<b>Wallace</b> On Reagan's Legacy

It's been a little more than six months since the nation mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan, the country's 40th President. During that time, CBS News set out to commemorate and celebrate his life in the new DVD and book, "Ronald Regan Remembered."

The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler sat down with Mike Wallace, who contributed to this project, to talk about Reagan's legacy and how his good friend, Nancy Reagan, is holding up.

The following is the interview:

Mike Wallace: "He adored America. He understood America. When he talked about the shining city on the hill, he meant it."

Rene Syler: "When he took office, the country was in pretty bad shape. And he instituted a number of socially conservative programs. When the air traffic controllers went on strike…"

Mike Wallace: "You know, when the air traffic controllers went on strike was a dramatic moment."

Rene Syler: "He fired almost 12,000."

Mike Wallace: "He was a strong president, but he didn't jam it down anybody's throat. He's the antithesis of George W. Bush. Much more comfortable with the press, much more open."

Rene Syler: "I remember Challenger, and that disaster, and how he spoke to the country."

Mike Wallace: "How important it was in the face of difficulties to embrace people and to let people know what was going on and what the feelings of the president of the United States and the first lady were."

Rene Syler: "He semed to have a no-nonsense style about him. When talking about when he and Gorbachev were meeting, and he said that all of their people were doing the dance. And he leans over to him and says, Mr. Gorbachev, let's go take a walk."

Mike Wallace: He knew how to do that. He and Gorbachev really developed a relationship. And Nancy helped that.

"I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a love affair like that. It really was an extraordinary love affair."

Rene Syler: "I just want to ask you about Nancy -- he died six months; it's been six months now -- and how is she doing, because this was the love of her life."

Mike Wallace: "Well, you can imagine after that long, long goodbye with Alzheimer's, and the night that the ceremonies at Simi Valley ended, she was in that house all by herself, and she was frail and she was lonely. And then, her friend Merv Griffin went out and bought her a little item. What do they call it? Shar-Pei or a little dog with a funny face. He opened the door to their house in Bel Air and dropped the dog in, closed the door and beat it.

"For the first time, I began to hear a lilt in her voice. She began to laugh a little bit, and I hadn't heard that in years and years."

Read an excerpt:

Introduction
by Dan Rather

Though the twenty-first century is not yet a decade old, the twentieth century already seems a distant memory. Because of this sense of remove, we may now be able to appreciate, in a way that we could not at the end of his second term, just how completely Ronald Reagan embodied what is called "the American century." Born in 1911, he held memories that few alive today can claim. The small-town America about which President Reagan would often wax nostalgic was not a rhetorical fabrication; it was the reality that young Ronald Reagan knew as a boy. He came of age during the Great Depression and served with the Army Air Force Motion Picture Unit during World War II. He acted on the silver screen during Hollywood's golden age. Amid the strife of the 1960s, he was the governor of California known for locking horns with antiwar protestors.

Ronald Reagan was a man who was fully a part of the era in which he lived, an era that left an indelible stamp on the American culture and psyche. By the time Reagan was elected president, his understanding of this country and its major currents of thought and feeling was innate. Even if one discounts all his considerable rhetorical skill, President Reagan did not have to reach to connect with his fellow Americans: if the times really do make the man, President Reagan was as American as they come.

This quality may well have been at the heart of President Reagan's political success, the substance that informed his considerable blessings of easy communication. Many have called President Reagan the Great Communicator, and the label sometimes grates on his partisans, who see in it a reluctance to credit the Reagan ideology. But to Reagan detractors and defenders alike, one might ask: Just what is leadership, in a democracy, but the harnessing of policy to the horse of persuasion? In a successful presidency, these realms are inseparable, and this was something that President Reagan always seemed to grasp.

In the public role of the presidency, Ronald Reagan knew how to personify the American spirit of the times, and reflect it back to an American public that generally liked what it saw. He spoke to an elevated sense of the American self, and he did so convincingly, in language that carried neither a self-conscious populist pose nor a high academic gloss. To recall President Reagan's speeches -- his first inaugural, his eulogizing of the Challenger crew, his farewell address -- is to remember a time not so long ago when words still reached out to the American imagination. Today's focus group-tested soundbites pale by comparison.

For many Americans, for many Republicans and Democrats alike, Ronald Reagan holds a privileged place in America's recent historical landscape. And in this presidential election year, no sooner had President Reagan left us than each major-party candidate sought to lay claim to his legacy: one through ideological and policy affinities, the other on the issue of federal funding for stem-cell research for treating Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases.

On June 11, 2004, as the sun set over the American continent, a nation said its last good-byes to Ronald Wilson Reagan, fortieth president of the United States. On a California hillside facing the Pacific Ocean, a site rich in symbolism for a onetime movie star and two-term governor of the Golden State, President Reagan's remarkable journey came to its end, with history trailing in its wake.

In the preceding days, America had witnessed a state funeral in the nation's capital, a rite this country had not seen in a generation. As the caisson bearing President Reagan's casket made its way past the many thousands who lined Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues, a certain air of triumph mingled with the solemnity of the occasion. As President Bush would say in the eulogy he delivered at t