WASHINGTON  -  On one of my first trips to the Oval Office, in 1985, the Emerson family went together to present a commemorative medallion on the 250th anniversary St. Genevieve’s founding to President Ronald Reagan.

As we approached the Oval Office, outside of which we were to wait for the president, the door swung open.  Our daughter Katharine had been obediently holding my hand,
but at that moment she broke away from me and ran towards President Reagan.  The Secret Service men standing between us and the president moved to stop her.

“No, no,” President Reagan evenly said to them.  Katharine flew past them and jumped up into the president’s arms.  He lifted her up high.

The genuine joy on both of their faces struck me then.  Today, the memory reminds me
that as strong a man as he was, President Reagan could easily match the enthusiastic happiness of a two-year-old.

I suppose odd impulses grip all children. In political households, though, the impulses can lead to some interesting scenarios, such as they did with Katharine.

At her tender age of two, Ronald Reagan was my daughter’s hero.

It was not the president’s rhetoric that won her.  It was not his stalwart countenance
under the distress of terror in the Middle East, his unwavering courage in the face of Communism, or his passionate leadership in the shadow of a nuclear threat.  No dinner table conversation convinced her of her regard for our president.  Not even the lure of the jellybean jar on his desk made him a great man to Katharine.

Plainly put – the quality that won her was the same one that won us all – his sincerity. 

Reagan loved America and Americans.  He trusted us with the task of returning our nation to greatness, with economic recovery, with defeat of the evil in the world, with restoration of the American spirit from our largest cities to our smallest towns.  He instructed us to love our families, to grow up kind, to preserve our land and then to better it.

Ronald Reagan was not just a leader whom we believed in; he was a leader who
believed in us.

There was no better man to pursue these goals on our behalf as president than Ronald
Reagan.  Because he was quintessentially American, he drew us to his vision and inspired us to help achieve it.

President Reagan was born to a salesman in Tampico, Illinois.  The future president grew up in Central Illinois and attended high school in a small town called Dixon.  His family nearly lost everything they had during the Depression.  But Reagan persevered in his education, worked hard, and built his own American success story.  Before he ever contemplated Hollywood, he was a Midwesterner.

With thousands of World War II veterans last week, I stood on Omaha Beach at  Normandy after learning of President Reagan’s death.  I reflected on how the brave Allied soldiers freed Europe on D-Day, Zero Hour, but also on how President Reagan advanced that freedom throughout the European Continent – first coaxing and then forcing it forward.  Today the free world is larger, stronger, and more secure because of his resolve.

Yet it is hard to remember him as an abstract hero – driving the progress of America in
all ways.  More poignant are the countless stories from so many Americans who met him, saw him, or even just heard his words.  When I recall Ronald Reagan, I think of him calling off the Secret Service agents and happily sweeping Katharine up in his arms. 

He swept us all up in that same way, and the tide of sincerity on which he carried us is the same one now welling up in the eyes of our nation.

A photo of Katharine in President Reagan’s arms, taken seconds after she defied us
to pursue a hug from her hero, today hangs in the front room of my Washington office.  Every time I walk through that door, I see the photo and think of him as millions of us do: as a member of our family.