Ronald Reagan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on the 6th of February 1911 in a rented apartment above a bakery in Tampico, Illinois, the younger son of a dreaming salesman and a devoted churchwoman. By the time he died on the 5th of June 2004, he had been a radio voice, a Hollywood leading man, a union president, a governor, and the 40th president of the United States. The arc of his life raises a set of questions that still divide Americans: Did his economic policies lift the country or hollow it out? Did his Cold War brinksmanship hasten the Soviet collapse, or did he stumble onto the right side of history? And what explains a man who signed the largest tax hike in California history while preaching the gospel of small government, who publicly championed the Brady Bill after leaving office, and who spent eight years in the White House largely silent about an epidemic that would kill tens of thousands of his own citizens? His son Ron later said that Reagan first showed overt symptoms of Alzheimer's in late 1992 or 1993 - just years after he left office - and that shadow hangs over every effort to take the full measure of the man.

• 2. From Tampico to Hollywood

  ›

  Nelle Reagan led prayer meetings at the local Disciples of Christ church when the pastor was out of town, and her son Ronald credited her spiritual influence for making him a Christian. His father, Jack, wanted to provide for the family but struggled with alcoholism. The Reagans moved repeatedly - through Chicago, Galesburg, and Monmouth - before settling in Dixon, Illinois, in 1920, in a house near the H. C. Pitney Variety Store Building.

  Dixon was where Reagan first found a public role. He worked summers as a lifeguard at the Rock River in Lowell Park and developed interests in drama and football at Dixon High School. At Eureka College, which Nelle chose because of its Disciples of Christ affiliation, he was a mediocre student but a natural organizer: he joined a student strike that forced the college president to resign and served as student body president. He was also a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. A detail his biographers have noted: when two Black teammates were refused service at a segregated hotel during a road trip, Reagan invited them to his parents' home in Dixon and his parents welcomed them - a gesture described as unusually progressive for that place and time.

  After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and sociology in 1932, Reagan talked his way into a job in Davenport, Iowa, broadcasting Big Ten football. He then moved to WHO radio in Des Moines, where he re-created Chicago Cubs games from sparse wire reports, inventing the play-by-play in real time. In 1936, while traveling with the Cubs to spring training in California, he took a screen test that led to a seven-year contract with Warner Bros. He arrived in Hollywood in 1937, debuted in Love Is on the Air, and made thirty films - mostly B films - before military service interrupted his career in April 1942. His turn as George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American in 1940 earned him the nickname "the Gipper," one he would carry all the way to the presidency. His performance in Kings Row in 1942, playing a man who wakes to find his legs amputated, was considered by many critics to be his finest screen work. Gallup polls placed him in the top 100 stars from 1941 to 1942, but World War II interrupted the momentum he would never fully recover as a film actor.

• 3. The Union Man and the Blacklist

  ›

  When Robert Montgomery resigned as president of the Screen Actors Guild on the 10th of March 1947, Reagan was elected to the position in a special election. The job dropped him into one of the ugliest periods in Hollywood history: labor battles, the Communist scare, and the blacklist.

  Reagan aligned the guild with the studios against the Conference of Studio Unions following the Hollywood Black Friday strike. Writer Rick Perlstein, in The Invisible Bridge, argued that this move gave liberal guild members a cover story - turning them into moral innocents rather than strikebreakers. On the 10th of April, the FBI interviewed Reagan and he provided the names of actors he believed to be communist sympathizers. Before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he testified that some guild members had Communist Party ties, though he called information about the Screen Writers Guild's situation "hearsay."

  Reagan resigned the SAG presidency on the 10th of November 1952, but the guild work was not finished. On the 16th of November 1959, the board elected him president for a second time, and he led negotiations to secure residual payments for actors whose films made between 1948 and 1959 had been televised. The producers ultimately agreed to fund pensions and pay residuals on films made after 1959. Reagan resigned this second tenure on the 7th of June 1960. His first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman in January 1940, had already ended in divorce in July 1949; Wyman was described as uninterested in politics and the marriage slowly unraveled. He met Nancy Davis in 1949 after she contacted him in his SAG capacity - her name had appeared on a communist blacklist by mistake, confused with another woman. They married in March 1952.

• 4. The Making of a Conservative

  ›

  Reagan had started his adult life as a Democrat, admiring Franklin D. Roosevelt as "a true hero." He supported Harry Truman in 1948 and worked with the AFL-CIO against right-to-work laws. In 1946, he appeared on a radio program called Operation Terror, calling rising Ku Klux Klan activity a "capably organized systematic campaign of fascist violence and intimidation and horror."

  The turn came gradually. His work as a motivational speaker for General Electric throughout the 1950s sharpened his suspicion of federal bureaucracy. In 1961, he adapted his GE speeches into a talk attacking Medicare, warning that its passage would mean "the end of individual freedom in the United States." He formally registered as a Republican in 1962, the same year GE dropped him.

  At the 1964 presidential election, a televised speech Reagan gave for Barry Goldwater's campaign became the turning point. Titled "A Time for Choosing," the speech argued that the Founding Fathers "knew that governments don't control things" and that government must use "force and coercion" to try. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but Reagan's national profile among conservatives soared. Political journalists David S. Broder and Stephen H. Hess called it "the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his famous 'Cross of Gold' address." Two years later, Reagan ran for governor of California. He won with 58 percent of the vote against incumbent Pat Brown's 42 percent, defeating a man who had tried to paint him as an extremist.

• 5. Governor of California

  ›

  Pat Brown had left California with a structural deficit, partly because the state had switched to accrual accounting to avoid raising taxes. Reagan arrived in Sacramento promising smaller government and immediately proceeded to sign the largest tax hike in California history. Historian Kevin Starr noted this bluntly: Reagan "gave Californians the biggest tax hike in their history - and got away with it." Sales taxes, corporate taxes, inheritance taxes, liquor and cigarette taxes all rose.

  On guns, Reagan's record was equally counterintuitive. In 1967, alarmed by the Black Panther Party's practice of copwatching - following police while openly carrying firearms - he signed the Mulford Act, which prohibited public carrying of firearms in California. Critics said the law was "overreacting to the political activism of organizations such as the Black Panthers," and it became California's most restrictive gun control measure. That same year, he signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act, allowing abortions in cases of rape and incest when a doctor determined a birth would damage the mother's physical or mental health. He later said he regretted signing it, believing doctors had interpreted the mental health provision loosely.

  On the University of California campuses, Reagan was uncompromising. After declaring a state of emergency in response to protests at Berkeley on the 5th of February 1969, he sent in the California Highway Patrol. In May 1969, a confrontation at the site known as People's Park left one student shot and killed, many officers and two reporters injured. Reagan then ordered the state National Guard to occupy Berkeley for seventeen days. On the 7th of April he said, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." By 1973, however, the state budget had swung from deficit to surplus, and Reagan spoke of wanting "to give back to the people." Professor Gary K. Clabaugh later wrote that Reagan's opposition to basic education funding caused public schools to deteriorate, and journalist William Trombley concluded that budget cuts damaged Berkeley's student-faculty ratio and research capacity.

• 6. Reaganomics and Its Consequences

  ›

  Reagan was inaugurated on the 20th of January 1981. In his address, he declared, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Iran waited until he had been sworn in before announcing the release of American hostages held since the 4th of November 1979 - a final act of contempt toward Jimmy Carter.

  Reagan's economic program combined tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts to domestic discretionary spending. He signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 to dramatically lower federal income tax rates. He also signed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 - one of eleven times Reagan raised taxes during his presidency - which doubled the federal cigarette tax and, according to economist Paul Krugman, reversed "a third of the 1981 cut." The economy slid into recession in July 1981. By December 1982, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured unemployment at 10.8 percent. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker had fought inflation with high interest rates, which squeezed lending and deepened the downturn before the economy began to recover. By 1989, unemployment had fallen to 5.3 percent and inflation had dropped from 12 percent in 1980 to under 5 percent.

  The costs were real. The national debt as a share of gross domestic product rose from 33 percent in 1981 to 53 percent by 1989. Reagan himself described the tripling of the national debt as "the greatest disappointment of his presidency." Defense spending doubled between 1981 and 1985. On the other side, deregulation of savings and loan associations through the 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act allowed those institutions to make riskier loans and investments; leaders of some institutions embezzled funds, and the administration's inattentiveness contributed to the savings and loan crisis that required costly bailouts. Economic inequality increased during the 1980s, as did the number of homeless individuals. Critics labeled the underlying theory "trickle-down economics."

• 7. Cold War, Grenada, and Iran-Contra

  ›

  Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer bomber program that Carter had canceled, deployed the MX missile, and in March 1983 unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based missile defense system that opponents quickly dubbed "Star Wars." Soviet leader Yuri Andropov said it would lead to "an extremely dangerous path." In a 1982 address to the British Parliament, Reagan said that freedom and democracy would leave "Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." Margaret Thatcher called the speech a "triumph."

  On the 19th of October 1983, Maurice Bishop was overthrown and murdered in Grenada. Several days later, Reagan ordered an invasion, citing a Soviet-Cuban military buildup and concern for American medical students at St. George's University. American forces prevailed in two days of fighting. The United Nations General Assembly voted to censure the action, but it enjoyed public support within the United States.

  The darker episode of Reagan's second term began in mid-1985, when Hezbollah started taking American hostages in Lebanon. Reagan approved the secret sale of over 2,000 missiles to Iran - then engaged in the Iran-Iraq War - hoping Iranian pressure would free the hostages. Hezbollah released four hostages but captured six more. On the initiative of National Security Council staffer Oliver North, proceeds from the missile sales were redirected to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, a move that violated the second Boland Amendment. The Lebanese newspaper Ash-Shiraa exposed the transactions in early November 1986. Reagan initially denied wrongdoing; on the 25th of November, he announced that John Poindexter and North had left the administration and that he would form the Tower Commission to investigate. The commission, reporting in February 1987, confirmed that the administration had traded arms for hostages and that Reagan had "created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others" and had "knowingly participated or acquiesced in covering up the scandal." Investigators did not find conclusive proof that Reagan had known about the direct aid to the Contras.

  In a separate crisis, on the 17th of May 1987, an Iraqi fighter jet struck the USS Stark with two Exocet missiles, killing 37 sailors. Reagan issued a "policy of self-defense" and accepted Iraq's official apology, declaring that no country had "a right to try and close" the Persian Gulf "and take it for itself."

• 8. Gorbachev, the Wall, and What Followed

  ›

  Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader as oil prices - the primary source of Soviet export revenue - fell to roughly one third of their previous level in 1985. Combined with the costs of collectivized agriculture, inefficient manufacturing, and enormous military expenditures, the Soviet economy was under severe strain. Reagan recognized an opening and shifted from confrontation to diplomacy, holding four summit conferences with Gorbachev between 1985 and 1988.

  The most consequential summit took place in Reykjavik in 1986. The two leaders agreed to abolish all nuclear weapons - a deal that stunned their own advisers - before it collapsed over a single condition: Gorbachev demanded that SDI research be confined to laboratories for the ten-year disarmament period. Reagan refused. In June 1987, standing at the Berlin Wall, Reagan called on Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." The remark was largely ignored at the time. When the wall fell in November 1989, it was retrospectively treated as a defining moment, though Reagan had already left office.

  In December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at the Washington Summit, committing both countries to the total abolition of their respective short-range and medium-range missile stockpiles. The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to ratify it in May 1988. British historian M. J. Heale wrote in 2008 that scholars had reached broad consensus that Reagan "contributed to critically ending the Cold War," though historian Melvyn P. Leffler described him more carefully as "Gorbachev's minor, yet indispensable partner, setting the framework for the dramatic changes that neither anticipated happening anytime soon." When Reagan left the presidency on the 20th of January 1989, the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history up to that point was underway; the Soviet Union itself dissolved two years later in 1991.