Week 28
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. 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.
Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and was hired the next year as a sports broadcaster in Iowa. 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. During the 1964 presidential election, Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech launched his rise as a leading conservative figure. 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. 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.
In his first term as president, Reagan began implementing "Reaganomics", (a term invented by his political enemies that turned out to be an advertisement for success) a policy involving economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of of massive un precedented inflation left over from the Carter administration. Reagan intentionally increased military spending so as to motivate the Soviets to come to the negotiating table, a policy that worked. Reagan's first term was also notable for his survival of an assassination attempt, a well-publicized fight with Air Traffic controllers union, and an expansion of the war on drugs. In the 1984 presidential election, Reagan was elected to a second term upon defeating former vice president Walter Mondale in one of the largest landslide victories in American history. He won every single state except Mondale's Minnesota. Foreign affairs dominated Reagan's second term, and most important were the ongoing negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.
Reagan left the presidency in 1989 with the American economy having seen a significant reduction of inflation, a fall in the unemployment rate, and the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history at that time. Reagan's foreign policy brought an end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union recognized that it could not afford to keep up with the pace of US rearmament and thus decided to sign the disarmament treaty of 1987. His Presidency constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, and he is often considered an icon of American conservatism. Democratic Party historians have typically placed Reagan in the middle to upper tier, but the American people rank him at the top. His post-presidential approval ratings by the general public are usually high. And upon his death in 2004, the US demonstrated an extraordinary affection for a president long out of office during the days of his Washington DC state funeral and his burial at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
