Noonan worked in the Reagan White House and clearly expresses the thoughts of many in this nation in her editorial:
He was dying for years and the day came and somehow it came as a blow. Not a loss but a blow. How could this be? Maybe we were all of us more loyal to him, and to the meaning of his life, than we quite meant to be.And maybe it's more.
This was a life with size. It had heft, and meaning. And I am thinking of what Stephen Vincent Benet, a writer whom he quoted, wrote on the death of his friend Scott Fitzgerald. "You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you'd better."
Ronald Reagan was not unappreciated at the end, far from it. But he was at the beginning.
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