Buried: Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California
Fortieth President-1981-1989
Born: February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois
Died: 1:00 p.m. on June 5, 2004, in Bel-Air, California
Age at death: 93
Cause of death: pneumonia, complicated
by Alzheimer’s disease
Final words: Unknown
Admission to Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library and Museum: $12.00
On January 20, 1989, Ronald Reagan took a final look at the Oval Office and remarked how bare it was. The fortieth president had served two terms in office, survived an assassination attempt, and at the age of seventy-seven was the oldest man to leave the presidency. He watched as his vice president, George Bush, took the oath to succeed him. Then, Ronald Reagan, the most popular president to leave the White House since Dwight D. Eisenhower, retired to his ranch in Bel Air, California.
Ronald Reagan selected one hundred acres of undeveloped land, high in the Simi foothills, north of Los Angeles for the site of his library and museum. On November 4, 1991, former presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and President George Bush attended the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum. Reagan told his audience, “The doors of this library are open now and all are welcome. The judgment of history is left to you—the people. I have no fears of that, for we have done our best….”
A piece of the Berlin Wall, the subject of one of Ronald Reagan’s most famous speeches
The library and museum contains 50 million documents relating to Reagan’s presidency. There is a wall of movie posters from Reagan’s Hollywood years featuring Bedtime for Bonzo, Stallion Road, and Hasty Heart, and photos of young Reagan as a life guard, a radio sports announcer, and a movie star. Visitors also can see a replica of the Oval Office, watch a panoramic video on Reagan’s legacy, and read a telegram to Reagan from the parents of his attempted assassin John Hinckley. The First Lady’s Gallery details Nancy Reagan’s life and contributions.
The Ronald Reagan Library and Museum is located in the hills of Simi Valley, California
In November 1994, Ronald Reagan wrote a formal farewell letter to the country, revealing that he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and would be leaving public life. He wrote, “When the Lord calls me home whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
Ronald Reagan passed away on June 5, 2004, at his home in Bel-Air, California, at the age of ninety-three. His wife, Nancy, and two of his children, Ron and Patti, were by his side. Only one president, Gerald Ford, lived longer. Reagan’s passing touched off a week of memorial ceremonies ranging from Southern California to Washington, D.C., and back again. Following a brief, private ceremony for family members at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, the public was first able to pay their respects as Reagan’s casket lay in repose; over 100,000 mourners visited the library over the course of two days.
The rose garden in front of the Reagan gravesite
Ronald Reagan is buried in this tomb bearing the presidential seal
From California, Nancy Reagan accompanied her husband’s casket on a flight to Washington, D.C., for the first state funeral held since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1973. In the Capitol rotunda, Reagan’s casket was displayed on a catafalque built in 1865 for the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. Mourners waited in line for hours to file past the coffin. President George W. Bush declared Friday, June 11, a day of mourning as Reagan’s cortege proceeded from the Capitol along a five-mile route to the National Cathedral. Thousands of onlookers lined the D.C. streets. The service drew notable statesmen and-women from around the world, including all living former presidents and first ladies, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev. The coffin was flown back to California, where Ronald Reagan was buried at his presidential library during a sunset service for 700 guests.
Touring the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
The Ronald Reagan Library and Museum, in Simi Valley, California, is open daily, excluding Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is $12.00 for adults, $9.00 for senior citizens, $3.00 for children ages eleven to seventeen, and free for children ages ten and under.
From Los Angeles and points south: Take I-405 North toward Sacramento to 118 West. Exit at Madera Road South, then turn right on Madera and proceed three miles to Presidential Drive.
From Santa Barbara and points north: Take 101 South to 23 North and exit at Olsen Road. Turn right on Olsen and proceed two miles to Presidential Drive.
Follow Presidential Drive up the hill to the library and look for parking signs.
For additional information
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
40 Presidential Drive
Simi Valley, CA 93065
Phone: (800) 410-8354
www.reagan.utexas.edu
“ . . . . . . Reagan himself had often likened politics to show business.”
—Richard Norton Smith
Though ill with Alzheimer’s disease for nearly a decade at the time of his death in June 2004, Ronald Reagan had enjoyed a renaissance of popular and scholarly approval. Against the twilight of Reagan’s slow fade, many a journalist and academic—some more grudgingly than others—came to reconsider dismissive assessments made at the end of the Reagan presidency. This was not without irony, since Reagan himself had often likened politics to show business. In both occupations, he liked to say, success required a big opening and an equally dramatic close. As good as his word, when he slipped away on June 5, it was not before a stunning moment of emotional connection with the woman who had shared his life for nearly half a century. As Nancy Reagan looked on, her husband opened his eyes before he closed them for the last time. He saw her. His wordless gesture communicated volumes to those by his bedside.
While the circumstances surrounding this president’s passing could not have differed more from the horror and convulsive grief of November 1963, there was in both deaths a sense of history transcending mere headlines, of legends in the making. For millions of admirers, Ronald Reagan had become an iconic figure. Sensing the climax of a decisive chapter in the national story, they lined up for hours to ride buses to the mountaintop Reagan Library in Simi Valley, forty miles northwest of Los Angeles. They stood five-and six-deep on the streets of Washington, a town not generally seen as a hotbed of Reaganesque politics. At such times presidential historians find themselves much in demand. As a former director of the Reagan Presidential Library, I returned my share of press calls that week. But I also wanted to get out of the television studio, to experience for myself the street level response generated by Reagan’s passing.
So a little after 8 o’clock on a warm June evening I joined the shuffling line outside the Capitol waiting to pay its respects. It snaked down the Hill, past the charging bronze figure of Ulysses S. Grant, beyond the granite lined pools of water which imperfectly connect the sloping Capitol grounds to the adjoining Mall. The moonlit dome, rushed to completion as a symbol of national unity amidst a brutal civil war, provided the perfect backdrop for a National Review Woodstock. By the time I walked into the rotunda, shortly before two in the morning, I had conversed with dozens of strangers, many barely old enough to have personal recollections of a presidency that had ended fifteen years before. There were families with strollers and military personnel in uniform; a carload of college kids who had driven from New Jersey; a woman from Missouri, who hadn’t slept since leaving home an indeterminate number of hours earlier. Periodically cameramen and microphone-wielding journalists invaded our ranks. Reagan stories were told. Old recordings of speeches drifted on the soft spring night. A friend’s cell phone allowed us to share the experience with the randomly called.
Nancy Reagan is presented with an American flag at her husband’s funeral
It was one of those increasingly rare water cooler moments, a mélange of patriotic pride and spirituality and the humbling perspective that comes with confronting our mortality. But if politics were briefly adjourned, democracy was not. Even now, angry, sometimes profane dissents were being registered online and via that defining instrument of electronic populism, the call-in show. Appearing the next day on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal I received a couple such jabs myself. Would similar abuse, I wondered, albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum, have greeted the demise of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? Probably. For in the über partisan climate of recent years—wherein adversaries are routinely treated as enemies, and the clash of ideas can all too easily morph into ideological jihad—death itself cannot instill good manners, let along the unity of grief.
—RNS