Sir John Swan may best be described as an idealist without illusions. He is a man whose boldly optimistic vision of what Bermuda has the potential to be has always been tempered by an intuitive understanding of life’s harder realities.

His ability to negotiate the always difficult path between idealism and pragmatism, between what is and what is in fact possible, has always been his most marked characteristic.

Installed as one of Bermuda’s national heroes today, the long-time former premier is a statesman in the truest sense of the word — a genuinely transformative figure whose far-reaching and enlightened ideas enabled him to guide Bermuda through the exceptional era that he both championed and came to embody.

While he may have left office 21 years ago, Sir John has never left the public consciousness, remaining one of the most influential, inspiring and enduring figures in Bermuda’s modern history.

An internationally respected political, business and cultural leader, he is at once the most publicly accessible of Bermudian public figures as well as an intensely private family man. He is an extraordinarily careful and deliberative thinker as well as a man of decisive action. And he is, of course, possessed of a charisma that is polished to a high gloss while also being a man of deep conviction, compassion and courage.

His signature political legacy, the tax treaty that he concluded with the US in 1985 after years of patient and painstaking personal negotiations with Washington, provided the cornerstone of Bermuda’s subsequent economic prosperity. But it was also the fundamental centrepiece of our ensuing social and cultural development.

For our unprecedented wealth and rapid emergence as a blue-chip international business domicile of choice enabled Bermuda to offer more opportunities, benefits, services and freedoms to all of our people than at any other time in the island’s history. Economic growth led to shared prosperity and social progress occurring simultaneously and in ways not dreamt of by previous generations of Bermudians.

No one can seriously challenge Sir John’s worthiness for inclusion in the island’s small official pantheon of those who shaped their times, and ours, and left their mark on Bermuda history.

No one can seriously dispute that he is not fully deserving of our respect, admiration and gratitude and the designation of “hero”.

Heroes, after all, are not only men and women of great character and great commitment, but also individuals who have shouldered great burdens and encountered great adversity. It is their very ability to endure and to prevail in the face of hardship that makes them heroic, or else their greatness might well go unnoticed.

For, ultimately, true heroism is measured not just by how much is achieved but by how many setbacks are overcome in pursuit of those achievements.

In both his private life and throughout his public career, Sir John Swan has contended with all manner of obstacles and difficulties.

His resolve steadied him and defeats steeled his will and strengthened his sense of purpose. In the end, he succeeded in transforming both our island and the way we think about ourselves as a people for the better.

He changed all of our lives profoundly by being one of those rare individuals who, rather than simply cursing the darkness, instead lit a candle — and the light it cast illuminated our way ahead.

It has been said that adversity introduces a man to himself. If this is so, John Swan must have come to know himself as a determined, resilient and highly resourceful individual from a very young age indeed. As a boy, he overcame a reading disability, one very little understood at the time and one that could have severely curtailed his education or perhaps even ended it.

As a young man, he endured the everyday indignities and injustices heaped upon black people in the racially segregated Bermuda of the 1940s and 1950s. Later, he witnessed the sometimes lethal brutalities inflicted on blacks in the American South, where he attended university in West Virginia.

Returning to a Bermuda on the cusp of revolutionary change, he was determined to play a role in how that change came about. First, as a pioneering black businessman and real estate developer and, later, as a politician, he quickly established himself as one of the most singular and defining voices of his generation.

“I did recognise that I had to overcome covert and overt prejudice and ignorance, but I felt my success would be finally determined by my attitude,” he has said. “If I embraced prejudice and ignorance, it would embrace me and could shackle me both physically and mentally.

“If you allow prejudice and ignorance to stop you moving forward, all you do is place your opportunities in the hands of someone who wishes to deprive you of your potential, be they black or white.”

And that potential has only rarely been denied during the course of a career in the public eye that has been extended to more than 50 years,

As Premier of Bermuda between 1982 and 1995, Sir John Swan has only rarely placed short-term expediency ahead of his long-term objectives. And his public support tended to be based more on his overarching strategy for the island, one he was always at pains to communicate, rather than the instantly dispensable slogans and platitudes most political careers and reputations are built on both here and elsewhere.

He was fond of citing the Book of Proverbs — “Where there is no vision, the people perish” — as well as the almost endless list of failed microstates to buttress his unshakeable commitment to defined goals and objectives and long-range planning.

Just as a student of history does, he saw the movement of world events not as acts in an unfolding morality play but, rather, as the complex confluence of economic and social forces, the cumulative results of tens of thousands of individual actions taken by innumerable people, institutions and states.

He also understood the urgent need for Bermuda to put our own obsolete arguments and the politics of division and mutual degradation behind us to better protect our fragile island from the almost elemental power of these global tides in a world already growing ever smaller and increasingly interconnected in the 1980s and 1990s.

If he never ultimately succeeded in that goal, if he has still not done all he would have hoped to do, our latest national hero has given Bermuda a new sense of itself — a new spirit, a new conception of its role and destiny, and a renewed sense of identity.

And he might well not have given up on his ultimate objective of resolving at least some of the old feuds that still continue so badly to distort Bermudian politics. For the one illusion this most hard-headed of idealists may admit to holding fast to is the belief that until it comes to an end, life is a field of unlimited possibilities.