Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan: The Performer Who Rewrote the Script

In a New Hampshire hall in February 1980, a moderator tried to cut Ronald Reagan's microphone. Reagan, whose campaign was paying for the evening, leaned in and snapped, "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" He had the man's name wrong — it was Breen — and it did not matter in the slightest. He took the primary by more than 39,000 votes, and the nomination followed. The moment was pure theatre, the discipline he had spent forty years mastering.

Dixon, Illinois

He was born on 6 February 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, younger son of Jack Reagan, a salesman who drank, and Nelle Wilson Reagan, a devout Disciples of Christ member. The family settled in Dixon in 1920. At Eureka College from 1928 to 1932 he read economics and sociology, cheered, acted, was elected student body president, and joined a student strike that forced the college president out. The pattern was already visible: not the best student in the room, reliably the most persuasive.

The Voice on the Wire

In 1933 he was hired in Davenport, Iowa, to call Big Ten football, then moved to WHO in Des Moines as the Chicago Cubs announcer. He never saw the games. He built play-by-play in real time from terse wire copy, inventing the crack of the bat while a telegraph operator fed him the bare result — a professional education in making an audience believe in a scene that was not in front of them.

Warner Bros. and the Guild

A 1936 screen test won him a seven-year Warner Bros. contract. He played George Gipp in *Knute Rockne, All American* (1940), which gave him a nickname he carried for life, and gave his best-reviewed performance as an amputee in *Kings Row* (1942). He made fifty-three films, and spent the war producing training films for the Army.

The consequential job was union politics. As president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 he handled the blacklist years; in April 1948 he gave the FBI names of suspected communist sympathisers and testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to the post in 1959, he won actors residuals for films sold to television. He married Jane Wyman in 1940 and divorced in 1949, then married Nancy Davis — who had first contacted him about an erroneous blacklist entry — in 1952.

The Turn

Hosting *General Electric Theater* from 1954 to 1962 put him before a national audience weekly. His politics hardened as he went: a Roosevelt Democrat in the 1940s, by 1961 he was warning that Medicare meant "the end of individual freedom in the United States." GE dropped him in 1962 and he registered Republican. Two years later a televised address for Barry Goldwater, "A Time for Choosing," made him a national figure overnight — "the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention," in the judgement of David Broder and Stephen Hess.

Sacramento

He beat the incumbent Pat Brown 58 to 42 in 1966 and governed California for eight years, in ways that sit awkwardly with his later reputation. He signed the biggest tax increase in the state's history and produced a surplus by 1973. He signed the Mulford Act of 1967, the state's most restrictive gun control law, drafted against armed Black Panther patrols, and a Therapeutic Abortion Act he came to regret. He sent the Highway Patrol and then the National Guard into Berkeley in 1969; a student was killed at People's Park. Defending himself in 1970: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."

Government Is the Problem

After nearly unseating Gerald Ford in 1976, he took the nomination in 1980 and beat Jimmy Carter 489 electoral votes to 49. "There you go again," he told Carter in debate; "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" he asked the country. The Iranian hostages were released on his first day in office. His inaugural set the doctrine in one line: "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." On 30 March 1981 John Hinckley Jr. shot him outside the Washington Hilton; he reached hospital on the margin of death and emerged convinced he had been spared for a purpose.

The Economic Recovery Tax Act of August 1981 cut income tax rates sharply. That same month he gave striking air traffic controllers forty-eight hours to return and then fired roughly twelve thousand of them; union membership fell from about a quarter of the workforce to a sixth. Half the federal regulations on the books in 1981 were gone by 1986. The recession bit first — unemployment hit 10.8 per cent in December 1982 — then broke, and expansion ran to 1990. By 1989 inflation was under 5 per cent, down from 12. The bill came in deficits: the national debt tripled, from 33 to 53 per cent of GDP, and he never submitted a balanced budget, which he called the greatest disappointment of his presidency. He also signed eleven tax increases.

The Evil Empire and the Gate

He was the first president to reject containment and détente outright and argue the Soviet Union could be beaten rather than managed. In 1982 he told the British Parliament that Marxism-Leninism would be left "on the ash heap of history" — American reporters called it wishful thinking; Margaret Thatcher called it a triumph. In March 1983 he named the USSR an "evil empire" and announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which scientists dismissed as Star Wars. He doubled defence spending, armed the Afghan mujahideen and invaded Grenada. Then, after a landslide re-election in 1984, he pivoted. At the Brandenburg Gate on 12 June 1987 he observed that the Soviet Union still could not feed itself, then issued the line that outlived him: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty followed — and so did Iran-Contra, the secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels.

Why Ronald Is Called a Genius

Reagan's claim to the word is not intellectual. He was not a policy thinker, he presided over an administration that broke the law in Nicaragua and Iran, and his silence through the early AIDS epidemic remains the cruellest failure of his tenure. His civil rights record was worse than indifferent: he opposed a King holiday as based on "an image, not reality," and his 1988 veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act was the first civil rights veto by a president since Andrew Johnson's in 1866, and was overridden.

The genius, such as it is, has two components. The first is a communicative gift of the highest order, trained in an unusual school — years of narrating baseball games he could not see, from wire copy, to listeners who believed him. He could compress an argument into a sentence and deliver it as though it had just occurred to him. The second is rarer and more substantive: he bet, against almost the whole American foreign policy establishment, that the Soviet system was brittle enough to be pushed over rather than merely contained, and he was right. Critics reasonably note that Gorbachev, Soviet economic decay and luck did much of the work, and that his fiscal doctrine collapsed on contact with his own budgets. But the bet was his, he made it early, and he absorbed the ridicule for it.

Legacy

He left office with the Cold War ending, an economy transformed and a debt he had promised to eliminate tripled instead. The realignment he led moved American politics rightward for a generation. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, he withdrew from public life and died on 5 June 2004. Dedicating his presidential library in 1991, he had already framed the argument he knew was coming: "The judgment of history is left to you, the people."

Achievements

• Governor of California (1967–1975)
• President of the United States (1981–1989)
• President-elect of the United States (1980–1981)
• President of SAG (1947–1952)
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
• Order of the White Eagle
• Collar of the Order of the White Lion
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1993
• Educated at Dixon High School and Eureka College