Ronald Reagan, (1911-2004), 40th President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan's political career, which came relatively late in life and embraced two terms as governor of California and two unsuccessful attempts to gain the Republican presidential nomination, culminated in his election to the presidency in 1980. The beginning of the Reagan administration was remarkable by almost any standard. On inauguration day, Jan. 20, 1981, 52 Americans who had been held hostage by Iran for 444 days were released at almost the same time the new president was taking the oath of office. Slightly over two months later, an assassination attempt put the president in the hospital for several weeks.

By the time of the 1984 presidential election, a majority of the American people believed that Reagan had restored public confidence in government. He won reelection by an overwhelming popular vote and with the greatest number of electoral votes ever gained by a presidential candidate. Despite some vicissitudes in his second term, he remained one of the most popular American presidents as his years in office drew to a close.

Early Career

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Ill., on Feb. 6, 1911. His father's parents, who were Roman Catholic, were born in Ireland. His mother, a Protestant, was of Scottish-English ancestry. When he was nine, his family moved to Dixon, Ill. After graduating from Eureka College, near his home, Reagan began working as a sports announcer for WOC, a radio station in Davenport, Iowa, and later for WHO in Des Moines, with which WOC merged. During a trip Reagan took to California in 1937 to cover baseball spring training, an agent from Warner Brothers studios signed him for his film debut as a radio announcer in Love Is on the Air. That role was the beginning of a film career that included more than 50 movies, the best known of which were Knute Rockne--All American and King's Row. He made his last film in 1964.

Reagan interrupted his acting career in 1942 and served for three years in the U.S. Army, for which he made training films. After he was discharged, with the rank of captain, he began turning toward a political career. In 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union representing Hollywood personalities that was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. He was reelected to five additional one-year terms and was responsible for negotiating several of the union's contracts.

Reagan, who grew up as a liberal New Deal Democrat, began to change his political beliefs in the late 1940's and early 1950's. His conviction that Communist infiltration was undercutting the nation's institutions helped to bring to fruition a radical shift in his philosophy. He gradually abandoned his movie career and became a spokesman for the General Electric Company, traveling nationwide to preach his newly developing conservative ideology. Reagan joined the Republican party in 1962 and began devoting himself to party affairs.

Reagan's first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman, ended in 1949 in divorce, reportedly after she objected to his increasing political involvement. They had two children, one of whom was adopted. In 1952 he married Nancy Davis, whom he met while working on a movie. They also had two children.

Early Political Career

Ronald Reagan arrived on the political scene in 1964 with a television address designed to revive Sen. Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency. After the speech, a group of businessmen suggested that Reagan run for governor of California. Even though he was a recent convert to the Republican party, this was not a handicap in California, where political affiliation is of little practical consequence. Reagan captured the Republican nomination for governor in 1966 over five other candidates, with 64.7% of the votes. During the general election campaign against Democratic incumbent Edmund G. Brown, Sr., Reagan spoke out against campus radicals and welfare cheaters. Brown, by his own admission, did not take Reagan seriously as a challenger until it was too late.

Reagan won the governorship by a margin of nearly one million votes, the largest plurality by which a sitting governor had ever before been defeated throughout American history. The importance of California in national politics and the size of his margin of election brought Reagan recognition as a politician of national stature.

Ronald Reagan's eight years as governor of California brought home to him the difference between the words he had spoken over the years and what could actually be accomplished once in office. For six of those years he was confronted by a relatively unfriendly Democratic legislature, and sorting out the responsibility for his accomplishments and failures as governor has been difficult. Many observers have noted that his record was not as good as he claimed but not as bad as his critics maintained. Reagan concentrated on three major goals during his gubernatorial years, and he succeeded in having an impact on all three--although not always the one he sought. The three touchstones of his administration were taxes and government spending, welfare reform, and higher education.

Taxes and Government Spending

In his campaign for governor, Reagan spoke against higher taxes and urged that state spending be trimmed. Yet during his eight years in office, the state budget increased from $4.6 billion to $10.2 billion. Much of the increase, however, was designed to raise state revenues in order to relieve local governments of the burden of increased costs of welfare and education. The portion of the state budget earmarked for aid to local governments grew from $5 billion to $7.8 billion, and this state aid permitted the lowering of local property taxes. Reagan contended that the tax hikes, all of which came in his first year in office, were necessitated by the "near bankruptcy" in which he found the state after assuming control from Governor Brown.

Welfare Reform

Reagan supporters pointed to welfare reform as the capstone of his governorship. Changes in the welfare system were the highlight of his second term after he had been reelected over state Assembly leader Jesse Unruh, the Democratic candidate, in 1970. In 1961 about 620,000 people were receiving welfare benefits in California; by 1971, the figure had grown to 2.4 million--or one out of every nine people in the state. Alarmed at the rapid escalation of welfare costs, Reagan proposed a 70-point welfare and Medi-Cal reform package--the latter a more liberal version of the federal Medicaid program. After a long conflict with the Democratic general assembly, he and that body reached a compromise that accomplished Reagan's major goal. The caseload of welfare recipients dropped, while the benefits for those who remained eligible increased by more than 40%. Reagan's critics contended that his approach to welfare reform reduced benefits to the needy as well as to welfare cheaters.

Higher Education

The late 1960's and early 1970's were periods of turmoil on the nation's campuses as many students registered their opposition to the Vietnam War. Among the centers of unrest was the University of California at Berkeley, where the "free speech movement" set the stage for confrontation. Reagan, in one of his first acts as governor, urged the board of regents to fire the university president, Clark Kerr, who Reagan felt was too lenient in dealing with student demonstrators.

During his first two years Reagan reduced university funding by 27%. Once the student protest movement had subsided, however, the higher education system began to receive large funding increases. By the end of Reagan's second term, support had more than doubled over what it had been when he assumed office.

The 1968 and 1976 Presidential Campaigns

Reagan repeatedly was mentioned as a prospective presidential candidate prior to the 1968 Republican Convention. Just two days before the convention balloting in Miami Beach, Reagan switched from favorite-son status to that of full-fledged candidate. He received 182 delegate votes, 86 of them from California.

As his second gubernatorial term neared its end in 1974, Reagan was urged to run for a third term. He decided instead to make a more serious effort to capture the 1976 Republican nomination. He was faced, however, with a substantial obstacle--an incumbent Republican president determined to seek election.

Gerald R. Ford, Jr., had succeeded to the presidency on the resignation of Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Although Ford was well liked and respected, he suffered a substantial decline in popularity after his controversial pardon of former President Nixon. In spite of his incumbency, Ford operated under some serious handicaps that almost caused him to lose the nomination to Reagan. The Watergate scandal had severely damaged the prestige and authority of the presidency, making the traditional advantages of incumbency of less value. New campaign-finance laws removed another major advantage ordinarily enjoyed by incumbents. The new laws permitted a challenger, such as Reagan, to seek the nomination on an equal footing with the incumbent. Furthermore, having left the governorship two years earlier, Reagan was able to campaign full time while Ford was tied to the White House by duties.

Two substantive changes in party rules and the nominating process also provided an impetus to the Reagan effort. The formal rules of the Republican party had been changed to apportion delegates in a way that favored a candidate with special appeal to the South and West, areas in which Reagan long had enjoyed popularity in Republican circles. The spread of presidential primaries was a second change that favored Reagan, and the influence of established party leaders became less important in selecting the nominee. Reagan was masterly in winning the support of Republican voters, thus undercutting the natural advantage that any president would have with the professionals in the political party organization. A spirited national campaign almost won the nomination for Reagan, and he fell only 60 delegate votes short of defeating President Ford.

The 1980 Presidential Campaign

With the defeat of President Ford by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan began his campaign for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. He established a political action committee that collected and contributed more than $600,000 to Republican candidates at all levels during the 1978 off-year elections. Reagan's efforts served to create a national network of loyal partisans, a group he used as a base for his 1980 campaign. His campaign director, John Sears, acted under the assumption that Reagan was the obvious front-runner. He therefore devised a strategy to keep his candidate above the fray and to move him closer to the center of the ideological spectrum. In line with this strategy, Reagan declined to participate in the debates among the major Republican candidates just prior to the Iowa caucuses. This resulted in his being declared the loser by the national press. He lost the Iowa caucus vote to former Ambassador George Bush, thus setting in motion a series of upheavals in his campaign organization. Reagan then embarked on a campaign tour of New England, appeared in two debates, and won the New Hampshire primary.

On the day of his New Hampshire victory, Reagan fired Sears and other top campaign aides. With the departure of Sears, Reagan brought in an old friend, William J. Casey, a New York lawyer and former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, to take over the campaign. Casey and Edwin Meese III, another old friend, rebuilt the campaign organization, redesigned the fund-raising apparatus, and encouraged the candidate to pursue a more vigorous campaign. During the ensuing weeks Reagan won all of the primaries but four. In the states that used the caucus system to choose delegates, he was even more impressive, winning 400 of the 478 delegates. Reagan ultimately reduced the field of candidates to one other--George Bush--having defeated and forced all others out of the competition. Although Bush won the Pennsylvania primary in April and the Michigan primary in May, Reagan had locked up the delegates needed for nomination. Reagan was nominated at the Republican National Convention in Detroit by a vote of 1,939 to 55.

The 1980 presidential campaign was viewed widely as a lackluster affair between two candidates who did not command wide respect. Reagan attempted to focus campaign rhetoric on President Carter's "failed" economic policies that had resulted in 12% inflation and 8 million people unemployed. Carter, on the other hand, tried to paint a portrait of Reagan as being "trigger happy" and likely to get the United States into war. Although Reagan began the campaign with a 15% lead in the public-opinion polls, President Carter had some success in narrowing the lead, and as election day neared the outcome was too close to call. Reagan, however, pulled decisively ahead in the final days of the campaign. The result was a Reagan victory of landslide proportions. In the popular vote Reagan received about 51% of the ballots (and 489 electoral votes) to Carter's 42% (49 electoral votes) and John Anderson's 7% (no electoral votes). Reagan swept all but six states and the District of Columbia. For the second time in as many elections, an incumbent president of the United States was turned out of office.

The 1984 Presidential Campaign

Reagan and Bush were renominated, as expected, on Aug. 22, 1984, at the Republican convention in Dallas. The Democratic nominees were Walter Mondale, former Vice President under Jimmy Carter, and Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first woman ever nominated by a major party. When the ballots were counted, Reagan had scored an even wider margin of victory than in 1980. He won every state except the challenger's home state of Minnesota (and the District of Columbia), for a total of 525 electoral votes, the greatest number ever tallied by a presidential candidate in U.S. history.

The Reagan Administration

Ronald Reagan came to the presidency determined to reduce the growth of the national government, restore the power of the states in the federal system, reduce government expenditures through massive domestic budget cuts, expand the military and defense establishments, lower taxes, and restructure foreign policy away from détente with the Soviet Union to a posture of peace through strength. To help achieve these goals he sought to restore the dominance of the presidency over the Congress. He was quite successful until the 1986 off-year elections, in which the Democrats won a net gain of five seats in the House of Representatives and took control of the Senate by a 55-45 margin.

Domestic Politics

Reagan's first term was dominated by efforts to carry out his economic program--dubbed "Reaganomics" by the media--which consisted in part of large budget reductions in domestic programs and substantial tax cuts for individuals and businesses. The theory of supply-side economics--generating growth by stimulating a greater supply of goods and services, thereby increasing jobs--was a mainstay of the Reagan approach. Central to the administration's efforts to combat inflation was rigorous control over government spending deficits. Early budget cuts of $39 billion were followed by the passage of a 25% tax cut for individual taxpayers and faster tax write-offs for business.

The administration's economic policies had mixed results. Unemployment rose to a level of 10.6% by the end of 1982 but declined to around 5.5% late in 1988. Inflation, which had peaked at 13.5% during the Carter years, gradually fell to about 4%-6%. Massive federal deficits piled up, however--a reflection of tax cutting, greater defense spending, and other economic factors.

The greatest shock to the economy occurred on Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market plunged 508 points on the Dow Jones average, ending a slide that had begun in August. In two months stocks had lost about 36% of their value, but within a year they recovered almost half of the loss with little apparent damage to the economy.

In other domestic areas, Reagan achieved mixed results. Deregulation became a watchword of the administration, but critics charged that reduced regulation created hazards to public health and safety. During his first term, the president sought to shift dozens of federal programs to the state and local levels under his system of "new federalism." Officials in these jurisdictions complained that promised federal aid to implement the programs was inadequate. The administration's efforts to reduce spending for social programs and increase appropriations for defense engendered controversy.

Reagan's domestic program during his second term focused on tax reform. Late in 1986 the Senate joined the House to pass a major tax bill that reduced the number of tax rates, removed millions of low-income persons from the tax rolls, and eliminated most deductions.

One focus of the administration from the beginning was an agenda of social issues ranging from opposition to abortion to support for mandatory prayer in the public schools. Much of the social agenda of the conservative fundamentalist supporters of the president was adopted by the executive branch, but Reagan had little success in gaining its acceptance by Congress.

Late in 1987, Reagan failed twice to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with judges holdingstrong conservative views. The Senate, 58-42, rejected the nomination of Robert Bork after the Judiciary Committee found him insufficiently inclined to protect individual rights and liberties. A second judge, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew from consideration after it became known that he had smoked marijuana while teaching at Harvard. Reagan's third choice for the vacancy, Judge Anthony M. Kennedy, was approved.

Foreign Relations

Soviet-U.S. relations were generally chilly during Reagan's first term. The shooting down of a South Korean airliner by a Soviet military plane in 1983, alleged Soviet expansionist and interventionist policies, the U.S. deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe, and the Reagan-proposed Strategic Defense Initiative contributed to continuing tensions. A cordial 1985 meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva began a warming trend. In 1987 the two leaders signed a historic treaty in Washington that would eliminate their intermediate-range nuclear forces. In 1988, Reagan had a friendly summit meeting in Moscow, the capital of what he had once called an "evil empire."

Several times Reagan took military action, either as an instrument of foreign policy or as a possible deterrent to terrorism. In October 1983 he ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, declaring that Americans there were in jeopardy and that the country had become a potentially dangerous Cuban-Soviet military base. The Grenada operation occurred just two days after a terrorist attack on the U.S. Marine peacekeeping contingent in Lebanon caused the death of 241 servicemen.

When TWA Flight 847 was hijacked to Beirut in June 1985, the issues of terrorism and how to respond to it became highly visible. Althoughthe 39 passengers were finally released, their 17-day ordeal and the murder of a U.S. Navy man aboard convinced the administration that more decisive action should be taken against terrorists in general and against the Libyan leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, in particular.

In August 1981 two Libyan jets were downed by U.S. planes in the Gulf of Sidra during military exercises. Tensions were heightened in October 1985 when terrorists highjacked the Italian liner Achille Lauro and murdered an elderly American passenger. U.S. planes intercepted an Egyptian plane carrying the hijackers, who had surrendered in Egypt, and forced it to land in Italy. Libyan involvement was established in the December bombings of the Rome and Vienna airports. In retaliation, American planes in late April 1986 attacked several sites in and around Tripoli, Libya's capital.

Reagan's other long-standing foreign-policy initiative was to assist anti-Communist guerrillas, known as contras, in thwarting alleged Soviet-Cuban inroads into Nicaragua and to pressure the Sandinista government to hold elections and negotiate with its neighbors. Congress reversed itself several times on whether to give humanitarian or military aid to the contras. It became apparent that Reagan's real goal was to overthrow the Sandinistas, but when the government and the contras signed a cease-fire in 1988, this objective appeared unrealistic.

The United States indicted Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges in 1988 but failed to force him from office or persuade him to surrender his power.

The most damaging foreign-policy event of 1987 for President Reagan was the Iran-contra affair. Late in 1986 the administration admitted that it had been secretly selling arms to Iran, with some of the profits possibly going to the guerrillas in Nicaragua. Reagan claimed that he had not been informed of the Iran-contra link by national security adviser Vice Admiral John Poindexter or his aide, Lt. Col. Oliver North. The two policies--selling arms to Iran in apparent exchange for hostages and sending arms to Nicaragua--triggered multiple investigations.

A report by a presidential commission, released in February 1987, depicted Reagan as confused and uninformed, and concluded that his relaxed "personal management style" had prevented him from controlling his subordinates. House and Senate committees, conducting joint hearings, heard testimony that Reagan did not know of the diversion of funds. Most committee members signed a majority report in November 1987 asserting that although Reagan's role in the affair could not be determined precisely, he had clearly failed to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Poindexter, North, and others were indicted in the affair in 1988.

The "Bully Pulpit"

In the manner of Theodore Roosevelt, who had called the White House a bully pulpit and who had greatly enjoyed being president, Ronald Reagan displayed consistent optimism and a jaunty self-confidence that endeared him to millions.

When tragedy struck--the deaths of the seven Challenger astronaunts in 1986, for example--Reagan eloquently articulated the nation's grief. When personal danger touched him--he was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1981 and underwent a colon cancer operation in 1985--he was upbeat and reassuring.

He was, it was said, Teflon-coated. Nothing stuck to him: not revelations of wrongdoing by aides, not occasional failures in foreign policy, not evidence that astrology may have influenced some of his decisions. Approaching his 78th birthday as his presidency drew to a close, Reagan was seen by many as the personification of Uncle Sam or as the grandfather of the nation. A scholar had called the presidency an "awesome burden," but Reagan neared the end of his second term as a remarkably untroubled man.

Robert J. Huckshorn
Florida Atlantic University
Revised by Donald Young
Author, American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency
 

For Further Reading

Barrett, Lawrence I., Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House (Penguin 1984).
Combs, James, The Reagan Range: The Nostalgic Myth in American Politics (Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Press 1993).
Dallek, Robert, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Harvard Univ. Press 1984).
Dugger, Ronnie, On Reagan (McGraw-Hill 1983).
Dye, T. R., Who's Running America? (Prentice-Hall 1983).
Greenstein, Fred I., ed., The Reagan Presidency: An Early Assessment (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 1983).
McManus, Doyle, and Jane Mayer, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-88 (Houghton 1988).
Noonan, Peggy, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (Random House 1990).
Palmer, John L., and Isabel V. Sawhill, The Reagan Record (Ballinger 1984).
Reagan, Ronald, Ronald Reagan Talks to America(Devin 1983).
Reeves, R., The Reagan Detour (Simon & Schuster 1985).
Stuckey, Mary E., Playing the Game: The Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan(Praeger 1990).