Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in a rented apartment above a bakery in Tampico, Illinois, the second son of Jack Reagan, a shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan ^[1]. The family moved repeatedly around northern Illinois during his childhood as his father chased work, settling in Dixon in 1920. Jack Reagan struggled with alcoholism, and Nelle, a devout member of the Disciples of Christ, raised her sons in the church and encouraged Ronald's early interest in performance and public speaking ^[1].

Any account of the Ronald Reagan biography has to begin in Dixon, the town he always called home. As a teenager he worked summers as a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River, a job he held for seven seasons and where, by local accounts, he pulled dozens of swimmers from the water ^[2]. He attended Dixon High School, where he played football, acted in school plays, and served as student body president.

In 1928 he enrolled at Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ school in central Illinois, on a partial athletic scholarship. He majored in economics and sociology, played on the football team, led the swim team, and got his first taste of politics when he spoke on behalf of students during a campus protest against faculty cuts ^[1]. He graduated in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, with modest grades and large ambitions.

Reagan's first career was in broadcasting. Hired in 1932 by radio station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, he soon moved to the more powerful WHO in Des Moines, where he became a popular sportscaster ^[2]. One of his signature skills was recreating Chicago Cubs baseball games live on air from bare telegraph accounts, improvising crowd noise and play-by-play detail for listeners across the Midwest.

A 1937 trip to California to cover Cubs spring training changed his life. A screen test led to a contract with Warner Bros., and over the next two decades he appeared in more than fifty films ^[3]. He was rarely a top-billed star, but he found steady work and a few roles that stuck to him. He played Notre Dame football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), the part that gave him the lifelong nickname "the Gipper," and earned his strongest reviews as a small-town amputee in Kings Row (1942) ^[3].

During the Second World War, Reagan served in the Army Air Forces. Poor eyesight kept him from combat, and he spent the war in California making training and morale films with the First Motion Picture Unit ^[1]. After 1945 his film career slowed, but his influence inside the industry grew. He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again in 1959, leading the union through contract negotiations and the anticommunist investigations of the era, during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee ^[3]. From 1954 to 1962 he hosted the television anthology series General Electric Theater and toured GE plants as a company spokesman, sharpening the polished, conversational speaking style that later defined his politics.

Reagan began adult life as a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat and voted for Democratic presidential candidates through 1948. His politics moved steadily rightward during the 1950s, shaped by his union battles, his GE years, and his growing hostility to high taxes and communism. He formally became a Republican in 1962 ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Ronald Reagan before politics finds the answer in this long conversion: an actor and union leader who talked himself, plant floor by plant floor, into conservatism.

His breakthrough came on October 27, 1964, when he delivered a nationally televised address, later known simply as "A Time for Choosing," on behalf of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ^[4]. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the speech raised substantial money and made Reagan a conservative star overnight. Two years later he challenged incumbent Pat Brown for the governorship of California and won by nearly a million votes.

Reagan served two terms as governor, from 1967 to 1975. His record mixed conservative rhetoric with pragmatic governing: he signed what was then the largest tax increase in California history to close a budget deficit, cracked down on campus protests at Berkeley, signed a liberalized abortion law he later said he regretted, and enacted welfare reform in 1971 ^[4]. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and again in 1976, when he came within a hundred delegates of unseating President Gerald Ford. In 1980, running against President Jimmy Carter amid high inflation, gasoline lines, and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan won 44 states and carried Republicans to control of the Senate ^[1]. At 69, he was the oldest person yet elected to the presidency.

Reagan took office on January 20, 1981, and his first year set the pattern for the decade. On March 30, 1981, he was shot and seriously wounded outside a Washington hotel by John Hinckley Jr.; a bullet lodged near his heart, and his recovery, along with the humor he displayed in the hospital, lifted his public standing ^[5]. That August he signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, cutting individual income tax rates by roughly 25 percent over three years, and fired more than 11,000 striking federal air traffic controllers, a move that reshaped American labor relations ^[5].

The list of Ronald Reagan achievements in economic policy remains contested, but the outline is clear. The Federal Reserve's tight money policy broke double-digit inflation at the cost of a severe recession in 1981 and 1982, with unemployment peaking above 10 percent. Recovery followed, and the economy grew through the rest of his presidency, an expansion his supporters credited to tax cuts and deregulation ^[6]. Critics pointed to the price: federal budget deficits roughly tripled the national debt during his eight years, and he signed several later tax increases to limit the damage ^[6]. In 1986 he signed a landmark bipartisan tax reform that lowered rates and closed loopholes, and he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1981 ^[5].

Foreign policy defined his second term. Reagan entered office calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," launched the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, and in 1983 proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based missile defense program ^[7]. Yet after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Reagan pursued negotiation with striking energy. The two leaders met at summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, and in 1987 signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons ^[7]. Standing at the Berlin Wall in June 1987, Reagan demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," a line that became emblematic of the Cold War's final chapter ^[7].

The gravest crisis of his presidency broke in November 1986, when it emerged that his administration had secretly sold arms to Iran and diverted some proceeds to the Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's government, in defiance of congressional restrictions. The Iran-Contra affair led to criminal charges against several officials and a sharp, temporary collapse in Reagan's approval ratings. Investigations found no proof that he knew of the diversion, and in a March 1987 address he accepted responsibility while insisting he had not intended to trade arms for hostages ^[8]. His administration was also widely criticized for its slow response to the emerging AIDS epidemic ^[6]. He left office in January 1989 with approval ratings among the highest of any departing president in the polling era ^[5].

Reagan married actress Jane Wyman in 1940. They had a daughter, Maureen, in 1941 and adopted a son, Michael, in 1945; a second daughter died shortly after birth in 1947. Wyman filed for divorce in 1948, making Reagan the first divorced man ever to become president ^[1].

In 1952 he married actress Nancy Davis, whom he had met when she sought his help, as Screen Actors Guild president, in clearing her name from a Hollywood blacklist mix-up. Their marriage lasted 52 years and produced two children, Patti and Ron. Nancy Reagan became her husband's closest adviser and fiercest protector, an influence felt throughout his governorship and presidency ^[2].

Away from politics, Reagan was happiest outdoors. He and Nancy bought Rancho del Cielo, a 688-acre ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara, in 1974, and he spent long stretches of his presidency there riding horses, clearing brush, and building fences ^[2]. He was known personally for optimism, a large stock of jokes and Hollywood stories, and a habit of writing constantly: decades of his own radio scripts, letters, and diaries survive and have been published ^[4].

After leaving the White House, the Reagans returned to Los Angeles, settling in Bel Air. He wrote a memoir, An American Life (1990), gave paid speeches, and in 1991 opened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California ^[2]. In 1989 he was awarded an honorary British knighthood, and in 1993 President George H. W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In November 1994 Reagan announced in a handwritten public letter that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," he wrote, in a farewell that moved even his critics and helped bring the illness into open public discussion ^[5]. He withdrew almost entirely from public view over the following decade, cared for by Nancy at their Bel Air home.

Ronald Reagan died there on June 5, 2004, at the age of 93, at that time the longest-lived American president ^[5]. A week of national mourning followed, including a state funeral at Washington National Cathedral attended by leaders from around the world. He was buried at his presidential library in Simi Valley.

Few modern presidents cast a longer shadow over their own party. Reagan fused free-market economics, cultural traditionalism, and assertive anticommunism into a governing coalition that dominated Republican politics for decades, and later candidates of both parties measured themselves against his electoral map: his 1984 reelection over Walter Mondale carried 49 of 50 states ^[6]. Basic Ronald Reagan facts, such as that 49-state landslide and the 525 electoral votes that came with it, still mark the outer edge of modern presidential victories.

Historians continue to argue over how much credit he deserves for the Cold War's end, which came under his successor, and over the long-term effects of rising deficits and inequality during the 1980s ^[6]. What is less disputed is his skill at the public side of the office. Journalists called him "the Great Communicator," and his eulogies after the Challenger disaster in 1986 and at other moments of national grief are studied as models of presidential speech ^[7].

His name is now attached to Washington National Airport, an aircraft carrier, and hundreds of schools, roads, and public buildings. In surveys of historians conducted since his death, Reagan has generally ranked in or near the top ten American presidents, and among the public he regularly polls as one of the most admired ^[8]. Whether judged a transformative statesman or a lucky performer in the right role, he remade the terms of American political debate, and both parties still argue on ground he laid out.