Stoic on the sideline, Tom Landry posted 20 consecutive winning seasons in Dallas.

Twenty years later, in 1985, President Ronald Reagan first met with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in Geneva, Switzerland, signaling the beginning of the end of the Evil Empire. The following year, the United States would first officially observe Martin Luther King Day. The Dallas Cowboys, under coach Tom Landry, won 10 games.

Change, in today's world, is inevitable. But for 20 consecutive seasons, two decades that witnessed five American presidents, the peace and love of Woodstock and the compassionate understanding of Live Aid, the Dallas Cowboys had a winning record. It was the keen, unyielding spirit of Landry that willed it to be.

"This is my 19th season as a head coach," says Atlanta's Dan Reeves, who spent 15 years under Landry as a player and an assistant. "I cannot imagine how someone could stay with the same organization and achieve 20 straight winning seasons. It's incredible.

"When he was replaced (in 1989), everybody talked about the way the game had passed him by. Listen, he and Don Shula could jump in there right now and win."

Landry, sadly, will not have that tantalizing opportunity. The legendary coach died Saturday night of leukemia at age 75.

The record book tells us that in Landry's 29 seasons with the Cowboys he won 270 games, lost 178 and tied six for a winning percentage of .601. Only Don Shula (347-173-6, .665) and George Halas (324-151-31, .671) won more games in the NFL. Only Halas won more games with the same team.

As Landry's legacy is celebrated in the wake of his passing, the caricature artists will offer snapshots of the man with the angular face who paced the sideline in a hat and suit. Landry was the somber, focused face of America's Team, the cornerstone of one of the great, innovative organizations in professional sports history.

"Tom's looked upon as a stoic, conservative coach," says Tex Schramm, who hired Landry to coach the fledgling Cowboys in 1960, nearly 40 years ago. "But he wasn't that way."

	“	During the period he was coach, as a nation, we went through a lot of different phases. He was adaptable to those changing times. If there was anybody who would go against his thinking, it was the hippie. But we got some hippies, and he just adapted rather than try to make them totally adapt to him. ”
		— Former Cowboys GM Tex Schramm

Schramm, the longtime Cowboys general manager, laughed out loud in his sprawling Dallas home. He remembered the collision of Landry's old-school, authority-rules philosophy and the new-wave players of the 1970s.

"During the period he was coach, as a nation, we went through a lot of different phases," Schramm says. "He was adaptable to those changing times. If there was anybody who would go against his thinking, it was the hippie. But we got some hippies, and he just adapted rather than try to make them totally adapt to him.

"In the '70s, you saw the first thrust of drugs and all that other stuff. He adapted himself to that, but he didn't get credit for that. As far as football was concerned, he was so certain of his belief in how to win football games, he totally sold it to his players. And they bought it."

Reeves, the league's winningest active coach (176-136-1), was one of those players. After five seasons as a running back and two as a player-coach, Reeves became Landry's running backs coach in 1972. After a year off to experiment with real estate, Reeves returned for seven more seasons as an assistant before taking the head job in Denver.

"He was willing to listen. He was open to ideas," Reeves says. "As a player or a coach, you never felt like you were wasting your time coming to him with an idea.

"In 1975, we talked about bringing in the shotgun formation during the offseason. There were people that waited years and years before going to the shotgun. We were in it before anybody else and (people thought) we were crazy."

So crazy, the Cowboys reached the Super Bowl that year, only to lose to Pittsburgh 21-17. Landry's Cowboys reached five Super Bowls in all, winning two: Super Bowl VI, 24-3 over Miami, and Super Bowl XII, 27-10 over Denver.

Beyond the trappings of success, Landry was an innovator. Born in Mission, Texas, he joined the Air Corps as a freshman at the University of Texas. At 19 he won his wings and became a co-pilot of a B-17 in World War II. Stationed in England, Landry flew 30 missions for the Eighth Air Force and survived a crash in Belgium after a bombing run over Czechoslovakia.

After the war, he was a star two-way back at Texas, playing for teams that won the 1948 Sugar Bowl and the 1949 Orange Bowl. Landry played defensive back for seven seasons as a professional, the last six with the New York Giants. He intercepted 32 passes in his career, the result of his studious analysis of opposing offenses. He was one of those terminally inquisitive players who was destined to become a coach.

Imagine the spirited conversations between Landry and one of the Giants' other young assistants, Vince Lombardi, in the mid-1950s.

Lombardi, who had played on the offensive side of the ball in college, developed numerous offensive inventions, like option blocking and his Run to Daylight concept. Lombardi's linemen would take the opponent in whatever direction he was going and the back would read the block and cut accordingly. When Lombardi left to become head coach at Green Bay, Landry countered with the 4-3 Outside, a defensive alignment that freed middle linebacker Sam Huff to react to the runner's ad-libs.

When Lombardi countered with weak-side counters and traps, Landry adjusted by dropping the strongside defensive end and the weakside tackle off the line of scrimmage into a position that allowed them to read the play better. That evolved into Landry's famous Flex Defense.

When the rest of the league began to copy Landry's Flex, he was forced to come up with his motion-oriented, multiple offense schemes to exploit the very defense he created.

Landry's first season with the expansion Cowboys was a disaster. Dallas went 0-11-1. If Landry had followed that mark with 4-9-1, 5-8-1 and 4-10 in today's climate, he would almost certainly have been fired. But owner Clint Murchison saw beyond Landry's 13-38-3 record. With public sentiment running heavily against Landry, Murchison called a press conference and signed him to a new 10-year contract.

After going 7-7 in 1965, Landry's Cowboys broke through with that first winning season in 1966. The players he had accumulated over six seasons -- Don Meredith, Chuck Howley, Lee Roy Jordan, Bob Lilly, Don Perkins and Mel Renfro -- began to play like champions. For the next two decades, Landry's Cowboys never knew what a losing season felt like.

Tight end Mike Ditka played four seasons under Landry and spent another nine years in Dallas as an assistant. He was a senior at the University of Pittsburgh when Landry's winning streak began in 1966. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Cowboys in the NFL Championship Game that year and went on to beat Kansas City in Super Bowl I. When Landry's streak ended in 1985, Ditka's team, the Chicago Bears, punctuated one of the greatest seasons ever with a victory in Super Bowl XX.

Schramm says both he and Landry believed the Cowboys should have emerged from their five Super Bowl appearances with more than two victories. Still, Schramm feels posting 20 consecutive winning seasons was Landry's greatest achievement.

"He believed in what he was doing, the way he was coaching," Schramm says. "He believed he was right. And, of course, as the record showed, he was."

Greg Garber is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.