Ronald Reagan has died, a day before the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy landing. It looks like Andrew Lloyd’s sources were right a few days ago. Given this weekend’s somber remembrances, it might be appropriate to replay his D-Day speech from twenty years ago (though that would put a lot of pressure on President Bush to deliver a real humdinger tomorrow if it’s not to be overshadowed).

I never voted for him (I voted Libertarian), but he was one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, and I’m glad he won both times (and was at the time, considering the alternatives). The Soviet Union may have collapsed eventually, but there’s zero doubt in my mind that he accelerated the process, and broke us out of the failed policy of containment. He was a man of great vision, and in that, we haven’t had a president since, including the present one, that was his match.

Of course, in my mind he’s been dead for years, and it’s sad that we give so much reverence to the body and too little to the mind. I don’t know if he was suffering toward the end, but this has to be a sorrow tinctured with relief for his long-suffering family.