Former US President Ronald Reagan, who made an astounding career change by leaping from acting to politics and then forging a conservative revolution that reshaped American politics, died on Saturday after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
The man admired for his sunny optimism and skills as "The Great Communicator" died of pneumonia at age 93 at his home in the posh Bel Air section of Los Angeles.
Members of his immediate family were at his bedside, including his wife of 52 years, Nancy -- loved ones he was no longer able to recognize or speak to because of Alzheimer's.
PHOTO: EPA
The death ended a long, painful last chapter in a close marriage. Just last month, Nancy Reagan made a rare speech in which she described her husband's last days suffering from Alzheimer's.
"Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place, where I can no longer reach him," she said, urging support for stem cell research to help cure Alzheimer's.
The White House said the death of the 40th president was a sad day for the US. "A great American life has come to an end," US President George W. Bush said in Paris following talks with French President Jacques Chirac.
Bush, whose politics seemed modeled on Reagan's as much as on his own father, President George H. W. Bush, said, "He leaves behind a nation he restored, and a world he helped save."
He added that "now a shining city awaits him," a reference to a favorite speech line of Reagan's about America becoming a shining city on the hill.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who became a close friend of his, praised Reagan for what she said was his greatest achievement -- ending the Cold War "without a shot being fired."
Thatcher added, "To have achieved so much, against such odds, and with such humor and humanity, made Ronald Reagan a truly great American hero."
Even Reagan's political enemies, the Democrats, were quick to offer praise. Senator John Kerry, the party's expected presidential nominee, said, "Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious. Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."
Opening his weekly national radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, in a live Saturday broadcast from Gilford, New Hampshire, Garrison Keillor saluted Reagan as "a great man who befuddled us old liberals for years, mainly with his great, shining charm, which never ever failed him."
Reagan's body was taken in a flag-draped coffin to a local funeral home to be embalmed later on Saturday.
Today, according to long set plans, he will lie in state at the Reagan library, north of Los Angeles, before being flown the next day to Washington to lie in state there.
Barring last minute changes, a funeral service will be held at the National Cathedral and his body will be flown back to California to be buried on a hillside at the Reagan library on Thursday.
It will be the first presidential state funeral in Washington since Lyndon Johnson's in 1973 and poses security problems for a city that was a target of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the funeral home where Reagan's body was taken and at the entrance to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where they turned a stone entry gate into a flag-draped makeshift memorial.
Reagan had suffered from the brain-wasting Alzheimer's disease since 1994. The man who held five summits with Mikhail Gorbachev was reduced to playing children's games with his wife before his condition worsened and he entered the last stages of the disease, recognizing no-one.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman in Illinois, began his career broadcasting baseball games in the Middle West, games whose plays he would make up off a sports ticker.
He moved to Hollywood and became a fixture of the B-movie scene. His most famous line came in the football film Knute Rockne, All American where as dying player George Gipp, Reagan uttered the line, "Just win one for the Gipper."
As his career faded in the 1950s and 1960s, Reagan used his job as the anti-Communist chief of the Screen Actor's Guild as training for a shift to politics where he ultimately starred on the world stage in better roles than he ever had in any of his 50 movies.
Inspired by Barry Goldwater's conservatism, he switched parties and became a Republican in 1962 and ran twice successfully as California's governor.
As president from 1981 to 1989, he presided over a conservative revival that changed America's political and economic landscape for years.
Dozens of major politicians dominating the scene today, including President Bush, owe their inspiration to what was called "The Reagan Revolution."
He became the first right-wing president in 50 years; the first in 30 years to serve two terms; and the first to spend a trillion dollars on peacetime defense and witness a doubling of the national debt.
He called the Soviet Union an evil empire and helped defeat it in the Cold War by presiding over a massive US defense build-up that the Russians could not afford to match.
Reagan was thrust into his gravest crisis with the disclosure in November 1986 that the US had sold arms to Iran in 1985 and 1986 and diverted proceeds to US-backed Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.
Reagan declared himself guilty of nothing but poor judgment and 1987 hearings in Congress backed him up regarding one central point: Witnesses said he wasn't told about the Contra funds.
He left office two weeks shy of his 78th birthday, by far the oldest president the US had ever had and more popular than any predecessor in history.
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