historians writing in a future age will no doubt praise Reagan for all that he accomplished and all that he set in motion. No other figure, say perhaps Winston Churchill, did so much in the 20th century to shape the early stages of the 21st. Under his leadership, the United States restarted the engine of its prosperity, creating 20 million jobs and 7 million small businesses, checked inflation, sparked record growth in the U.S. economy and spawned a worldwide boom that carried forward well beyond his presidency.

Throughout Europe, throughout Central America and into South America, Asia and Africa, there are people who today live free because Reagan believed that freedom could triumph over tyranny and because he had the courage to carry the battle for liberty forward, unbowed if bloody by partisan critics.

What Reagan said at Pointe du Hoc in 1984 is worth repeating as we mourn his passing. "You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.

"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.

"You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man."

On that momentous day, Reagan recalled the words of a poem by Stephen Spender, telling "the boys of Pointe du Hoc," that they were men who in their "lives fought for life ... and left the vivid air signed with your honor." And today, as he has been called home to glory, the same should be said of him.

Peter Roff is a senior political analyst for UPI, a sister news organization of Insight.