Ronald Reagan – Ex-president an icon for Americans

World leaders will today gather in a sombre Washington to pay their final respects to the late President Ronald Reagan, alongside his family.

With his demise has come a mistiness, filtered from popular memory, which might detract from a man now venerated as a great president.

Ronald Reagan, indeed, was an icon for Americans and his arrival at the White House imbued them with a renewed spirit of optimism.