US and world mourn Reagan's death

File photo shows former US president Ronald Reagan (R) with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (L) during welcoming ceremonies at the White House on the first day of their summit on December 8, 1987. Ronald Reagan, an icon to Republicans and a hero to those Americans who remember him as the man who brought down the "Evil Empire," died on Saturday at the age of 93 at his home in Bel Air in southern California. PHOTO: AFP

"Ronald Reagan needs no one to sing his praises," Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said. But they did anyway. The 40th president's death evoked a world of remembrances Saturday from friends, Republican political soulmates and opponents who squared off against him.

"A man who changed history," said US Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., whose party spent 12 years trying to reclaim the White House after Reagan captured it in 1980. "He won the Cold War without firing a shot," former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore said.

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The mourning in America was swift. Flags sank to half-staff. Ballparks went mute for the former Chicago Cubs announcer, and the Belmont Stakes held a moment of silence. In Dixon, Ill., Reagan's childhood home, Ken and Marilyn Knotts laid two roses under his statue.

In Paris, President Bush called it "a sad hour in the life of America." In England, Queen Elizabeth II mourned "a truly great American hero."

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan's friend and conservative counterpart across the Atlantic in the 1980s, invoked the "millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued."

And from presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry: "Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."

For Reagan, the praise capped a career built on imagemaking and public relations. The former actor and his cadre of consultants defined the political landscape of the 1980s, carefully calibrating the populist message he offered to the world more adeptly, perhaps, than any American president before him.