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.

A testament to that were the thousands of Americans of all political persuasions who filed past the former president's coffin, as he lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington ahead of the funeral service.

To the world he gave a glimpse of the peace that could be achieved by his initiative with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Critics have pointed out another side of the Reagan presidency high budget deficits, the Iran-Contra scandal and human rights abuses in Central America.

History will, ultimately, judge him.