Each of the decennial anniversaries of D-Day since the 40th in 1984 has brought the American president and his French counterpart to Normandy. The 65th anniversary in 2009 did likewise. It is safe to say, however, that none of these occasions has surpassed President Ronald Reagan’s visit. For one thing, 1984 was an election year, and the details of timing and backdrop for the president’s first major address on June 6 at Pointe du Hoc in front of scores of U.S. Ranger veterans who had seized that spot on the “Day of Days” 40 years earlier were carefully orchestrated to embellish his reelection bid. The profound emotional impact of the speech in front of the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” and the one later in the afternoon at the American cemetery has reverberated through all the years thereafter.

One scholar has observed that Reagan’s day in Normandy “played a seminal role in launching the great reappreciation of World War II veterans that swept America in the 1980s and continues today largely unabated.” When the president’s voice cracked during the reference in his speech at the cemetery to Lisa Zanatta Henn, the daughter of a deceased D-Day veteran, who was attending to honor her father and put flowers on his grave, millions got to see the power of these memorials to stir the deepest and most genuine senses of pride, gratitude, and sorrow. Reagan’s death at 93 years of age and one day shy of the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004 somehow seemed profoundly fitting.