The Gipper has been fading since 1994 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It’s been some time since he could recognize his wife of more than half a century. Before the light went out completely when he passed away on June 5, the Great Communicator gave the country back the hope and pride it had lost in the stagnated 1970s, in the process paving the way for the centrism of Bill Clinton as well as the regular-guy affability of George W. Bush.
On February 6, 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born to Nelle and Jack Reagan in Tampico, Ill. The son of an alcoholic Irish immigrant shoe salesman who went bankrupt during the Great Depression, he attended high school in nearby Dixon and worked his way through Eureka College where he studied economics and sociology, played on the football team and acted in school plays. After college he worked briefly as a sportscaster in Des Moines, Iowa, before a screen test in 1937 landed him a Warner Brothers film contract in Hollywood. He made his screen debut that same year with “Love is in the Air” and would go on to appear in 53 films over the next two decades.
Reagan married the actress Jane Wyman in 1940. The couple had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael, before they divorced in 1948. (Maureen died from cancer in 2001.) During World War II, he served as a non-combative captain in the Army Air Corps, where he kept his cinematic skills honed by producing a number of training films. But it was when Reagan returned to Hollywood in 1947 that he got his first real taste of politics–he began a five-year term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position he would resume again in 1959. Once a prominent liberal voice in Hollywood politics, Reagan became embroiled in McCarthy-era battles over communism in the film industry, an experience that began his marked move to the right. Still, he continued appearing in movies, most notably the 1950’s unfortunate “Bedtime for Bonzo,” which had him acting alongside a chimpanzee (a role that would come back to taunt him later in life).
It was also during this time that he met a young actress named Nancy Davis, who sought out the SAG president to prove her bona fides as an anti-communist–the two were married in 1952, after which Reagan’s rightward political shift became even more pronounced. With Nancy, a devout Presbyterian, Reagan had two children, Patricia Ann and Ronald Prescott. He toured the country for eight years as a television spokesman for General Electric Theater, becoming a committed free-enterprise conservative, before officially joining the Republicans in 1962. The budding politician still had a little actor in him, which he put on display in a stirring television appeal for the party’s 1964 presidential candidate, Barry M. Goldwater. But that year would mark the end of his film career, capping off two decades in the movies with a remake of the film noir classic “The Killers.” In 1966, Reagan ran for governor of California as a staunch conservative in the Goldwater mold, defeating Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, by a margin of a million votes.
His sights were already set on bigger things: in August 1968, during his second year as governor, Reagan announced his first unsuccessful presidential bid before ultimately throwing his support behind Richard Nixon. Reagan would serve two terms as governor. Operating under his axiom that “government is not the solution, government is the problem,” he cut taxes, fought crime, worked to reduce the welfare rolls and, in 1969, sent the National Guard to Berkeley to quell student unrest. Politically pragmatic, the Republican also endorsed a withholding tax and signed into law a liberal abortion statute. Historian Robert Dallek once said of these years that “there were some major contradictions [to Reagan]. But he gets away with this, because he does rhetorically and in terms of his actions largely live up to his conservative agenda.”
In 1975 he announced his candidacy for his party’s nomination in following year’s presidential election. Gerald Ford won the party nod, but Reagan’s strong showing laid the groundwork for the 1980 election. After winning the party’s nomination in 1979, he chose George Bush, a former Texas Congressman and United Nations Ambassador, as his running mate and ran on a platform that called for “a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.” The moment turned out to be the right one for the Gipper–the country was suffering from what then-president Jimmy Carter had described as a “crisis of confidence.” Inflation and deficits were through the roof, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and Islamic militants took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage in Iran. It was in this climate that, on Nov. 4, 1980, the country showed Carter the door. Ronald Reagan was elected the 40th President of the United States with 489 electoral votes, compared to the incumbent’s 49. On January 20, 1981, the day that he is sworn in, Iran released the 52 remaining hostages who had been held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444 days.
Just 69 days into his presidency, on March 30, 1981 Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., outside the Washington Hilton hotel. Press Secretary James Brady was also hit, as well as a Washington police officer. The president was badly injured–the bullet missed his heart by less than an inch; it lodged in his lung causing it to collapse. But he handled the affair with the grace and charm of an old Hollywood pro. Hinckley later bizarrely explained that the assassination attempt was his way of trying to attract the attention of actress Jodie Foster.
Having campaigned on the need to reduce taxes, deregulate the economy and modernize the country’s defense systems to negotiate abroad “from a position of strength,” Reagan took his case to Congress, winning substantial tax cuts and a big increase in defense spending. The country plunged deeper into recession. The Federal Reserve Board was compelled to raise interest rates to fight inflation and the United States began building a huge budget deficit. In early 1983, the unemployment rate passed the 11 percent mark and the president’s approval ratings sank to his all-time low of 35 percent.
In March of that year, around the time he called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” Reagan unveiled his proposal for a Space Defense Initiative (SDI) by telling the country: “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinyn responded that the initiative, which became popularly known as “Star Wars,” would “open a new phase in the arms race.” In October, citing the need to protect against a perceived Communist threat in Grenada and to protect U.S. medical students from growing unrest, Reagan sent 5,000 U.S. troops to invade the small island nation. The move generated a revival in national self-confidence, and Reagan’s domestic program of tax cuts and deficit financing, which had finally brought about an economic uptick between 1983 and 1986, became important factors behind his 1984 landslide reelection over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale.
Between 1985 and 1988 Reagan held four summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, seeking to achieve “peace through strength” by signing a treaty for the scrapping of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. (Still, defense spending climbed by more than 35 percent under his watch.) In April of 1986 the president declared war on international terrorism, sending U.S. Air Force & Navy bombers to hit Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin night club that killed a U.S. serviceman. That same year he also obtained an overhaul of the income tax code, eliminating many deductions and exempting millions of low-income families.
November 1986 saw the greatest challenge to his popular presidency when, in a nationally televised speech to defend against charges that his administration had sold arms to Iran, Reagan admitted sending the country some defensive weapons and spare parts. He denied it was part of an arms-for-hostages deal, though, asserting that “We did not–repeat, did not–trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” But the American people were skeptical and the “Iran-Contra Affair” that emerged revealed that senior members of his administration orchestrated the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. The laundered profits were intended, also illegally, to supply the anti-Marxist “Contra” guerrilla rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government. In a February 1987 memo to the Tower Commission investigating the scandal, the president wrote “I’m trying to recall events that happened eighteen months ago, I’m afraid that I let myself be influenced by others’ recollections, not my own…. My answer therefore and the simple truth is, ‘I don’t remember, period.’” At the end of the scandal, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan and his National Security Adviser Rear-Admiral John Poindexter resigned. The Tower board ultimately fails to link the president directly to the diversion of funds.
In the waning months of his presidency, the old actor sought to assure his place in history with a a rousing speech at Brandenburg Gate by the Berlin Wall in June. Directly addressing the Soviet premier Reagan announced that “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (The following year, he did.) In 1988 George Bush was elected president and Reagan departed office with the highest popularity rating since Franklin Roosevelt–at the same time leaving Bush with a $152.5 billion deficit. “They called it the Reagan revolution,” he says in his 1989 farewell address, “Well, I’ll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”
Reagan and his wife retired to California where his memory continued its steady deterioration. In 1994 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, after which he addressed a letter to the American people disclosing his condition. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he writes. “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you my friends. May God always bless you.” The performer and president would no longer appear in public. Earlier this year, Nancy Reagan publicly urged the current Bush administration to reverse its stance on funding embryonic stem cell research, which could lead to a cure for the disease which has ravaged the brain of her husband. “I just don’t see how we can turn our backs on this… We have lost so much time already. I just really can’t bear to lose any more.” But the death of Ronald Reagan is one more loss she, and the rest of the nation, will have to bear.
