Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, he came of age in small Midwestern towns, including Dixon, where he attended high school and developed interests in drama and football. He later graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and sociology. A member of the Republican Party, Reagan became an important figure in the American conservative movement, and the period of his presidency came to be known as the Reagan era.

Before national politics, Reagan built a public life through voice, performance, and persuasion. In 1933 he was hired as a sports broadcaster in Iowa, later working for WHO radio in Des Moines, where he created play-by-play accounts of Chicago Cubs games from basic wire reports. In 1937, after a screen test in California, he signed with Warner Bros. Pictures and began a film career. He debuted in Love Is on the Air, appeared in thirty films before military service, and became closely associated with roles in Knute Rockne, All American and Kings Row. He also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960.

Reagan’s thinking was shaped early by family, church, and work. His mother, Nelle Clyde Wilson, was committed to the Disciples of Christ and led prayer meetings when her pastor was away; Reagan credited her spiritual influence and became a Christian. At Eureka College, which his mother approved because of its religious affiliation, he took part in sports, drama, campus politics, and a student strike that led to the college president’s resignation. In the 1950s, he hosted General Electric Theater and worked as a motivational speaker for General Electric. During the 1964 presidential election, his speech “A Time for Choosing” launched his rise as a leading conservative figure.

After being elected governor of California in 1966, Reagan raised state taxes, turned a state budget deficit into a surplus, and implemented crackdowns on university protests. He later lost to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, then won the party’s nomination in 1980 and defeated President Jimmy Carter in a landslide. As president, he began implementing “Reaganomics,” a policy involving economic deregulation and cuts to both taxes and government spending during stagflation. His first term also included an assassination attempt, a public fight with public-sector labor unions, an expansion of the war on drugs, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and a slow response to the AIDS epidemic.

Reagan won a second term in 1984 by defeating former vice president Walter Mondale in one of the largest landslide victories in American history. Foreign affairs dominated those years, including the 1986 bombing of Libya, the secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras, and negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. When Reagan left office in 1989, inflation had been significantly reduced, unemployment had declined, and the United States had experienced the longest peacetime economic expansion in its history to that time, while the national debt had nearly tripled since 1981. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, he died in 2004. His words remain widely read because they belong to a life spent moving between radio booth, film set, union office, statehouse, and the presidency.