"What day is this," General Robert E. Lee asked his young adjutant in the early morning hours of the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863, as the Confederate army prepared for the decisive engagement of the Civil War?

"It's after midnight," said the young adjutant, "It's now Friday • • • Friday, July 3rd," he told Lee.

Lee pondered the latest in a series of ironies that brought him to the great battlefield in the rolling Pennsylvania hills. "Tomorrow is July 4th, Independence Day," he mused.

"The Good Lord certainly has a sense of humor," Lee said.

Ronald Reagan, according to his wife, Nancy, was in a "far place where I can't reach him anymore" in the months prior to his death.

But he would probably have been pleased with the exquisite timing and irony of his final departure Saturday, June 5th on the day before the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, the location of one of his best speeches at the D Day 40th anniversary in 1984, and one of the spiritual icons from which he drew the principles he cherished for most of his long life.

This irony, as measured by the historians and commentators on the Sunday morning after he died, drew justifiable attention to  the lessons of his presidency.

Reagan, an actor by profession and a Democrat-turned-Republican, had an extraordinary talent for communicating with the people he was elected to serve, including the "Reagan Democrats" who helped him win two presidential elections by comfortable margins.

When he took office in 1981, he began immediately to redeem his campaign pledges which he regarded as solemn commitments which crystallized the objectives he set for his administration:

Reagan's first objective was the renaissance of the US military and an accelerated  effort to combat international communism and make economic competition with the Soviet Union.

The second objective was to fight the pernicious and galloping Johnson-Nixon-Carter inflation that was the root cause of endemic economic dislocation.

The third objective was the resurrection of the national economy through the pump-priming effect of reduced personal income taxes.

The fourth objective was a smaller, more efficient federal government.

Ronald Reagan gave us our country back (and our pride in its greatness) after the failed Jimmy Carter presidency. Reagan based everything on principles that he adopted as Republican principles.

After Jimmy Carter and government by "malaise," President Ronald Reagan was a refreshing change. His scrupulous intellectual honesty and unshakable republican principles, honored only in the breach by so many politicians of both parties, attracted support from a broad spectrum of the American electorate.

"Government is part of the problem," Reagan insisted, and after the well meaning incompetence of Carter, and the arrogant dishonesty and sham of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, Reagan was eminently believable: he had a program and it was based on core principles generated by the chief architects of the American Dream.

Leonard "Bud" Lomell, a D-Day veteran and a resident of Dover Township, told CNBC news Sunday morning that Reagan was a "good guy" whose speech in 1984 to the veterans on the battlefield for the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings "was remembered fondly" by everyone who was present.

Lomell was in Normandy for the anniversary in 1984, and is back there this week at the age of 84 for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The news of President Reagan's death came as he and hundreds of other D-Day veterans were on the scene at the beaches where the great invasion took place on June 6, 1944.

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