Here’s current White House speechwriter Bill McGurn writing from Normandy in NRODT in 1994:

For the peoples of Europe, D-Day represented redemption and hope; for the Allies, the making good on a promise that erased the hesitation of 1939 and embarrassments like Dunkirk. Although terrible battles were still to come and the Germans would exhibit an awesome capacity to fight under the most appalling of circumstances, everyone knew, Hitler included, that once the Allies established themselves on the beaches it would be but a matter of time. In his attic in Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s father chalked off the days. In Paris my father walks under the Arc de Triomphe in the footsteps of his uncle Tom Bartley, who marched through on his way to the German border that summer fifty years ago with men who told each other, “We’ll be home for Christmas.” Little could he have known then what lay ahead of him at the Battle of the Bulge.
It was precisely this restoration of hope that explains why D-Day has always resonated more fully in the collective memory than even the end of the war, tainted by Yalta.

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