“It was an emotional experience for everyone,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary on June 6, 1984, about his trip to Pointe du Hoc, where he delivered one of the most famous speeches of his presidency and met with 62 surviving Army Rangers who had scaled the 100-foot cliffs under fire from Germans.

Peggy Noonan recalled in her 1991 memoir that when she was assigned to write Reagan’s speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, she was given a modest task. “We’d like it to be like the Gettysburg Address,” she was told over and over. When she finally asked what everybody meant by that, she was told that the Gettysburg Address had made people cry — and they wanted to achieve the same effect.

Noonan explained her own goal in having Reagan detail the incredible achievements of the Rangers on that day: “I wanted American teenagers to stop chewing their Rice Krispies for a minute and hear about the greatness of those tough kids who are now their grandfathers.”

The line that everybody remembers when citing the speech — “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc” — was a phrase Noonan said she took from the title of Roger Kahn’s book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer.

While writing it, she was caught in a tug of war as the political advisors kept pressuring her to cut down the speech, while the national security staffers kept wanting to insert more policy into it – including a throwaway line acknowledging the 20 million Russian deaths in World War II. In the speech as delivered, while Reagan noted those deaths, he also scolded the Soviets for still keeping their troops in Europe “uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war.”

None of this robbed the speech of its emotional resonance. To this day, it’s hard for any patriotic American to not get choked up when watching the speech, when Reagan says, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who was present, recounted the scene on the day of the speech itself.

“Many of the Rangers wept when they heard these words, and a number of us in the press corps wept with them,” he wrote in his book President Reagan: The Role of the Lifetime. “Even the Secret Service agents, trained to watch for danger instead of listening to presidential speeches, did not disguise their feelings.”