One year ago today, President Reagan passed away, after his decade-long struggle with Alzheimer's. For a look at what went on during the week of mourning that began on this date last year, click here and scroll down June 5th, and then just start scolling up, and following the links (not all of which will work a year later of course--but you knew that).

Perhaps Tim Graham best put the Gipper's accomplishments into perspective:

Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo."

In the prologue to his book on Reagan Dinesh D'Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, "Sovietologists" and journalists — were the dummies.

"I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."

The result? Well, there's a piece of the Berlin Wall at the Reagan Library, which is only fitting for the man who both said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"--and set about making him do just that.

Update: Greg Hanke recalls viewing President Reagan's coffin as it laid in state at the Reagan Library.