Nation to give Reagan a grand goodbye

WASHINGTON — He was never particularly at home in Washington. He believed big government was the bane of the nation, and he preferred weekends at Camp David in the Maryland mountains to the whirl of the capital.

But this week, the Washington where he almost lost his life to the bullet of an assassin will give former President Reagan a ceremonial farewell reserved for the best and most beloved of the country's citizens.

Long missing from public view, he will be lifted up and accorded a state funeral filled with pomp and spectacle, the muffled drum and riderless horse, silent throngs and the haunting recollections of past national mourning. It will be the nation's first presidential state funeral in more than 30 years.

Federal offices will be closed Friday for the funeral, the White House said last night. Federal offices and programs essential for national defense, homeland security and other essential business may be kept open at the discretion of agency heads.

Presidents, former presidents and presidents-elect are entitled to state funerals. It is left to the family to decide whether one should be held and how involved it should be. Reagan's family requested the full funeral protocol.

Lyndon Johnson, in 1973, was the last former president to have an official Washington ceremony. Former President Nixon's family, acting on his wishes, opted out of the Washington tradition when he died in 1994.

No detail in planning such an occasion is too small. The military, for instance, has a 138-page document that dictates everything from seating charts to floral arrangements. Processions must move at 20 mph. The footsteps of military guards are elaborately prescribed.

Reagan, 93, died Saturday at his home in California. His body will lie in state at his presidential library and museum in Simi Valley, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles before being flown to Washington on Wednesday to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, on a bier made for Abraham Lincoln.

After Reagan's body arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, it will be transported by motorcade to 16th Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest, where the casket will be transferred to a ceremonial Army caisson, dating from 1918 and drawn by six matched horses along Constitution.

In the hands of the blue-jacketed Caisson Platoon of the Army's elite 3rd Infantry Regiment "Old Guard," the caisson will be accompanied by the traditional, and ghostly, riderless horse to the Capitol, where the body will lie in state Thursday.

Reagan will join a list of those who have lain in state beneath the Capitol Rotunda that includes former Presidents Eisenhower, Taft and Hoover and Presidents Harding, McKinley, Garfield and Lincoln. The last people to lie in state, in 1998, were U.S. Capitol Police officers Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson, who were killed by a gunman.

Friday morning will bring an official service at Washington National Cathedral, attended by dignitaries from around the globe. President Bush will speak.

The first presidential state funeral was for William Henry Harrison. He caught a cold during his inaugural address in 1841 and died of pneumonia 30 days later, becoming the first president to die in office.

Alexander Hunter, a Washington merchant, was commissioned to put on a first-of-its-kind U.S. ceremony.

Hunter draped the White House in black. Official buildings and many private households followed suit, starting a now-lost tradition that was repeated at Lincoln's funeral 24 years later.

For Harrison, Hunter ordered a curtained and upholstered black-and-white carriage, which was drawn by black-clad horses, each accompanied by a black groom dressed and turbaned in white. Along the side marched white pallbearers, dressed in black.

Reagan, a former actor, would have understood such pageantry, said Donald Ritchie, associate historian in the Senate Historical Office.

"He was great at ceremonies," Ritchie said. "… He understood the importance of public presentation and public ceremony."

Though Reagan would no doubt have been honored by the tribute, he considered California, where he moved in the 1930s after signing a movie contract with Warner Bros., his true home.

Living in Washington for eight years, Reagan once said, had left him in a "perpetual state of homesickness" for California.

"Washington was just a place where he needed to be," Jim Kuhn, Reagan's executive assistant in his second term, said yesterday.

After the funeral Friday, Reagan's body will be flown home to his beloved California.

He will be buried at the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library & Museum.