Mourning brings Reagans together

LOS ANGELES — In a week of enduring images, perhaps the most poignant came at the end.

Nancy Reagan, saying her final farewell to her husband of 52 years, rested her head on his casket, crying and caressing the mahogany coffin as she was surrounded by the president’s three surviving children.

They formed a picture of a tightknit family, loving and supportive, all the more touching because such unity had so often eluded them in the past.

The public perception of the former first couple’s relationship with their children, particularly with daughter Patti Davis, had long been one of a family divided.

The children found themselves competing for attention from a father whose time was split — first by acting, then by divorce, then by politics. In the end, however, all found a way to reconcile with a man they came to revere.

“The more I understood him, the more I began to love him as a father and put things behind me,” said Michael Reagan, Mr. Reagan’s adopted son. “I started to remember the wonderful times he gave me instead of the times he couldn’t be there because he had other obligations.”

The former president’s surviving children had been in the background while the nation mourned their father. Another child from Mr. Reagan’s first marriage, Maureen, died of cancer in 2001 at age 60.

Until Friday, they spoke about their relationships with him only in magazine columns or brief interviews.

But during the burial service at their father’s presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., Michael, Patti and Ron Reagan gave eulogies that honored him as caring, warm and committed.

“Honest, compassionate, graceful, brave,” said Ron Reagan, 46. “He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet.”

Miss Davis, 51, wrote in an essay scheduled to appear in Newsweek this week that her father remained in shadow for much of her life.

“No one ever saw all of him,” she wrote. “It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.”

America, she wrote, often seemed the family’s most important child.

“I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him,” she said.

Miss Davis and Ron Reagan, their father’s children with Nancy, rejected their father’s politics and spoke out against some of his policies as president, including those on the nuclear arms race and AIDS.

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