John Kline: “I just wanted to rise and join my colleagues in expressing my love and admiration and respect for President Ronald…”

“I just wanted to rise and join my colleagues in expressing my love and admiration and respect for President Ronald Reagan. I very much appreciate that here on the House floor last night and today colleagues from both sides of the aisle have stepped up to express their respects. I think that is an important thing. It is an indicator of what a truly great man, a great President, a great leader we had in Ronald Reagan. Those of us who had the privilege and honor of working closely with President Reagan, and I was very fortunate that in his first months in office I had the position of being his Marine Corps aid and carrying the nuclear football, the codes, traveling with him, and having the opportunity to share some thoughts, it usually was him sharing the thoughts and me listening in rapt attention, but what a wonderful man. When you were with and near Ronald Reagan, it really was morning in America. I never knew any one of us who worked with him or anyone who was in his presence that could not feel his love for life, his love for our country, his unstoppable optimism. And on the one hand he was, as we have heard many of our colleagues say, friendly, loveable, affable, ready with the joke; and on the other hand he was truly a man of steel. He had a wonderful vision for America, a vision as he articulated of a city on the hill, a beacon of hope and opportunity for the world.”