The world is a safer, freer  and more prosperous place because Ronald Reagan was president at exactly the right time.

Although the possibility of the occasional nuclear wacko is still with us, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has been essentially eliminated because, in the words of Colin Powell, Reagan's National Security Advisor, "Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev did some historic work together" during the final years of the Reagan presidency.

After the Reykjavik summit in 1986, Gorbachev told aides "I looked in his eyes for a hint of compromise, but all I saw was blue sky." Powell said "perpetual optimism is a force multiplier."

Reagan was that personification of the vision that we can succeed, Powell said.

Soviet communism was a flawed system. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt knew this instinctively, but none of them acted on this simple premise as a core belief.

Former Russian leader Nikita Krushchev told Vice President Richard Nixon in Moscow that he "would bury America" economically, and Nixon didn't laugh at him.

That type of threat had some mock credibility in the nineteen fifties.

By 1984, year of Orwellian irony, Gorbachev was trying desperately to  find a way to save the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and he needed Reagan's help to do it.

But all Reagan wanted to do in the name of freedom for millions of people in Eastern Europe was to make life as difficult as possible for Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership, and he understood exactly how to do it.

The United States had weathered the recession of 1982 and was in the first years of the greatest economic expansion in American history. The communist economies of Russia and the whole Soviet bloc were basket cases.

"We have a strong economy because it's a market economy; so we can have guns and butter, and you can't - unless you give up your flawed system," Reagan told Gorbachev numerous times in so many words, referring to the strength of the American economy and the economic threat of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the star wars technology that intimidated the Russian leader into a series of economic decisions that hastened the downfall of the USSR.

The fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War are the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan. Traders vividly remember Reagan's visit to the New York Stock Exchange back in the 1980's with Mikhail Gorbachev in the citadel of capitalism.

Gorbachev was impressed with everything in America, particularly the easy way that Americans took their relative prosperity for granted in a place where economic values were essentially determined by the markets and not by the commissars.

Reagan said many times that timing was "everything."

It is somehow appropriate that the man Margaret Thatcher says had "a higher claim to winning the Cold War" than anybody else, drew his last breath and left us the day before the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, where a group of heroes, all of them now elderly, showed up in Normandy to ponder their handiwork in saving the World from Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

"Here we are in a hornets nest of Germans and we have to go looking for the three gun emplacements that are not where they were supposed to be," said Sergeant Leonard "Bud" Lomell of Toms River, whose company had struggled up the cliffs on Omaha Beach.

His Ranger Battalion had scaled the cliffs and he had taken a machine gun bullet that grazed his side, drawing blood.

Lomell, in Normandy, told CNN he played poker all afternoon the previous day aboard ship. Part of the company played cards; the rest went to church.

The ones who went to church were killed in the landings. The ones who played poker survived. "I thought that was ironic," Lomell said matter-of-factly, without a hint of a macabre value judgement.

"We weren't heroes," Lomell insisted. "We were just doing our jobs.," a massive understatement that was echoed by everybody who took part in D-Day.

Sergeant Lomell came out of the landing craft first. He was the squad leader. 3393 Americans died in the D-Day landings, CNN says.

If it were not for their sacrifices and the great generational commitment of millions like them, it is unlikely Reagan and Gorbachev would have done their good work together because the World would be a different place.

Former Secretary of State Jim Baker said Reagan was responsible for ending the Cold War, "not with a bang, but a whimper," picking up on one of T. S. Eliot's best lines.

Senator John McCain said we "live in a dangerous world but we don't wake up in the morning with the threat of a nuclear exchange facing us. "Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with that," McCain said.

Reagan's principles were guidelines that should have been everybody's principles. They were principles for the ages. Indeed, most of them were imbedded in the fabric of the national memory.

America should be a nation of values, and we should not be afraid to show those values to the rest of the world, Reagan said.

Freedom ultimately has a self-fulfilling character because it leads with compelling inevitability to prosperity and progress.

No one ever chooses to go back into tyranny, Reagan said, echoing Lincoln's words about involuntary servitude and bondage.

Reagan was at the Brandenburg gate in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," he commanded.

On November 9, 1989, only two years later, and only months after Reagan left office, the wall came down. Luck? Maybe. In the right place at the right time? Maybe.

The first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev was in 1985 in Geneva. George Schultz, former Secretary of State, said Reagan wanted to win the Cold War.

He did not believe in detente; he wanted to win the Cold War. Their system is inherently unstable, Reagan said.

"Anybody who looked at the Berlin Wall knew it had to come down. It was so offensive, so  terrible," Schultz said.

But Reagan's admirers and some historians make a good case for his speech in Berlin being the beginning of the end for the wall and for the Soviet Union, precisely because Reagan had made it impossible for the Russians to compete with the US, a situation that focused the fact that their system was a fatally flawed one.

"President Reagan's understanding of the inherent weakness of the Soviet system gave us a clear vision that never changed. He showed us what a determined, disciplined leader could do," said Powell.

America should be a nation of values and they should not be afraid to show those values to the rest of the world, Reagan said.

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