I know that Reagan left government bigger than he found it, but still, he was the only president of my lifetime that I actually liked. He had grace, charm, class, and most of the right enemies. I don't have anything to add to all the eulogizing going on, except the following cool story about the twentysomething RR from Edmund Morris's much maligned, but flakily interesting Dutch:

"Paul was talking about a nurse who had been held up beneath Dutch's bedroom window in Des Moines. A warm Sunday night; the time about eleven o'clock; suddenly the sound of a man snarling something, and a young woman's voice, high and panicky:"Take everything I've got but let me go" Reagan leaps out of bed, seizes his latest acquisition, a .45 automatic (unloaded), and in the glow of a street lamp outside sees one of the girls from Broadlawns General Hospital with her hands in the air. The man menacing her is stooping to pick up her bag, when a light baritone that carries well on the air rings out: 'Leave her alone or I'll shoot you right between the shoulders!'"