Ronald Reagan

Who was Ronald Reagan?

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. After being elected governor of California in 1966, he raised state taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus, and implemented crackdowns on university protests. A member of the Republican Party, he became an important figure in the American conservative movement. The period encompassing his presidency is known as the Reagan era. In 1937, he moved to California where he became a well-known film actor. During his acting career, Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild twice from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960.

In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. Following his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries, Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination and then obtained a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. On the world stage, he escalated the arms race, increased military spending, shifted Cold War policy away from détente, and ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada. In the 1984 presidential election, he was elected to a second term by defeating former vice president Walter Mondale in one of the largest landslide victories in American history. Foreign affairs dominated his second term, including the 1986 bombing of Libya, the secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras, and negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

The national debt had nearly tripled since 1981 as a result of his tax cuts and increased military spending outweighing his cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Reagan's foreign policies also contributed to the end of the Cold War. Although he planned an active post-presidency, those plans were hindered after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Historical rankings of US presidents have typically placed Reagan in the middle to upper tier, and his post-presidential approval ratings by the general public have generally remained high.

Historical significance

During the 1964 presidential election, Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", a policy involving economic deregulation and cuts to both taxes and government spending during a period of stagflation. Other notable events during Reagan's first term included his survival of an assassination attempt, a well-publicized fight with public-sector labor unions, an expansion of the war on drugs, and his administration's slow response to the AIDS epidemic. Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having experienced a significant reduction of inflation, a decline in the unemployment rate, and the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history at that time. His physical and mental capacities gradually deteriorated leading to his death in 2004.