That's what the world did after the Wall came down, and is doing now. We went inside and finished lunch. But it is good to remember: a marvel had visited, had come down and landed on the lawn, even though such things are impossible. And it's good to remember that though many people built and funded and sacrificed for the "plane," Ronald Reagan was its pilot.

Domestically, he was no less a smasher of the status quo, a leader for serious and "impossible" change. F.D.R., the great President of Reagan's young manhood and from whom he learned the sound and tone and tense of the presidency, convinced the country in the 1930s that only the bounty and power of the Federal establishment could fully heal a wounded country. Reagan convinced (or reminded) the country that the bounty came from us, the people, that the power was absorbed from us, the people, and that we the people would benefit from a good portion of their return. Reagan had a libertarian conviction, which is really an old American conviction, that power is best and most justly wielded from the individual to the community to the state and then the Federal Government--and not from the Federal Government on down. He thought, as Jefferson said, that that government governs best that governs least. He wanted to shrink the bloated monster; he wanted to cut very seriously the amount of money the monster took from the citizenry each year in taxes.

He was not afraid to speak on school prayer and abortion, though his aides warned him it hurt him in the polls. He cared about the polls but refused to let them silence him. Abortion is wrong, he said, because it both kills and coarsens.

In doing all this, in taking the actions he took at home and abroad, in using words and conviction and character to fight, he produced the biggest, most successful and most meaningful presidency since Franklin Roosevelt's. In fact, when you look at the great Presidents of this century, I think it comes down to two Roosevelts and a Reagan. Reagan kept Teddy's picture in his Cabinet Room, in part because he loved T.R.'s brio in tackling the big questions.

The result of Reagan's presidency? I asked him a few years after he left office what he thought his legacy was, how he would sum it up. It wasn't a very Reagan question: he didn't think much about his personal place in history, he thought about what was right and then tried to do it. But he told me he thought his eight years could be summed up this way: "He tried to expand the frontiers of human freedom in a world at peace with itself."

He came from nowhere, not from Hyannis or Greenwich but from nowhere. He was born above a store in Tampico, Ill., born in fact 16 years before Lucky Lindy landed in Paris. It is easy to romanticize the Midwest Reagan came from, but he didn't. "There was nothing in those towns," he told me when I asked, years ago, why he left. He wanted more, and got it, in Hollywood and beyond. But he was not just a lucky and blessed young man, a bright fellow smiled on by the gods. He had grit.

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