From all corners of the planet, the eulogies streamed in — a torrent of words for the president known as "the Great Communicator," the man who aimed his message at regular people and whose enemies and friends agreed he changed the world.
"Ronald Reagan needs no one to sing his praises," Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said. But they did anyway. The 40th president's death evoked a world of remembrances Saturday from friends, Republican political soulmates and opponents who squared off against him.
"A man who changed history," said U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., whose party spent 12 years trying to reclaim the White House after Reagan captured it in 1980. "He won the Cold War without firing a shot," former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore said.
The mourning in America was swift. Flags sank to half-staff. Ballparks went mute for the former Chicago Cubs announcer, and the Belmont Stakes held a moment of silence. In Dixon, Ill., Reagan's childhood home, Ken and Marilyn Knotts laid two roses under his statue.
In Paris, President Bush called it "a sad hour in the life of America." In England, Queen Elizabeth II mourned "a truly great American hero."
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan's friend and conservative counterpart across the Atlantic in the 1980s, invoked the "millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued."
And from presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry: "Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."
For Reagan, the praise capped a career built on imagemaking and public relations. The former actor and his cadre of consultants defined the political landscape of the 1980s, carefully calibrating the populist message he offered to the world — more adeptly, perhaps, than any American president before him.
From coast to coast Saturday, Americans of all political persuasions invoked the pithy statements offered by the man whose crack staff helped make the term "sound bite" a household word. Among them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
"No president in American history understood the timbre of the American character better than Ronald Reagan," said Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa. Drew Lewis, Reagan's transportation secretary from 1981 to 1983, went further: "He was not the laid-back kind of lackadaisical person that he presented himself to be. That was a facade."
Among regular Americans — the noncelebrities at whom Reagan aimed his messages of homespun hope — a warmth was evident. Mark Spencer, a security guard in Santa Monica, Calif., considered Reagan a national grandfather. Navy veteran Bill Keys of Richfield, Ohio, said Reagan presided over a foreign-policy era in which America "could talk to people, which is not happening today."
"He was an actor, and he used it well," said Giuseppe Rizza, 53, in Washington, D.C.
"Whether you agreed or disagreed with Ronald Reagan, you can't deny that he was honest, fought hard for what he believed in and had the courage of his convictions," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
An anti-war rally in Los Angeles, however, offered a different point of view.
"He was the first time I voted Democratic. I couldn't believe they were going to run an actor for president," said Anna May Nelson, 67, of Burbank, Calif.
The world, too, offered farewells — from German President Johannes Rau to French leader Jacques Chirac to Australian transportation minister John Anderson.
"They wrote Truman off as a little haberdasher from Missouri and they wrote Reagan off as a B-grade actor, but in reality both have done a huge amount to lock in the freedoms that so many countless tens of millions of people, including ourselves, take for granted around the world," Anderson said.
In the nations of the former Soviet bloc, subjects of the communist sphere of influence that Reagan famously called the "Evil Empire," sentiment ran high.
"He is the one who allowed the breakup of the Soviet Union," said Bogdan Chireac, a foreign affairs analyst for the Romanian newspaper Adevarul. "May God rest his soul."
The overwhelming praise from public figures Saturday illustrated Reagan's ultimate political success — his elevation to national icon well before his death.
New York Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, offered a remembrance reminiscent of Reagan himself: "The sun has set on the remarkable life of the great man who reminded us it is always morning in America."