Sense of loss extends to stature of presidency

WASHINGTON -- The call that summoned Scott Rockwell, like so many others, to the street corners surrounding the National Cathedral yesterday was stronger than respect, history, or even nostalgia: It was a yearning for a time when the president of the United States was the leader of the free world, all that stood between freedom and tyranny.

''He was always there, that face that we knew," said Rockwell, 36, who recalled looking up to Reagan throughout his teen years. ''When the shuttle Challenger went up I watched him on TV. That face. It's sad to see that face go."

The 1980s weren't so long ago, but for many like Rockwell they mark a sharp divide in perceptions of the presidency. As the clean ideological lines of the Cold War have melted away, the presidency has lost its sense of inviolability. Some Cold War presidents were reviled by their political enemies as much as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been disliked by theirs, but those past leaders of the free world weren't treated with the same contempt.

The worldwide fight against communism put the president on the side of freedom in the great struggle of the day, meaning that at the end of the day America was united in its most important task.

Yesterday, as thousands of young adults rode bikes and wheeled strollers to the neighborhood around the cathedral in Northwest Washington to catch a glimpse of Reagan's casket, they were bidding farewell not only to a figure of admiration but to an era of respect for the presidency.

Reagan was, in the eyes of many, the definitive president of the Cold War period, literally from central casting. Bringing dignity and ceremony to an office strained by a string of traumas, Reagan embodied the American spirit in a way that few could, even in the days when all public-school students grew up reading laudatory biographies of US presidents.

It's not clear whether a president can achieve that stature again, given the lack of clarity of the struggles of the post-Cold War world. After Reagan, fewer Americans viewed the president as the protector of their freedom, and many more took the liberty of questioning the rightness of his stands.

''I see celebration of Reagan as a celebration of the ideal of the head of state," said Boston University presidential historian Michael Corgan.

The State Funeral, with much of the pomp of a British royal procession, conveyed the sense that Reagan's was an earlier, grander presidency.

On Wednesday, when military guards performed an ancient ritual, placing the flag-draped coffin on a horse-drawn caisson, Washingtonians in their work clothes and tourists on vacation lined up 15 deep along Constitution Avenue to watch the procession. As the soldiers stood in silence, cellphones buzzed and clanged and played nursery rhymes throughout the crowd.

No one seemed to be bothered.

''I'm more a Democrat than a Republican, but I like the pageantry and realize that we do this sort of thing well," said Sean Grogan, 46, observing the funeral rituals yesterday. ''In a funny way it makes me glad I live here."

As for Reagan himself, Grogan recalled, ''I was not the biggest fan of him as president, but watching the clips of him I totally understand his gift."

At the National Cathedral yesterday, speaker after speaker remembered the '80s as a time of clear moral choices, what President Bush called ''one of the decisive decades of the century, as the convictions that shaped the president began to shape the times."

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney lauded Reagan as a unique leader. ''I always thought that President Reagan's understanding of the nobility of the presidency coincided with the American dream," Mulroney said. ''One day [French] President Mitterrand in referring to President Reagan said: ''Il a vraiment la notion de l'Etat." Rough translation: 'He really has a sense of the State about him.' "

''What President Mitterrand meant was that there is a vast difference between the job of president and the role of president," Mulroney continued. ''Ronald Reagan fulfilled both with elegance and ease, embodying himself that unusual alchemy of history, tradition, achievement, inspiration, conduct, and national pride that define the special role the president of the United States must assume at home and around the world."

After Reagan left office in January 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. The age of superpower brinkmanship came to an end, and smaller, nationalistic battles replaced the giant chess game of placing missiles and building bases overseas.

Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, declared that the United States must help establish a ''new world order," over which the one remaining superpower would preside as a kind of policeman.

Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, embraced that role, and committed US troops to peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. While many Americans endorsed the new role, they didn't necessarily support every intervention. The lack of an immediate threat to the United States made each move discretionary.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks brought back a sense of overarching purpose, and gave the second President Bush a strong international platform; but the Iraq war has proved to be more discretionary than necessary, and Bush is under constant criticism.

Yesterday, Bush depicted Reagan as the kind of leader he, Bush, has sought to be, with convictions ''as firm and straight as the columns of this cathedral."

The president then left the podium with the straight-shouldered walk he often uses on important occasions, as if straining for an extra half-inch of height.