NewMexiKen means no disrespect to the late Ronald Reagan by posting this item. I actually respect the office too much to “dis” any but an incumbent President I happen to disagree with. But I think it is interesting to put the recent national mourning into perspective. Frank Rich does it well.
A total of some 200,000 Americans passed by the [Reagan] coffin in California and Washington. The crowds watching the funeral procession in Washington numbered in the “tens of thousands,” reported The Washington Post. By comparison, three million Americans greeted the cross-country journey of Warren Harding’s funeral train from San Francisco to Washington when he died in office in the steamy August of 1923, according to Mark Sullivan’s history, “Our Times.” It took 3,500 soldiers to direct the crowd in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, alone. The grief for Harding was so pronounced in New York, a city that hardly knew him, that The Times reported how theaters canceled their shows to hold impromptu memorial gatherings for those citizens unable to jam into the packed services held in Trinity Church at Wall Street and Temple Emanu-El uptown and most houses of worship in between. Next to that, the Reagan outpouring, much of it carried out by bubbly TV-camera-seeking citizens in halter tops and shorts, was grief lite.
The entire Rich column is well-worth reading.
Byron doesn’t comment much, for fear of offending his father-in-law, I think. But he made an excellent point on this.
It stands to reason that the sudden death of any sitting president would garner a much bigger reaction than the long-expected death of a 93-year-old man who left the office 15 years ago.