Every writer hopes to come up with a memorable expression or turn-of-phrase, but only truly masterful communicators say something that defines the essence of a nation in just six words. President Ronald Reagan was just such a man, who borrowed and popularized a term for America that came from our nation’s distant, Puritan past: “A shining city on a hill.” As he left office in 1989, the aging president shared a few more words in his desperate yearning to communicate his vision for a free, thriving country to his fellow Americans.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he stated in his farewell address on January 11, 1989:
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