He showed one kind of grit by becoming a conservative in Hollywood in the '50s and '60s. Just when everyone else was going left, particularly everyone in Hollywood who could enhance his career, he was going right. But he held to his position. It is easier to have convictions when they are shared by everyone around you; it is easier to hold to those convictions when you are surrounded by like-minded people. He almost never was.

He could take it in the face and keep on walking. Reaganites like to point to his 1976 run for the presidency, when he came within an inch of unseating Jerry Ford. When Reagan lost, he gave a valiant speech to his followers in which he spoke of the cause and signaled that he'd be back.

But I like to remember this: Reagan played Vegas. In 1954, when demand for his acting services was slowing, Reagan emceed a variety act to make money and keep his name in the air. He didn't like doing it. But it was what he had to do, so he did it. The point is he knew what it was to be through, to have people not answer your calls. When I thought about this time in his life once, I thought, All the great ones have known failure, but only the greatest of the great use it. He always used his. It deepened him and sharpened him. What was it that made him great? You can argue that great moments call forth great leaders, that the '20s brought forth a Harding, but the dramatic and demanding '30s and '80s summoned an F.D.R. and a Reagan. In Reagan's case, there was also something else. It was that he didn't become President to reach some egocentric sense of personal destiny; he didn't need the presidency, and he didn't go for it because of some strange vanity, some weird desire to be loved or a need of power to fill the empty spaces within. He didn't want the presidency in order to be a big man. He wanted the presidency so that he could do big things.

I think as we look back we will see him as the last gentleman of American politics. He was as courtly and well mannered as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich are not. He was a person of dignity and weight, warmth and wit. The English say a gentleman is one who never insults another by accident, but Reagan took it a step further: he wouldn't insult another on purpose.

For all that, there was of course his famous detachment. I never understood it, and neither, from what I've seen, did anyone else. It is true that when you worked for him, whether for two years or 20, he didn't care that much about your feelings. His saving grace — and it is a big one, a key one to his nature — is that he didn't care much about his feelings either. The cause was all, the effort to make the world calmer and the country freer was all.

Reagan's achievements were adult achievements, but when I think of him now I think of the reaction he got from the young. It was as if some mutual sweetness were sensed on both sides.

The man who ran speechwriting in the Reagan White House was Bently Elliott, and Ben's secretary was a woman in her early 20s named Donna. She adored Reagan. When he came back from long trips, when his helicopter landed on the White House lawn, the sound and whirr of the engine and blades would make our offices shake. We'd all stop and listen. Donna would call out, spoofing the mother in a '50s sitcom, "Daddy's home!" But you know, that's how I think a lot of people felt when Reagan was in the White House: Daddy's home. A wise and brave and responsible man is running things. And that's a good way to feel.

Another memory. Ben Elliott went with Reagan on his trip to China in 1984. Reagan spoke everywhere, as the ruling gerontocracy watched and weighed. The elders did not notice that the young of China were falling in love with the American President (that love was expressed in part in Beijing's great square during the democracy movement of 1989). One day as Reagan spoke about the history of America and the nature of democracy, a young Chinese student, standing in the back and listening to the translation, turned to the American visitor, Ben Elliott. He didn't know much English, but he turned to Ben, pointed toward Reagan and said, eyes shining, "He is great Yankeeman."

One great Yankeeman is exactly what he was, and is.

Author Peggy Noonan was a Special Assistant and speechwriter for President Reagan

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