Joel’s Improved Personal Website
Peggy Noonan foresaw this day in 1989:
“...He would have lived to see the Communist world break up, and seen us build the manned space station. An old man exhausted in a great struggle, one of the leaders of the Eighties we now, in the year 2011, acknowledge to have been great. Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II, perhaps Gorbachev…dead now, and here we are gathered once again, like the end of Chariots of Fire, where one of the old running stars, bent and gray, turns to a friend at Harold Abraham’s funeral and says, ‘We did it, didn’t we?’ as the stern chords of ‘Jerusalem’ boom from the Cathedral.”
Ronald Reagan’s death hit me a little harder than I would have thought.
Recently I bought a five dollar book of short stories about Abe Lincoln – things he said, people he pardoned, wise responses in sticky situations. To read about President Lincoln is to be motivated to be a better person. The same can be said of George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt. President Reagan belongs in that group. It was after I saw that, that I realized what a loss to the country his death was.