US: A movie actor who became one of the most popular presidents of the 20th century, Ronald Wilson Reagan redefined the nation's political agenda and dramatically reshaped US-Soviet relations while serving as president from 1981 to 1989.
After leaving office, Reagan suffered in his final years from the mind-destroying illness of Alzheimer's disease. He announced his condition on November 5th, 1994, in a poignant letter to the American people in which he thanked them "for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president". Often called the Great Communicator, the Republican president was an icon to American conservatives, whom he led out of the political wilderness. But his legacy eluded easy ideological classification.
Former Senate Republican leader Howard H. Baker, Jr. (Tenn.), who served as White House chief of staff during a key period in the Reagan presidency, observed that Reagan, despite a proclaimed constancy of values, also displayed "a capacity to surprise". This capacity was especially evident in Reagan's dealings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Although Reagan was an outspoken anti-communist who described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", he forged a constructive relationship with the reform-minded Gorbachev, who ascended to power midway through the Reagan presidency.
The two leaders held five summits, beginning with a 1985 meeting in Geneva. At a 1987 summit in Washington, they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first pact to reduce US and Soviet nuclear arsenals. After a follow-up Moscow summit in 1988, Reagan proclaimed a "new era" in US-Soviet relations.
The thaw that melted the Cold War followed a prolonged period of heightened tensions between the countries during Reagan's first term.
The relationship reached a low point on September 1st, 1983, when a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that had strayed over Russian air space, killing all 269 people aboard, including 61 US citizens. In the wake of this incident, military forces on both sides were placed on alert.
Administration critics contended Reagan had contributed to the crisis with anti-Soviet rhetoric and by conducting a massive US arms buildup that he had promised during his 1980 campaign. On June 18th, 1980, Reagan told The Washington Post that it "would be of great benefit to the United States if we started a buildup" because the Soviets were too weak economically to compete in an expanded arms race and would come to the bargaining table. He predicted the demise of the Soviet Union, most notably in a speech to British members of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster on June 8th, 1982, in which he said the Soviets faced "a great revolutionary crisis" and would wind up on "the ash heap of history".
In another historic speech, on June 12th, 1987, in front of the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall, Reagan urged: "Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Ten months after Reagan left office, the German people dismantled the wall. On Christmas 1991, Gorbachev stepped down and the Soviet Union and the Cold War passed into history. Some historians credit Reagan for these events - or at least for accelerating them. Others say the Soviet Union collapsed largely because of internal weaknesses.
There is general agreement, however, that the meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan and later between Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush eased the transition from Cold War to peace. Alexander Bessmertnykh, deputy Soviet foreign minister during the Gorbachev-Reagan summits, said at a 1993 conference at Princeton that both Reagan and Gorbachev were more farsighted than their advisers in their idealistic determination to reduce nuclear arsenals.
Reagan's economic policies also departed from the mainstream. In his 1980 campaign, he pledged to cut taxes, increase military spending and balance the budget. He carried out the first two promises at the expense of the third.
While the nation prospered after emerging from a 1981-82 recession, the Reagan budgets produced record deficits and a near tripling of the national debt. Toward the end of his term, Reagan called the federal budget deficit "one of my greatest disappointments" and blamed it on congressional reluctance to cut domestic spending, even though the budget proposals he submitted to Congress had not been balanced.
But the deficits appeared less harmful in hindsight. Conservative analyst David Frum has described them as "wartime deficits" and a small price to pay for ending the Cold War.
Even Reagan's critics acknowledge that he was a masterful political performer. Theodore Roosevelt termed the presidency a "bully pulpit", and Franklin D. Roosevelt gave this pulpit a new dimension in the radio age with folksy "fireside chats". Reagan, a former Democrat who had voted three times for FDR and admired him, adapted the bully pulpit to television. He sometimes borrowed directly from FDR. A refrain that became a frequent punch line of Reagan's 1980 campaign speeches - "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" - was a variant of an FDR comment in a 1934 fireside chat.
Reagan gave weekly Saturday radio speeches to the American people, a practice continued by his successors. Drawing upon skills forged in his earlier careers in radio, films and television, Reagan set the standard in using television to promote his presidency.
Reagan was nearly 78 when he completed his second term, but until he was stricken by Alzheimer's, Reagan's trim, athletic build made him appear younger than his years, and his amiability and self-deprecating humour softened the hard edge of his ideological advocacies. Reagan poked fun at his age, his work habits and his supposed simple-mindedness. He once said that he knew that hard work never killed anyone, "but I figure, why take the chance?"
Much of his humour was spontaneous. Asked while visiting astronauts in Houston before the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 1988 whether he would like to go into space, Reagan quipped, "I've been in space for several years".
Reagan maintained high public approval ratings during most of his presidency after the 1981-82 recession. But his popularity plummeted in November 1986 after disclosures that he had secretly approved US arms sales to Iran in an attempt to win release of American hostages held in Lebanon. The arms sales were a diplomatic embarrassment that undercut US efforts to persuade allies to stem the supply of arms to Iran, which was involved in a prolonged war with Iraq.
The Iran arms deal and follow-up revelations that proceeds from the sales had been diverted to the Contra rebels fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua provoked the seminal crisis of the Reagan administration and led to the dismissal of the president's national security adviser, John M. Poindexter, and Marine Lieut. Col. Oliver North, the National Security Council staff aide accused of masterminding the diversion.
Prodded by first lady Nancy Reagan and other advisers, Reagan reluctantly accepted responsibility for the arms sales but denied knowledge of the diversion, which Poindexter claimed he had approved without telling the president. Neither a joint congressional inquiry nor independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh was able to prove otherwise.
Walsh, who conducted a seven-year investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, found that Reagan had "knowingly participated or acquiesced in covering up the scandal", but he concluded that there was "no credible evidence that the president authorised or was aware of the diversion of the profits from the Iran arms sale to assist the contras".
The administration recovered its momentum during the final two years of the presidency, and Reagan regained much of the public approval squandered by the Iran-contra affair. This twilight period was marked by foreign policy successes, including the INF Treaty, the beginning of Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a long-sought settlement in southern Africa to remove foreign troops from Namibia. A few weeks before he left office, Reagan also reversed long-standing US policy and approved a "substantive dialogue" with the Palestine Liberation Organisation after its leadership renounced terrorism and recognised the legitimacy of Israel.
Overall, the "Reagan Doctrine" foreign policy of aiding anti-communist insurrections had mixed results. It succeeded in Afghanistan and had partial successes in southern Africa and Cambodia, then occupied by Vietnamese troops. But Reagan failed to mobilise public support on behalf of his favorite anti-communist insurgents, the Nicaraguan Contras he called "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers".
Time and again, the Democrat-controlled House resisted his appeals for military aid to the contras. This was a bitter disappointment to Reagan.
Reagan was more successful, after a shaky start, in rallying traditional allies behind his vision of a world committed to Western values of political and economic freedom. His staunch friend and ally in this effort was British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, whose support for the Reagan administration was demonstrated most directly in 1986 when she permitted use of British air bases in a bombing attack on Libya in retaliation for the terror bombing of a West German disco frequented by US servicemen.
Reagan's commitment to freedom was matched by an abhorrence of nuclear weapons. This view has been traced variously to his longtime interest in science fiction, his acceptance of the biblical prophecy of Armageddon and a tour he took on July 31st, 1979, at North American Aerospace Defence Command headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, where he learned that the American people were defenceless in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack.
Even before this tour, Reagan was sceptical about the conventional Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, in which peace was maintained through a balance of terror. This concern led in time to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposed by Reagan on March 23, 1983, and soon dubbed "Star Wars" after the popular George Lucas movie.
SDI sought to develop an effective antimissile defence, which Reagan offered to share with the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not believe him. They denounced SDI, in part because they feared antimissile research might lead to breakthroughs in other military technologies.
The issue came to a head at a 1986 summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik in Iceland, where the Soviet leader insisted on restricting SDI to laboratory research. Although SDI was then no more than a laboratory program, Reagan reacted, as special assistant Jack F. Matlock Jr. wrote later, "as if he had been asked to toss his favourite child into an erupting volcano" and walked out of the meeting.
Reagan's admirers have called SDI visionary; his detractors have denounced it as dubious science. But there is little doubt that SDI, whatever its feasibility, was a factor in prodding the Soviet Union to negotiate.
Reagan never made a pretense of scientific knowledge or of grasping policy details. He saw himself as a big-picture president who focused his attention on national defense, world peace and economic growth. In a 1982 speech, he said that the United States remained, as always, "a beacon of hope to all the oppressed and impoverished nations of the world".
Reagan often credited his political success to an empathy with ordinary Americans. Asked by a reporter on the eve of his election in 1980 what Americans saw in him, Reagan replied: "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves, and that I'm one of them? I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them." Even after two terms as president, Reagan called himself a "citizen-politician".
"This view was not a pose," said his friend Paul Laxalt, a Republican conservative who served as governor of neighboring Nevada during Reagan's first term as governor of California . "Much of life is psychological, and it is Reagan's genius that he convinced himself and others that he was not really a politician, which inspired unbelievable trust in him," Laxalt said.
Reagan reinforced the impression that he was not a politician by telling stories at meetings where others were discussing policy. Even during the most trying discussions, Reagan was apt to interject anecdotes from his Hollywood years or his Illinois boyhood, a practice that led critics to accuse him of conducting "government by anecdote."
Michael K. Deaver, a longtime aide and friend, said the persistent underestimation of Reagan was "his secret weapon". In time, it became recognised that Reagan's pleasant smile and apparent passivity concealed a competitiveness that came to the fore when he was sharply challenged.
This competitiveness manifested itself in a desire to succeed, acting as a brake on Reagan's more conservative impulses and inclining him toward compromise. Richard Darman, a moderate Republican and key White House aide during the first term, described Reagan as "simultaneously an ideologue and a pragmatist."
In office, Reagan's willingness to take what he could get led to compromises on welfare and education bills when he was governor and on pensions and tax reform as president. But Reagan usually defined the context in which the compromises occurred.
A prominent Democratic critic, Senator Gary Hart (Colorado), said Reagan was politically successful "not because he is the Great Communicator but because he has values and ideas and acts on them." This evaluation approximated Reagan's own view.
Reagan burst into political prominence in 1964 with a rousing nationally televised speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that stressed anti-government themes and portrayed the election as a choice between individual freedom and "the ant heap of totalitarianism". The speech raised $1 million, then a staggering sum, for the impoverished Goldwater campaign and made Reagan a conservative hero overnight. Two years later, he was elected governor of California in a landslide, establishing himself as the most successful conservative politician of the age.
He won a second four-year term as governor in 1970. In 1976, he challenged incumbent President Gerald R. Ford for the Republican nomination and fell short by 117 delegates. Four years later, Reagan recaptured the White House for the Republicans by defeating the man who had ousted Ford, President Jimmy Carter. Reagan was helped enormously in this campaign by soaring inflation, high interest rates and public frustration over the plight of Americans then held hostage by Iran in the US Embassy in Tehran.
Four years later, Reagan proclaimed that it was "morning again in America" and won re-election by a landslide, winning 49 states in a contest with Democratic nominee Walter F. Mondale.
"What I'd really like to do is go down in history as the president who made Americans believe in themselves again", Reagan said early in his presidency.
There were contradictions. Reagan, the only divorced man to serve as president, preached family values but was a distant figure to his four children and his grandchildren. He urged a religious revival yet rarely went to church.
He lauded military heroism after spending the second World War in a Hollywood studio making training films.
But on March 30th, 1981, when he was shot and seriously wounded by John W. Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan gave an impressive demonstration of the heroism he frequently celebrated.
As liberal Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan put it: "Reagan won our hearts the day he was shot. He almost became JFK and settled instead for John Wayne, becoming legend with a wince and a wisecrack: 'I hope all you doctors are Republicans.'" Reagan also survived colon cancer. Never one to dwell on negatives, Reagan managed to persuade himself that he never had cancer.
One of the paradoxes of Reagan's political career was that he campaigned ceaselessly against government, even as an incumbent president, but wound up strengthening the presidency and the influence of the central government.
Conservative columnist George Will, a friend and confidant of Reagan, contended that he also made enduring political contributions to his party and to the conservative movement. "He caused conservatives to grow up," Will said. "He changed the conservative movement from one of catharsis for the disaffected into a movement of government."
But Reagan sometimes exhibited lapses that undermined his Great Communicator image. Factual errors were commonplace at his infrequent White House news conferences. He seemed often to have a sketchy command of military matters and once left the impression that submarine-based nuclear missiles could be recalled in flight. He forgot the names of Cabinet officers, trusted aides and visiting dignitaries. In Brazil, he toasted the people of Bolivia.
Reagan brushed off criticisms about his verbal missteps, which he said were blown out of proportion by the media. In any case, he rarely suffered politically for such mistakes.
Reagan was born on Febraury 6th, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, in the front bedroom of a five-room flat above the general store on Main Street where his father worked. He was the second and last son of John Edward Reagan, an itinerant shoe salesman known to everyone as Jack, and Nelle Wilson Reagan, who suffered through a delivery so difficult that her doctor advised her not to have more children.
Jack Reagan, a muscular, hard-drinking man of Irish ancestry who dreamed of owning his own shoe store, drifted from town to town in central Illinois before settling in Dixon, where his sons went to high school and which they considered their home town.
On the night he was elected president, Reagan turned to his brother, Neil, and said, "I'll bet they're having a hot time in Dixon tonight".
But there was a dark side to Reagan's childhood. His father was an alcoholic, and Reagan's autobiography Where's the Rest of Me? published in 1965,describes a scene in which, as a rather scrawny 11-year-old boy, he discovered him "drunk, dead to the world" on the porch and dragged him in from the snow and up to bed.
Reagan acknowledged in later interviews that his father's drinking was a recurrent problem of his boyhood. As an adult, he would drink a glass of wine with dinner but rarely consumed hard liquor.
Reagan's mother, Nelle, dominated the household, took her children to concerts and plays and was the major influence in her younger son's life.
According to family accounts, Ronald Reagan began to read when he was 5, enjoyed participating in family theatricals and possessed a remarkable memory that his brother described as photographic.
The Reagans, never prosperous, were almost crushed by the Depression, which forced his father to close a shoe store opened with borrowed money and sent his mother to work in a dress shop for $14 a week. Years later, Reagan frequently related a Depression story about how his father, then working as a salesman, opened a letter on Christmas Eve expecting a bonus and learned that he had been fired.
Reagan said: "We didn't live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we lived so close to them we could hear the whistle real loud." For seven summers, Dutch Reagan, as he was then known, worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park on a treacherous section of the Rock River north of Dixon, and he rescued 77 people.
Reagan dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and was the lightest tackle on his undermanned high school football team. The motto under his class photo in his senior yearbook said, "Life is just one grand sweet song, so start the music". The subsequent four years at Eureka College, a small liberal arts school near Peoria, were also generally happy ones for Reagan, an indifferent student but an enthusiastic football player.
Reagan graduated on June 7th, 1932, in the depths of the Depression.
Most of the family income came from Nelle Reagan's income as a seamstress. But Reagan was typically optimistic.
Borrowing a well-worn family car, Reagan set out on a swing of small-town radio stations. In Davenport, Iowa, he got a $10-a-game job broadcasting University of Iowa home football games. When a staff announcer's job opened up, Reagan was hired by WOC for $100 a month.
In 1933, Reagan's voice carried him to Des Moines and WOC's larger sister station, WHO. Broadcasting over a new 50,000-watt clear-channel station that carried throughout the Midwest, Reagan became a well-known sports announcer whose speciality was creating play-by-play accounts of Chicago Cubs baseball games that the station received by wire.
Reagan was fascinated by Hollywood. In 1937, he went to Catalina off the Southern California coast to cover the spring training of the Chicago Cubs, and an actress friend from Des Moines introduced him to movie agent Bill Meiklejohn. By his account, Reagan considerably exaggerated his college acting experience, and Meiklejohn persuaded Warner Bros to give him a screen test. He passed, and Reagan quit his radio job and drove to California in a new Nash convertible.
Reagan made his film debut in June 1937 as a crusading radio announcer in a minor crime movie, Love Is On the Air. During the next two decades, he made 52 films, concluding with Hellcats of the Navy in 1957, in which the leading lady was his second wife, Nancy Davis. A TV film, The Killers, was the only movie in which Reagan portrayed a villain.
Reagan graduated to major movies with a small but significant part in the 1940 film Knute Rockne - All American, which starred Pat O'Brien as the famed Notre Dame football coach. Reagan played George Gipp, a Notre Dame football player who died of pneumonia and years later was the inspiration for a Rockne half-time pep talk in which he exhorted his team to "win one for the Gipper". Four decades later, this nickname was revived by reporters covering the presidential campaign, who routinely called Reagan "the Gipper".
Of all Reagan's films, the most acclaimed and his personal favourite was Kings Row, set in a small southern town. Reagan was cast as Drake McHugh, a pleasure-loving young man whose legs are sadistically amputated by a crazed surgeon (Charles Coburn) who wants to keep him away from his daughter. When he awakens from surgery and finds that his legs are missing, McHugh cries out, "Where's the rest of me?", a line he used as the title of his autobiography.
By the time Kings Row was released in 1942, Reagan was in the army. He had joined the cavalry reserve in 1937 because he liked to ride horses and was called to duty in April 1942. But Reagan's short-sightedness disqualified him from combat duty. He was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps. Reagan spent the war at Fort Roach, as its inhabitants called it, making training films and appearing in a 1943 Irving Berlin musical, This Is the Army. He was discharged in 1945, with the rank of captain.
Reagan met his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, in the 1938 film Brother Rat. They were married in 1940, and had a daughter, Maureen Elizabeth, a year later. In 1945, they adopted a son, Michael Edward. Another child was born four months premature in 1947 and died the same day.
In May 1948, Wyman filed for divorce, saying Reagan had become "very political" and she did not share his interests.
The divorce became final in July 1949. Because Reagan neither initiated nor wanted the divorce, he sometimes behaved as if it had not occurred. Thirty-two years later, he said in an interview, "I was divorced in the sense that the decision was made by somebody else". He became despondent and quarrelsome and was dissatisfied with the film roles offered him by Warner Bros.
In these uneasy years, Hollywood was shaken by industrial strife, congressional inquiries into alleged communist influence and competition from the fledgling medium of television. All these events impinged on Reagan, a self-proclaimed "bleeding-heart liberal" who had joined the United World Federalists, which advocated world government.
But Reagan was soon convinced that the Communist Party was trying to dominate liberal groups to which he belonged and gain control of Hollywood craft unions. He briefly became an FBI informant, although this was not known at the time, and an ardent anti-communist.
As president of the Screen Actors Guild, which he led in a successful strike against the movie producers, he helped implement the blacklist that prevented suspected communists from working in movies. At the same time, Reagan opposed what he viewed as an indiscriminate effort by the House Un-American Activities Committee to smear liberals who had unwittingly joined leftist organisations.
Although he remained a Democrat for the next decade, the political struggles of this period left a mark on Reagan.
Reagan met Nancy Davis, an attractive minor actress at MGM, in 1951, at the height of the congressional investigations.
She said later that she knew immediately that Reagan was "the man I wanted to marry". They were married on March 4th, 1952, and Nancy Davis quit her career to become a wife and mother. Their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born later that year. In 1958, Nancy Reagan gave birth to their second child, named Ronald Prescott.
Reagan's career also took a new direction. In 1952, as Screen Actors Guild president, he signed a confidential contract with Music Corp of America that allowed it to produce an unlimited number of television shows. Two years later MCA asked Reagan to host General Electric Theater, a new series of weekly dramas that by 1956-57 was rated third among all TV shows.
The contract required Reagan to spend 10 weeks a year touring GE plants, giving as many as 14 speeches a day. "We drove him to the limit," said Edward Langley, then a GE public relations man. "We saturated him in Middle America." Out of this saturation came the polished and patriotic speech that Reagan delivered for Goldwater in 1964, two years after his GE contract ended.
By then, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were an enduring team. She was supportive of his ambitions, shrewd in her personal judgments and highly protective. In Reagan's political campaigns and subsequently in the White House, she became a powerful figure who played a key role in choosing and ousting aides on the basis of their loyalty and effectiveness. While Reagan often brushed aside attacks on his policies, he bridled at even the slightest criticism of his wife.
Reagan left office on a high note on January 20th, 1989. The last Gallup Poll of his presidency gave him a 63 per cent approval rating, the highest for any departing president since FDR died in office in 1945.
Reagan's first years of retirement in California were idyllic. The Reagans moved to a spacious ranch house on a wooded acre in upscale Bel Air, and he worked on his memoirs. Whenever possible, he slipped away to his mountaintop ranch, a two-hour drive to ride horses and do ranch work.
But Reagan's world changed in 1993, when Nancy Reagan and their friends noticed that he seemed increasingly forgetful. The first public demonstration of his decline occurred on February 6th, 1993, at the Reagan Library, where Reagan repeated a toast to Thatcher verbatim during a celebration of his 82nd birthday. At his annual visit to the Mayo Clinic in 1994, doctors diagnosed Alzheimer's disease.
Meanwhile, historians were re-evaluating the Reagan presidency, which looked better to many in retrospect then it did when he left office. The eminent political historian James MacGregor Burns, best known for his books about Franklin D. Roosevelt, said in a 1999 column in the Washington Post that Reagan would rank with FDR among the "great" or "near-great" presidents of the 20th century.
Among those who shared a high opinion of Reagan was Gorbachev, who in a retrospective on American television called Reagan "a really big person - a very great political leader". It was an opinion widely shared by Reagan's fellow Americans.
Ronald Reagan: born February 6th, 1911; died June 5th, 2004.