Ronald Wilson Reagan
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was the 40th president of the United States (1981-1989) and the oldest person ever to serve as president. He implemented policies that decisively reversed the economic and social trends of two generations. He also brought in a new style of presidential leadership, downgrading the importance of the president as an administrator and increasing the importance of the media as a means of communication. Reagan first became famous as an actor in Hollywood motion pictures and a television host.
Reagan's emergence as a political figure was based on his charm and on his identification with a conservative following that lacked effective leadership, at a time when the nation seemed to have strayed from old-fashioned values. Ronald Reagan was a personal and ideological symbol of these values. Having never held public office, Reagan became governor of California, the most populous state, in 1967 and almost immediately thereafter was a serious candidate for the presidency.
Early Life
Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, the younger of two sons of Nelle and John Reagan. His father was a traveling shoe salesman who, during the Great Depression, the hard economic times of the 1930s, was saved from unemployment by the Works Progress Administration, a federal program to provide jobs during the depression. John Reagan was an alcoholic and Ronald was strongly influenced by his mother, who taught him to read at an early age. Most of his childhood was spent in Dixon, Illinois.
Reagan won a scholarship to study at Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ college near Peoria, Illinois. He majored in economics, and he was president of the student body and captain of the swimming team, and on the football team. He was also drawn toward acting, but upon graduation in 1932 the only job available related to show business was as a local radio sportscaster, and in 1936 he became a sportscaster for station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.
In 1937 Reagan went to Hollywood and began an acting career that spanned more than 25 years. He played in more than 50 films, including Knute Rockne-All American (1940), King's Row (1942), and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). He soon became active in the Screen Actors Guild (the union for film actors) and was elected six times as its president. He married actress Jane Wyman and they had two children: Maureen and Michael, an adopted son. After eight years the marriage ended in divorce. In 1952 Reagan married another actress, Nancy Davis, daughter of an Illinois neurosurgeon. They also had two children, Patricia and Ronald.
Reagan's first political activities were associated with his responsibilities as a union leader. As union president, Reagan tried to remove suspected Communists from the movie industry. When the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities began an investigation in 1947 on the influence of Communists in the film industry, Reagan took a strong anti-Communist stand testifying before the committee.
In 1954 Reagan agreed to work with the General Electric Company to host a 30-minute television series and to make promotional tours speaking to General Electric employees around the country. Reagan promoted the free-enterprise system to large audiences. Despite his decreasing support for government programs and a tendency to vote Republican (Eisenhower and Nixon) Reagan was a registered Democrat until 1962.
Reagan emerged on the national political scene in 1964 when he made an impassioned television speech supporting Republican presidential candidate United States Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona. Although Goldwater lost the election, Reagan's speech brought in money and praise from Republicans around the country.
Some wealthy Californians persuaded a receptive Reagan to run for governor of California in 1966. Reagan appealed to working-class Democrats and defeated Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Sr., the incumbent Democrat, by almost one million votes.
Governor of California
Perhaps because he had to work with a Democrat-controlled state legislature for six of his eight years, Reagan's performance as governor was more flexible than many people had expected from his campaign speeches. During his first term Reagan temporarily stopped government hiring to slow the growth of the state workforce, but he also obtained big tax increases to balance the state budget. He cut funding for the University of California, a center of the student protest movement of the late 1960's, but after protests died down he increased funding for higher education. Reagan was elected to a second term in 1970, defeating Democrat Jesse Unruh, although he won by a much smaller margin than in 1966. He compromised with Democrats in the state legislature to produce a major reform of the welfare system in 1971, which reduced the number of people receiving state aid while increasing the benefits for those who remained eligible. By 1973, budget surpluses enabled Reagan to begin tax rebates that returned almost six billion dollars to taxpayers.
As governor, Reagan became one of several widely known conservative politicians who wanted to restrict government involvement in the economy and society. Although he had promised to serve a full term when elected, Reagan made a last-minute effort to get the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. He was defeated by Richard Nixon, who then won the election.
After completing his term as governor, Reagan decided to challenge incumbent President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Reagan won an unexpected victory in the North Carolina primary and won many delegates in the Midwest and the West, but Ford was nominated by a narrow margin at the Republican National Convention in August. Ford's defeat by Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter in the presidential election led some Republicans to wonder whether Reagan might have won had he been in Ford's place, and Reagan began to plan another run in 1980.
The Election of 1980
Reagan, who had spent years making political friends at party fund-raising dinners around the country, announced his candidacy in November 1979. He became the immediate favorite to capture the nomination and, except for an unexpected defeat by former Republican Party Chairman George Bush in the Iowa caucuses, he easily defeated his rivals for the Republican nomination. At the 1980 Republican convention a conservative platform was adopted. Former President Gerald Ford was considered as the vice-presidential candidate, but when Ford's negotiators proposed that the vice-president should share presidential powers, Reagan rejected the plan. Instead, he chose George Bush as his running mate.
During the fall campaign against Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the biggest political issue was the economy. Reagan blamed Carter for the recession that had begun in 1980 and for increasing inflation. He also accused Carter of weakness in foreign policy and called for a stronger military. His claim that Carter had a weak foreign policy seemed to be substantiated by a lengthy hostage crisis in Tehran, Iran. In November 1979 after Carter had allowed the deposed shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment, a group of Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 53 Americans as hostages. When the United States refused to return the shah to Iran as the captors demanded, a stalemate ensued. In April 1980 Carter ordered an airborne rescue attempt that failed. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed the rescue mission, subsequently resigned. United States media publicized the plight of the hostages and Carter's failure to release them. They were released in January 1981.
The contrast between the television personalities of the two candidates was also very important. Carter's stiff, nervous manner had never been popular. Reagan's grinning, wisecracking charm and his appeals to patriotism and old-fashioned morality were hits with the public. Many believed that Reagan was a forceful leader who could restore prosperity at home and prevent national humiliation abroad.
Reagan won the election by a landslide. More than 47 percent of the voting-age population did not participate in the presidential vote, but of those who voted, Reagan received 51 percent and Carter 41 percent. Moderate Republican John Anderson, running as an independent, received nearly 7 percent. In the Electoral College, Reagan won a ten-to-one victory.
President of the United States
Ronald Reagan presided over the most far-reaching changes in U.S. government economic and social policy in half a century. He defined his management style as "identify the problem, find the right individuals to do the job, and then let them go to it." Although some foreign policy consequences of this detachment became embarrassing for Reagan, his administration was successful in eliminating or reducing many federal government programs begun under Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969) and lifting many restrictions on business activities.
Reagan's chief function in his own administration was as "the great communicator." He served as a spokesman for the conservative coalition that had backed his campaign for the presidency. This coalition consisted of three main groups. The first group included wealthy people who wanted their taxes cut, businessmen who wanted to decrease government regulation, and defense contractors who wanted larger government orders. Second were the members of the "religious right," who were unhappy about decades of what they saw as decreasing respect for religion in public life and about the permissive attitudes, especially with respect to sex and drugs, that had emerged in the late 1960s. The third group was composed of those people who viewed world politics from the Cold War standpoint of the 1950s, who believed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) wanted to attack the United States and felt that the United States should build up its military strength to deter possible aggression by the USSR or its allies. These groups often had little in common, and it took a politician with Reagan's charm to smooth over their differences.
Reagan's decisive defeat of Carter could be interpreted as a public desire for change. His strength in the 1980 election helped the Republicans win a majority in the Senate (the first in 26 years) and reduced the Democratic majority in the House. On March 31, 1981, Reagan was shot in the chest by John W. Hinckley, an unstable drifter. Hinckley was later found not guilty because of insanity and committed to a mental hospital.
At first, the recession that Reagan had inherited from Carter deepened. Almost 11 percent of the workforce was unemployed by the fall of 1982. The recession reduced inflation significantly, but interest rates remained high. The 1982 elections brought substantial Democratic gains in the House.
During the next two years, however, economic recovery began. Unemployment came down, but thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared and the new jobs, mostly in service industries, paid less. Inflation remained low, while interest rates stayed high. The 1980s were prosperous for wealthy and well-to-do Americans, but there was a fragile foundation to the prosperity. The government acquired much more debt than ever before, debt that would have to be repaid by future generations of Americans. Inexpensive imports and increasing household debt implied that the consumption that would support domestic industries would decrease. In addition, poverty spread among racial minorities, women, and children.
In 1984 the Republicans nominated Reagan and Bush for a second term. Reagan's Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, ran a lackluster campaign in which he proposed tax increases to reduce the budget deficits. Reagan promised to keep taxes down, and won 59 percent of the popular vote and carried 49 states. In congressional races the Democrats did better, keeping a large House majority and gaining seats in the Senate.
Most voters still liked Reagan's personality, but a growing number were critical of his policies. In the 1986 elections the Democrats regained control of the Senate. During his last two years in office, lacking a majority in either house of Congress and unable to run for reelection himself, Reagan found it harder to get his legislative proposals enacted.
Economic Policy
Reagan's economic policy rested on the claim that investment in industry and spending by consumers would eventually increase tax revenues, but only if the government left money that had been going to the U.S. Treasury in private hands. Using this argument, in 1981 Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which enacted tax cuts that mainly benefited upper-income taxpayers and large corporations. He also obtained approval for cuts in spending for government social programs, including job training, college loans, food and medical programs, payments for those with disabilities, child daycare centers, and centers for the elderly. He did leave intact programs such as social security and medicare.
In addition, Reagan relaxed environmental and safety standards. He appointed Anne Burford, who opposed many regulations on air quality and the disposal of toxic waste, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. James Watt, Reagan's secretary of the interior, supported the use of public lands by private corporations.
Reagan also persuaded Congress to deregulate many industries. In 1982, for example, Congress passed the Garn-Saint Germain Depository Institutions Act, which tried to help struggling savings and loan institutions by allowing them to make much riskier investments, such as very high-risk junk bonds.
The Reagan Administration also believed that labor unions often interfered with economic efficiency. In August 1981, 11,800 members of the 15,000-member Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike to demand a shorter work week, higher pay, and other benefits. Reagan reacted by dismissing all 11,800 strikers and decertifying their union. Despite the tax cuts, lower environmental and safety standards, and deregulation, productive investment in civilian goods did not substantially increase. Instead, the additional money in the private sector of the economy fueled a five-year increase in the stock market. The stock market surge was intensified by a wave of billion-dollar mergers and takeovers as the Reagan Administration virtually suspended the enforcement of antitrust laws. Consumer spending for manufactures grew, but mainly for imports. At the same time Congress enacted increases in military spending, especially for expensive new high-technology weapons systems.
The high military spending forced the government to borrow year after year on a scale unprecedented in peacetime. Much of this money came from abroad, especially from Japan. The huge budget deficits kept interest rates so high that the value of the dollar soared in relation to major foreign currencies. As a result, U.S. manufacturers found it difficult to compete with their foreign rivals in domestic or foreign markets, and thousands of industrial jobs disappeared. A substantial devaluation of the dollar starting in 1986 failed to overcome the huge trade deficit. By 1987 confidence in the future of the U.S. economy weakened around the world. In October 1987 a Wall Street panic caused the value of stocks to plummet as sharply as they had in 1929. After that there were calls even from prominent Republicans for greater presidential leadership to put the government's financial house in order, and Congress stopped approving increases in the military budget, except to offset inflation.
Social Policy
Reagan's administration had a powerful impact on civil liberties and civil rights. The Justice Department cut back its efforts to enforce job discrimination and fair housing laws. It supported legal challenges to court-ordered school busing plans and defended tax breaks for racially biased schools.
For years, Reagan sought the support of conservative Christians and others who considered U.S. moral standards too low. In 1986 he responded to public alarm about drug abuse by suggesting that all employers test their workers for evidence of the use of illegal drugs and urged government agencies to fire employees who failed the test more than once. In 1986 a commission appointed by United States Attorney General Edwin Meese called for tighter restrictions on allegedly obscene films and publications. The administration also refused to endorse a presidential commission's recommendation that there be a law to ban discrimination against victims of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease that by the mid-1980s was both a major health and political issue.
Judicial Appointments
Some social changes that conservatives desired, notably forbidding abortions and allowing prayer in public schools, could not be made because courts had outlawed such changes on constitutional grounds. During the Reagan years, however, half of the federal district and appeals judgeships became vacant and Reagan appointed conservatives to these courts. By the end of his term he had also appointed three of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1981 Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor, a conservative, to the court, and she became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. In 1986 he nominated conservative Associate Justice William Rehnquist as chief justice and named Antonin Scalia to replace him as associate justice. These nominations were all confirmed by the Senate. In 1987, however, the Senate refused to confirm Robert Bork, an ultraconservative whose views were well known. Reagan's next nominee, Douglas Ginsburg, a young economic libertarian, admitted that he had smoked marijuana and was forced to withdraw. Finally, Reagan named Anthony Kennedy, a moderate whose views on controversial issues were unknown, and his nomination was confirmed.
Fighting Communism
Reagan changed the tone, but not the course, of foreign policy. Détente, a peaceful if strained policy of coexistence with the USSR that was stressed in the 1970s, was deemphasized. In 1983, addressing a conservative Christian audience, Reagan called the USSR "an evil empire." He launched a global crusade against governments and movements said to be under Soviet influence.
A focal point of Reagan's foreign policy was to reverse the tide of Marxist revolution in Central America and the Caribbean. After a revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 had deposed former leader Anastasio Somoza, the United States had accused the new Sandinista government of aiding rebels in El Salvador. The United States cut off its aid in 1981 and began to support an anti-Sandinista guerrilla movement known as the contras. In 1982 Nicaragua signed an aid pact with the USSR. Reagan then mounted a major campaign to overthrow the Sandinistas by supplying weapons, money, and training to the contras. Reagan also sent arms and advisers to the regime in El Salvador. In 1983 U.S. troops invaded the Caribbean island nation of Grenada after rebels overthrew the government there.
The Reagan administration also supported two other major struggles against regimes based on forms of Marxism. It sent huge amounts of military equipment to Muslim guerrillas fighting the Communist government of Afghanistan, which was supported by Soviet troops, and joined with South Africa in aiding guerrillas fighting the Marxist government of Angola.
As in Nicaragua, these wars were long and expensive, and brought no decisive U.S. victories. But they kept up pressure against Marxist regimes and, unlike the Vietnam War of the late 1960s and early 1970s, produced almost no U.S. casualties.
In the Middle East, Reagan intervened several times with U.S. forces. In 1982, in an effort to strengthen the Christian government of Lebanon, Reagan sent marines to Lebanon. In October 1983 nearly 250 marines and other U.S. service members were killed when their Beirut headquarters was bombed. Reagan withdrew the surviving marines early in 1984. After the United States and other Western nations removed their forces from Lebanon, Westerners remaining in Lebanon often were kidnapped by radical Muslims. The Beirut bombing and incidents elsewhere created a strong reaction against Middle East-based terrorists in U.S. public opinion.
In 1986 a bomb in a West German dance club killed a U.S. soldier and injured others. The Reagan Administration claimed that Libya was responsible for this and other terrorist activities, and retaliated by bombing several Libyan cities on April 15, 1986. In 1987 U.S. naval forces were sent to the Persian Gulf after Kuwait asked for both U.S. and Soviet protection of its shipping during the Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan Administration was anxious to prevent the defeat of Iraq by Iran, which would diminish U.S. influence in the region, and the naval patrols exchanged fire with Iranian gunboats.
Reagan kept U.S. relations with the USSR cool. However, the U.S. military build-up, particularly the Strategic Defense Initiative (called Star Wars) technology, threatened Soviet security. The Strategic Defense Initiative was supposed to permit the United States to intercept enemy missiles before they hit their targets. Many experts believed that Star Wars was either technically unfeasible or prohibitively expensive-or both. Reagan's insistence on the program brought strategic arms control talks to a standstill and provoked strong protests from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during his summit meetings with Reagan in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. In 1987 the two leaders did agree to scrap land-based nuclear missiles of intermediate and shorter range, a small fraction of their nuclear arsenals.
The Iran-Contra Scandal
The last two years of Reagan's presidency were marred by a political scandal that turned his hands-off management style into an embarrassment and damaged his reputation for honesty and commitment to principle.
In November 1986 newspapers reported that the U.S. government had secretly sold weapons to Iran and had diverted the profits from the sales to help the contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Reagan at first strongly denied reports that arms had been sold to win the freedom of U.S. hostages held by Lebanese terrorists friendly to Iran. He argued that the shipments were part of an effort to open up contacts with "moderate elements" in the Iranian government. Administration representatives blamed the diversion of the profits on Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a National Security Council staff member who directed secret operations against Nicaragua.
When congressional hearings were held in 1987, attention centered particularly on how deeply Reagan was personally involved in the affair and on whether the administration had violated the Boland amendment, a law that had forbidden U.S. military aid to the contras. The chief witnesses were North and Admiral John Poindexter, who had been Reagan's national security adviser at the time of the arms shipments. North strongly denied the administration's claim that he had acted on his own. Poindexter said he had never told Reagan about the diversion of funds to the contras, but he did testify that Reagan had approved a direct arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger testified that they had advised against the arms sales to Iran and had not been told about important aspects of the policy. The hearings also revealed that while the Boland amendment was in effect U.S. officials had secretly asked foreign governments to contribute funds for the contras to replace the secret funding that Congress had stopped.
Congress members strongly criticized the incompetence of the administration's secret operations and its careless accounting for secret funds, but they did not question the need for-or the legality of-secret operations. They avoided any general investigation of contra financing, including alleged ties between contras and drug smugglers.
End of the Reagan Administration
The Iran-contra scandal tarnished Reagan's public image because his defense rested on his claim that he had been unaware of what his staff was doing and because his original assertion that the arms were not ransom payments for hostages was false. The press paid more attention to complaints from staff members that Reagan spent little time on presidential duties and sometimes slept during cabinet meetings. Reagan's political influence was also diminished by the efforts of politicians to position themselves for the 1988 elections, in which Reagan would not be a candidate. Congress began to reject some Reagan initiatives. The Iran-contra scandal was followed by the rejection of the Bork nomination, a congressional override of Reagan's veto of a civil-rights enforcement bill, and a congressional refusal to renew funding for contra military operations.
Reagan was proud of his administration's major accomplishments, which remained in place. The tax burden on high incomes had been greatly reduced, many restrictions in business activity had been removed, programs that redistributed income in favor of the poor had been cut back sharply, and conservatives now predominated in the federal judiciary. Arms spending had been greatly increased. Business was prospering for a record sixth year. Reagan was succeeded as president by his administration's vice president, George Bush.
Later Years
After retiring to California, Reagan supported conservatives on many issues. He published his autobiography, An American Life, in 1990, and he presided at the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, in 1991.
In November 1994 Reagan announced that he had Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative disease of the brain. One year later Reagan and his wife Nancy annouced that the couple, along with the national Alzheimer's Association, would establish the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute to help find treatments and eventually a cure for the disease.
