The Great Communicator's Vision of America.

During his campaign in 1980 Ronald Reagan borrowed his image of America from a sermon delivered on shipboard by the great colonial leader John Winthrop in 1630 as he and fellow Puritans were sailing toward the New World. Their settlement, Winthrop said, would be a "City upon a Hill" watched by "the eyes of all the people." Therefore, he asserted, "we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments. . . ." This vision of America is the one Reagan offered Americans throughout his first term in office, as he returned repeatedly to the image of the "City upon a Hill" in advocating a return to traditional patriotic, moral, and religious values. As Theodore H. White summed it up, Reagan "saw the future...