Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004), fortieth president of the United States.A political liberal in his youth, Ronald Wilson Reagan helped create a conservative coalition in middle age and moved American politics rightward after winning the presidency at age sixty‐nine. Born in Tampico, Illinois, he grew up in a family that was by the standards of the day socially as well as politically liberal. His Roman Catholic father Jack and his evangelical Protestant mother Nelle condemned
racism, and young Ron received help from a Jewish mentor. Jack's job with the
Works Progress Administration helped the family survive the Depression of the 1930s, but Jack's alcoholism left a mark on his son's personality. Outwardly amiable and optimistic, Reagan typically concealed his feelings, avoided confrontations, and cultivated many acquaintances but few close friends.
After graduating from Eureka College in 1932, Reagan became a
radio sportscaster in the
Middle West and then began a
film acting career in Hollywood. Generally avoiding the movie colony's often wild social life, he nevertheless became active in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and a master of Hollywood politics. In 1940 he helped to arrange production of his most famous film,
Knute Rockne: All American, in which he starred as Notre Dame football legend George Gipp. That same year he married actress Jane Wyman. Involved in national politics as well, he voted for Franklin Delano
Roosevelt four times and bled for liberal causes so easily, he would later joke, that he was “hemophiliac.” Barred from
World War II combat by weak vision, he acted in films and plays produced by the army.
A series of crises in the late 1940s permanently altered Reagan's life. He almost died of pneumonia, his marriage collapsed, and his movie career stalled. A
Cold War liberal Democrat during this period, he testified before the
House Committee on Un‐American Activities as president of SAG and was a secret informant for the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nancy Davis, an actress whom he met in 1949 and married three years later, restored stability to his life and nudged him rightward. He became a public spokesman for General Electric during the 1950s, joined the
Republican party in the early 1960s, and won a national conservative following while campaigning for Republican presidential nominee Barry
Goldwater in 1964. As governor of
California from 1967 to 1975, Reagan sounded conservative but often acted moderately. He compromised with Democratic legislators, allowed state budget increases, and signed a bill liberalizing
abortion. Bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976 proved unsuccessful.
Like the country as a whole, Reagan became more conservative during the late 1970s, yet he won the presidency in 1980, defeating President Jimmy
Carter, as the inspirational head of a broad coalition that included “Reagan Democrats” who blamed Carter for economic “stagflation” and a perceived decline of American power abroad. Moreover, except for his action to curb unions (most notably when he fired striking federal employees who belonged to the air‐traffic controllers' union), Reagan had no intention of dismantling the New Deal. Cuts in federal expenditures centered on antipoverty programs created during President Lyndon B.
Johnson's administration rather than on middle‐class entitlements. Overall, his economic program benefited the affluent. His administration lowered taxes, especially in the upper brackets; accepted a recession to stop runaway inflation; and promoted reduced governmental regulation of business. “Reaganomics” proved less popular than “the Gipper” himself, whose standing soared when he responded bravely to an assassination attempt in March 1981. He and his vice president, George
Bush, won a sweeping reelection victory in 1984, defeating Democrat Walter Mondale and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro.
After twenty‐five years of Cold War détente in practice if not in name, Reagan resumed vigorous denunciation of the Soviet Union as an evil, totalitarian empire. He also sponsored the largest military buildup in U.S. history. In March 1983, confronted with a strong
antinuclear protest movement, he proposed a high‐tech missile defense system known as the
Strategic Defense Initiative. Heavy military spending, coupled with tax cuts, produced massive budget deficits, compounded by a severe trade imbalance. Elsewhere, Reagan's diplomacy mixed prudence with exaggerated fears of Third World radicalism. He retained diplomatic relations with communist China and, after a disastrous intervention in the Lebanese civil war cost more than three hundred American lives in guerrilla bombings, prudently withdrew. On the other hand, he ordered the bombing of Libya and the invasion of Grenada on the dubious grounds that their governments profoundly threatened U.S. interests, and he worked tirelessly to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Although the full story may never be known, Reagan in the mid‐1980s at least acquiesced in a clandestine and illegal plan to sell arms to Iran and divert the profits to anti‐Sandinista rebels known as the Contras. A congressional investigation of the
Iran‐Contra Affair in 1986 temporarily damaged Reagan's popularity, but this crisis was soon eclipsed by the end of the Cold War. The degree to which Reagan's military buildup contributed to the collapse of
communism remains conjectural, but Reagan unquestionably responded flexibly as the Soviet Union moved toward democracy under Mikhail Gorbachev. Nancy Reagan, an influential behind‐the‐scenes figure in the Reagan White House, encouraged this flexibility. Reagan left office in 1989 as the most popular president since Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease in 1994, he withdrew from public life.
See also
Anticommunism;
Conservatism;
Foreign Relations;
New Deal Era, The.
Bibliography
Lou Cannon , Reagan, 1982.
Larry Berman, ed., Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency, 1990.
Lou Cannon , President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, 1991.
William E. Pemberton , Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan, 1997.
Edmund Morris , Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, 1999.
John W. Sloan , The Reagan Effect: Economics and Presidential Leadership, 1999.
Leo P. Ribuffo
