[ScaniaBoy]

You are so right.

I made my first visit to the USA in 1985. I was welcomed by President Reagan's cheerful face in the passageway at JFK. Just that made me feel that there was something special in the air.

And then; the bouncing, positive attitude that I found everywhere I traveled. The country was positively buzzing.

Not at all what you had been expected to find, if you watched the broadcast news in Sweden or Britain. And certainly not the malaise that we had been used to associate with the US ever since the Vietnam war, Watergate, Carter etc.

Instead it was the "can do" mentality of the US of the late 1800s which had lasted to the Kennedy years, and now reinvented by the Reagan revolution after some sad decades.

Ronald Reagan was truly a Great American, and thus, a great man. It is a sad day when such a man passes away, but we have to console ourselves with the fact that we have been blessed with his presence.

ScaniaBoy

[Jeff Head]

Thank you for that tribute of your own and the wonderful perspective.

He was a greeat American...but also simply a great man.

[NavyCanDo]

My Father was a die hard Rosevelt Democrat but with very conservative values. It was in Regan's eight years where he began to see the light. He voted for Jimmy Carter, but after eight prosperous years, the end of the cold war, and a new respect for America around the world it open his eyes and he grew to love Ronald Reagan. He became his hero in fact. He voted for Republicans ever since.

How fitting he should go to heaven the same year as his hero. God bless them both.