Ronald Reagan – The Actor Who Became President Documentary

Ronald Reagan – The Actor Who Became President Documentary 

On the 6th of November 1984 Americans  voted to elect their next President.   The Republican incumbent, Ronald Reagan, won a  landslide, taking every state except Minnesota,   his opponent, Walter Mondale’s home state.  Today Reagan divides opinion. Some see him   as a President who de-regulated the economy and  paved the way for the Great Financial Crisis of   2008. Others laud him as the leader who won the  Cold War.

 In 1984 Americans clearly wanted him   for another four years. What explains this divided  view of the 40th President of the United States?   This is the story of Ronald Reagan, an  icon of American conservatism.     The man known to history as Ronald Wilson Reagan  was born on the 6th of February 1911 at home in   the village of Tampico in the state of Illinois.  His father was Jack Reagan.

 When Ronald was born   in 1911, 27-year old Jack was working as a clerk  in a store in Tampico. He subsequently became a   travelling salesman. Jack’s family’s roots were  in Ireland. The family surname was originally   O’Regan and Jack’s grandfather, Michael, was  born and grew up in the county of Tipperary in   the Irish midlands.

 He left as part of the mass  exodus following the Irish famine of the 1840s,   emigrating first to England and then the United  States. Jack married Nelle Clyde Wilson in 1904,   a woman of Scottish and English heritage. Jack  and Nelle had a son named Neil four years later,   in 1908, followed by Ronald in 1911.  Ronald’s childhood was not easy. The family were   far from rich and he was one of the few presidents  which the United States has ever had who came from   a modest background.

 The Reagans moved frequently  as Jack found work as a salesman in Chicago,   Monmouth and other parts of Illinois. In the end  they settled down in the town of Dixon after the   First World War and Ronald attended Dixon High  School here. The Reagan household was unstable   owing to Jack’s drinking. Later in his life he  attempted to characterise his childhood as a kind   of idyllic rustic one in small-town America, but  in reality Jack Reagan frequently went on alcohol   binges and Ronald once found him passed out in  a stupor in the snow outside the family home in   Dixon. Biographers have suggested that Reagan’s  personality was shaped by these early experiences  

in ways which deeply impacted his later life. In  the immediate term, during his childhood years,   he leaned more towards his mother. He adopted her  religious views, as Nelle was a Protestant and an   adherent of the Disciples of Christ, while Jack,  as an Irish American, was a Roman Catholic.

 This,   however, did not stop Ronald from identifying as  Irish American. After high school, Ronald attended   Eureka College. There he obtained a Bachelor  of Arts studying economics and sociology.   Nonetheless, Reagan was not a particularly  good student and his interests primarily   lay in extra-curricular activities, especially  American football.

 He also enjoyed drama,   an interest which would be the making  of him in the long run.    After college Reagan took up a position as a  sports broadcaster working for a local radio   station in Davenport in Iowa. This was the  period of modern history when radio was the   king of media.

 Television would not come into  its own until after the Second World War and   people were switching away from stage shows to  visiting the cinema and listening to radios at   home. There was an art to describing sports  games in a period when people still couldn’t   see a match but could evoke an idea of what was  happening if the broadcasters described it well.   Reagan was good at this and he was soon approached  by WHO Radio in Des Moines in Iowa to come work   for one of the biggest outlets in this part of  the Midwest.

 Strangely enough, for a man who   went on to have such a substantial bearing on the  history of the twentieth century, we might never   have heard of Ronald Reagan had it not been for  his stint as a radio sports broadcaster. While   travelling for this job with the Chicago Cubs in  California in 1937, he happened to mention to a   friend that he wouldn’t mind giving acting  a try.

 She introduced him to a film agent,   who in turn introduced him to the executives  at Warner Bros. A few weeks later Reagan had   a seven-year film contract and by 1937 was out he  had made his film debut as the lead in Love is On   the Air. He would appear in over 30 films over  the next five years, with ten alone appearing   in 1938. Reagan was certainly not a rival to  Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant.

 He was a competent   B-movie actor whose career was predicated on  his good looks and his professionalism.    On the 7th of December 1941 the United States  was pulled violently into the Second World War   when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in  Hawaii, a conflict public opinion was until then   in favour of avoiding entanglement in. Reagan was  married by then.

 After a period of being regularly   noted in gossip columns as one of Hollywood’s most  eligible bachelors, he had married Jane Wyman in   January 1940. Their first child, a daughter named  Maureen, was born a year later in January 1941.   They then adopted a second child, Michael Reagan,  born in 1945. A third child, another daughter   named Christine, was born prematurely in 1947 and  did not survive long.

 As Jane was raising Maureen   at home, Ronald had headed off to perform his  military service. He had been an army reservist   since 1937 and reported for duty in 1942. Owing  to both his background as a film star and his   short-sightedness, he was primarily desk-bound  in various parts of the country for the war and   appeared in literally hundreds of short military  training and propaganda films.

 His marriage fell   apart after the war, with Christine’s death  possibly being an inflection point. He and   Jane divorced in 1948. Four years later he married  Anne Frances Robbins, an actress who went by the   stage name Nancy Davis. With Nancy, Ronald had  two further children, Patti, born in 1952, and   Ronald Jr. or Ron, born in 1958.

   In Hollywood after the war, Reagan had started   to become a more political person. In fact his  political views contributed to the collapse of   his first marriage. Jane leaned more towards the  Republican Party, while Reagan was a Democrat,   an ironic situation given his later image as a  Republican Party icon, albeit this was before the   mass realignment of American politics in the late  1950s and 1960s.

 Reagan continued to act, but he   was never again as prolific as he had been in the  period between 1938 and 1942. Instead he became   chair of the Motion Pictures Industry Council  after the war and then the head of the Screen   Actors Guild, serving in the position between  1947 and 1952 and again briefly in 1959 and 1960.   He was acknowledged by his contemporaries as a  strong head of the Guild who advocated effectively   for his colleagues.

 Nevertheless, Reagan’s  period as head of the Guild is controversial,   as he testified extensively before the House  Un-American Activities Committee which was   investigating claims that many people in Hollywood  were communists at a time when the Cold War with   the Soviet Union was heating up. He aligned  himself with the studios against the unions in   Hollywood.

 While some unease within America about  the rise of communist sympathies in the late 1940s   and early 1950s was understandable in the context  of the developing Cold War, the blacklisting of   screenwriters and actors who were even suspected  of harbouring communist views is generally seen as   a witch hunt today in the vein of Senator Joseph  McCarthy’s ultimately discredited ‘Red Scare’.   

While his role with the Screen Actors Guild  indicated Reagan’s shift towards being a more   political figure in Hollywood, he remained a  constant presence on screen. His final film   appearance was in 1964 in The Killers, but long  before then he had transitioned to television.   Between 1954 and 1962, he hosted hundreds of  episodes of General Electric Theater on CBS,   an anthology series which partly went out on  television, partly on radio.

 It was a kind of   sketch show of the sort so popular in the post-war  decades, one which involved adapting short stories   and snippets from plays, books and so forth.  It ensured Reagan remained a prominent figure   in American entertainment. Part of his contract  also involved touring the country as a speaker   for General Electric, a utilities company that  sponsored the show, to give motivational speeches   at GE’s 135 plants throughout the country.

  His talks became increasingly political in the   early 1960s and highlighted his shift from being a  Democratic supporter to a Republican who promoted   the idea of small government. This was a political  outlook which had evolved in Reagan gradually over   the years.

 By the end of the 1950s he had become  convinced that expanding government bureaucracy   was a problem for the US government and society.  He was hugely opposed to John F. Kennedy as   President and gave an impassioned plea in support  of Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate   against Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, in  the 1964 Presidential Election. His intervention   failed to prevent Goldwater being defeated in all  but six states in a landslide victory for Johnson   and his idea of the ‘Great Society’ that won over  a broad coalition of Americans for a brief time   in the mid-1960s. When the 1964 election was  underway Reagan had long been out of a job.  

GE had insisted on his dismissal from hosting  General Electric Theater as he had become too   political in his public statements, though  the official reason given for his departure   from the show was declining ratings.  Far from being dismayed by his dismissal   by General Electric, Reagan became even more  committed to politics and fully transitioned from   acting to a political career in the mid-1960s.

  Since 1959 Pat Brown had been the governor of   California. This Democratic leader of the state  had been popular in his first term, delivering   on projects like the California State Water  Project and a Master Plan for Higher Education.   His popularity slipped quickly in his second term  owing to the Watts Riots of August 1965 and other   public order issues in the state.

 This provided  an opportunity for Reagan to run against Brown   as a political outsider who nevertheless had a  public profile owing to his lengthy radio, film   and television career. Running on a law-and-order  message similar to Goldwater’s national campaign   in 1964, Reagan managed to defeat Brown by a  substantial margin in the election on the 8th of   November 1966. He served as Governor of California  for eight years between 1967 and 1975.

 Reagan’s   gubernatorial record was frequently at odds with  his later actions as US President. For instance,   in California he raised taxes initially to put  the state on a more solid financial footing.   He also passed the Mulford Act not long after  becoming governor, which prohibited the carrying   of loaded firearms, despite the fact that Reagan  was a keen advocate of the 2nd Amendment right   to bear arms.

 He decided to test the national  political waters by entering the Republican   primary race for the US Presidential Election of  1968 quite late in affairs. Reagan was never a   viable candidate, as Richard Nixon had secured too  much support by the time Reagan became involved,   but he won enough support during his brief  ‘Stop Nixon’ campaign to indicate that he   was a viable future presidential candidate.

  As his time as Governor of California drew to a   close at the start of 1975, Reagan pondered  his next move. This was dictated by events   surrounding the sitting President. Gerald Ford  had been President Richard Nixon’s Vice-President   until August 1974 when he succeeded as head of  state after Nixon resigned over the fallout from   the Watergate Scandal.

 Although eight previous  Vice-Presidents had succeeded to the Presidency   after the President of the day died or was  assassinated, Ford was the first to do so   via a Presidential resignation and without ever  having been elected as Vice-President. Spiro Agnew   had been Nixon’s running partner in the 1972  election, but he had resigned in October 1973,   thus paving the way for a remarkable ascent by  Ford to become Vice-President and then President   in under a year.

 He was deeply unpopular,  even within his own party, especially so   after he appointed Nelson Rockefeller as  his Vice-President, while the legacy of   the Watergate Scandal and the economic crisis of  the 1970s made Ford even more unpopular beyond   the Republican Party. Many found his granting  of a pardon to Nixon so that he could not be   prosecuted particularly egregious.

 As discontent  over the idea of Ford running as the Republican   Party candidate in the 1976 Presidential Election  mounted, Reagan decided to mount a challenge. He   announced his campaign on the 20th of November  1975 after months of unofficial campaigning.   His campaign built momentum and he won the New  Hampshire primary. The primary campaign proved   indecisive and the candidate was only decided  at the Republican National Convention in Kansas   City in August 1976. At this, Ford narrowly  defeated Reagan by 53% to 47%.

 He over-performed   in the Presidential Election and the Democratic  candidate, Jimmy Carter, only won by a relatively   narrow majority in an election which the Democrats  ought to have won much more comfortably.    Ford’s loss in 1976 might have been a respectable  one, but there was no possibility that he would   ever stand again to try to become the Republican  candidate.

 Instead Reagan was very much seen as   the candidate in waiting in the late 1970s.  Moreover, Jimmy Carter’s presidency was not   particularly well-liked by the public, albeit a  lot of this was out of his control and was owing   to resentments about the continuing economic  crisis in the second half of the 1970s pursuant   from the global oil crisis that began in 1973.

  Stagflation, a combination of economic stagnation   and high inflation, combined with high gas  prices and unrest over events in Central Asia,   where the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan  and the Iranian Revolution had occurred in 1979,   also undermined Carter. Conversely, Reagan  campaigned in 1979 and 1980 as a Cold War   presidential candidate who would adopt a more  aggressive stance towards the Russians.

 He faced   a surprising challenge from the former director  of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, who did well in the   Republican primaries, but he ultimately saw  him off at the convention in mid-July 1980.   Reagan then surprised many Republicans  by picking Bush to run as his proposed   Vice-President.

 Together they beat Jimmy  Carter and his Vice-Presidential candidate,   Walter Mondale, in the national election in  November 1980. Reagan won a landslide victory   with 489 votes out of 538 in the Electoral College  in an election in which a third-party candidate,   John Anderson, soaked up nearly six million  votes. Reagan now had a clear mandate to adopt   a radically different approach to government  from what had prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s.  

He was sworn in at his inauguration ceremony  on the 20th of January 1981, the first time   an inauguration was held on the West Front of  the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.    While Reagan had campaigned on a platform of  aggressive fiscal and economic reform and an   equally muscular approach towards the Cold War,  before he could implement any of this life was   very nearly cut short. Being President of the  United States is a dangerous endeavour.

 There   have been attempts on the lives of 17 presidents  and presidential candidates. Four presidents,   Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley  and John F. Kennedy, have been assassinated,   meaning that there is an 8% chance of being  killed in office as US President based on   the fact 45 men have held the office.

 In Reagan’s  time, Gerald Ford had survived two assassination   attempts within the space of two and a half weeks  in September 1975. In Ford’s case both assailants   didn’t actually shoot him. One missed and the  other had failed to load the bullets correctly   into the chamber. Reagan was not so lucky. On the  30th of March 1981, ten weeks into his presidency,   he was seriously wounded after John Hinckley, Jr.

  fired off a bullet that ricocheted and entered   Reagan’s chest area, breaking a rib and puncturing  one of his lungs. He was taken to hospital and   survived after emergency surgery. Hinckley was  found not-guilty by reason of insanity afterwards.   He had developed an infatuation with the actress  Jodie Foster and claimed that he wanted to impress   her by assassinating the president.

 After  his initial arrival at George Washington   University Hospital, Reagan’s blood pressure had  dropped to 60, under half the normal level. It   is theorised that he would have died had he  not been in good physical shape for his age.   He had quit smoking in 1966 after his  brother developed throat cancer. Reagan   also drank sparingly and exercised quite a bit.

  He was out of hospital after the assassination   attempt in under two weeks and proceeded  to begin implementing his policies.     Reagan’s first major order of business  was the domestic economy. His economic   views changed considerably over the course of his  lifetime. He was a supporter of big government,   state intervention and the power of collective  bargaining in his earlier years in Hollywood and   he even raised taxes as Governor of California.

  His stances shifted over time and in the 1970s,   he, like other major western leaders  such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain,   was won over to the idea that the economic malaise  that struck the west from 1973 onwards could be   fought back against by reducing taxes, shrinking  the government, de-regulating the economy and   privatising state-controlled assets.

 This  approach became known as Reaganomics in   America and is a direct parallel to Thatcherism  in Britain and Neo-Liberalism in broader western   economic theory. An early component of this was  the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. This had   nearly become law in 1980, but Carter had blocked  the passage of it. Reagan signed it into law on   the 13th of August 1981. The Act substantially  reduced federal income tax rates across America.  

Reagan is sometimes criticised for fostering  inequality in America through his tax cuts,   but marginal tax rates in the United States  were extremely high in the 1960s and 1970s.   The issue with the tax base in America and  the budget deficit and debt has more to do   with policies pursued in Reagan’s second term  and by his successors.

 On top of the tax cuts,   the Federal Reserve continued to increase its  rates to combat inflation, peaking at nearly 20%   in 1981, a drastic measure which did curb rampant  inflation. Between the flattening of inflation and   the tax cuts, the Reagan era economy bounced back  from a serious crisis in 1981 and 1982 to begin   growing considerably from 1983 onwards.

  Beyond tax cuts and the Fed’s battle against   inflation, Reagan engaged in a multi-faceted  approach to the economy. For instance,   he deregulated the oil and gas industry to make  the US less reliant on energy sources in the   Middle East, a process that was sensible  and already underway under Carter. Some   federal agencies outsourced elements of  their work to third parties in line with   the Reaganomic belief that private industry  was more efficient than the public sector.  

However, privatisation was far less dramatic in  the United States under Reagan than it was in   Britain under Thatcher in the 1980s. The reasons  for this were clear. The American government had   far less state assets to begin with. The nature of  US economic development going back to the middle   of the nineteenth century was that things like  the railways were broadly in private ownership.  

While privatisation was perhaps less acute in  the US under Reagan than is sometimes stated,   he certainly did follow through on his aims  to tackle the power of the trade unions.   A notable incident occurred in the late summer  of 1981 after the Professional Air Traffic   Controllers Organization went on strike on the 3rd  of August demanding a substantial pay increase,   better pensions and a four-day work week.

  Reagan acted swiftly to intervene by hiring   replacements and calling retired controllers back  to work. Within days the strike had been broken,   and many air traffic controllers lost their jobs.  It is viewed as a tipping point in the labour   movement in America today. These policies  are unquestionably controversial depending   on a person’s economic outlook. Yet there is no  denying that the US economy benefited initially.  

It rebounded from the economic downturn of  the early 1980s to grow at an average of 4.5%   of GDP between 1983 and 1988.   The other element of Reagan’s domestic   policy platform that has garnered attention is  his emphasis on law and order and the War on   Drugs.

 Again, there is no denying that America was  a violent society with serious crime problems when   Reagan entered office. Cities like New York were  seeing well over a thousand homicides every year.   A lot of this was linked to the illegal drug  trade, especially the explosion in narcotics   trafficking during the 1970s. Reagan and the First  Lady, Nancy Reagan, with whom he was especially   close and on whom he relied for emotional support  throughout his political life, became known for   their ‘Just Say No’ campaign against drug use.  Reagan certainly didn’t start the War on Drugs.  

It had mostly been created under Richard Nixon,  but Reagan’s administration did pass legislation   like the Military Co-Operation with Law  Enforcement Act of 1981 which is seen as   having led to the militarisation of it. The 1980s  also witnessed a sharp increase in the development   of what sociologists and political scientists now  term the Prison-Industrial Complex.

 The number of   people in US prisons grew from around 550,000  in 1980 to well over a million in 1990 and then   to nearly two million by the end of the century.  Reagan’s policies might have been well-intentioned   when it came to reducing extreme levels of  crime, yet they failed for reasons broadly   beyond his control.

 In particular, Reagan’s entry  into office coincided with the appearance of many   more powerful narcotics onto the American market.  The introduction of new legislation to fight   the drug epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s  partly explains the rise in prison numbers. While   Reagan’s War on Drugs met with mixed results,  there isn’t any denying that urban crime levels   fell very substantially in America in the 1990s  and this has to be viewed to some extent as a   delayed result of Reagan’s law and order policies  in the 1980s.

 In contrast to his active approach   towards the War on Drugs and fighting crime in  America, Reagan was notably silent on the HIV/AIDS   Crisis which began in America at the start of the  1980s. The worst years of the crisis in America   overlapped with Reagan’s time in office, yet he  only first mentioned it in a press conference in   1985 when a question on the crisis was put to  him, and he did not give a speech specifically   on the subject of HIV/AIDS until 1987, six  years after the first diagnoses in the US.   

Reagan had been jingoistic about the Cold War  on the campaign trail in 1980, but he was slow   to actually act against the USSR after he entered  office, prioritising domestic economic concerns   first. By 1983 the US economy was starting to  grow at speed and Reagan turned to foreign policy   matters.

 The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan  on Christmas Eve 1979 to prop up a communist   regime there and had been fighting Islamic  mujahidin in the country ever since. The US   government offered these fighters support. There  were many other proxy conflicts underway around   the world, particularly in places like Nicaragua  and Guatemala in Central America and in parts of   Africa like Ethiopia.

 On the 8th of March 1983  Reagan gave a landmark speech at a meeting of the   National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando,  Florida in which he referred to the Afghanistan   conflict and used it to frame his argument that  the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” Two weeks   later he announced plans to set up what became the  Strategic Defence Initiative in 1984.

 The goal of   this was to use new technology to make America  resistant to a nuclear strike, specifically by   deploying advanced computer detection systems  and interception devices. This even included   plans for laser-like weapons and missile systems  that would be located in low Earth orbit. These   were unrealistic for the technology available  in the mid-1980s and the Strategic Defence   Initiative was derided as “reckless Star Wars  schemes” by Senator Ted Kennedy.

 Nevertheless,   what the Star Wars plan and the “evil empire”  speech indicated was that Reagan was determined   to take a tougher line on the Soviet Union than  Carter or Ford had. Reagan was the first US   President since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962  to push back against the strategy of detente.    Reagan’s first term witnessed the most dangerous  moment in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile   Crisis two decades earlier, though the nuclear  threat that occurred in the 1980s happened in a   much less public way than had the Cuban instance  back in 1962. The Reagan era emergency is known  

as Able Archer ‘83. In November 1983 the US  and its NATO allies were carrying out their   annual military exercises in Europe, what they  called Operation Able Archer. These were fairly   standard military exercises designed to simply  indicate to the Russians and their allies that   the western alliance stood ready to respond to any  threat posed by the communists in Eastern Europe.  

However, in November 1983, in large part owing to  Reagan’s rhetoric and the inception of the Star   Wars programme, the Soviets were on edge. Combined  with this, NATO had introduced a new method of   secret communications between its units. When  these began relaying messages, the Russians, who   also listened in on these military drills every  year, became genuinely concerned and believed that   the drills might be a smokescreen for an actual  attack.

 In response, the Politburo ordered its   forces in Poland and East Germany to stand ready  to defend the borders of the Warsaw Pact alliance   and readied its nuclear arsenal. Documents that  have only been declassified in recent years have   revealed how close the world came to nuclear war  as a result of Able Archer ‘83, though in the end   the Russians decided to hold firm and wait for any  attack to come from the west before responding.  

It was a sign of how tense relations between the  US and the USSR were during Reagan’s first term,   but matters would soon improve owing  to a change in leadership in Moscow.    It must be said that Reagan frequently created  tensions with the Russians and the Warsaw Pact   bloc through his off-the-cuff remarks.

 In  October 1982 it was widely reported that   he had referred to the Polish authorities as,  quote, “a bunch of no-good, lousy bums,” a form   of undiplomatic language that was not used back in  the 1980s when conducting foreign diplomacy, even   with an adversary. The statement had been made  off-the-record while preparing to make a formal   statement on the suppression of the Solidarity  trade union in Poland, whose leader, Lech Walesa,   was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following  year.

 Two years later, on the 11th of August 1984,   in the middle of giving the weekly radio address  that he made every week from 1982 onwards as   President, he made an even more ill-judged  joke. Reagan concluded his address by saying,   “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you  today that I’ve signed legislation that will   outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five  minutes.

” This was Reagan’s sense of humour and   the joke was off-air. However, it was quickly  leaked and there was an outcry that it was a   reckless statement during a period of heightened  tensions in the Cold War. Reagan’s sense of   humour was not the only thing which marked his  presidency out from others. The secret services,   for instance, had to put together a team who could  ride horses when Reagan became president, as he   spent down time at his ranch out in California  and went riding with Queen Elizabeth II when   he visited Windsor Castle during a state visit  in 1982. Another quirk of his time as leader of  

America was the so-called ‘Jelly-Bean Strategy’.  Reagan had taken to leaving the sweets lying   around his office years earlier as a substitute  for smoking as he tried to quit the habit.   In the White House as president, he used bowls  of jelly beans, as a way of disarming foreign   leaders and diplomats, gauging how they would  respond to the informality of the President of the   United States offering a bowl of jelly beans.

  It wasn’t simply Reagan’s demeanour which had made   the Russians uneasy and led to the Able Archer  ‘83 incident. He demonstrated as well during his   first term that he was willing to take decisive  military action when he felt it was justified,   though he avoided long-term entanglements of the  kind that had seen the Americans become entrenched   in a long-running war in Vietnam between the late  1950s and their eventual full withdrawal in 1975.  

For instance, while the US government initially  tried to remain neutral in the Falklands War that   broke out after the Argentine government invaded  the British island chain in the South Atlantic in   early April 1982, Reagan soon decided to give  his support more firmly to Margaret Thatcher’s   government.

 In going against the military junta in  Buenos Aires, Reagan risked alienating a strategic   ally in Latin America. The most intense period  of foreign intervention of Reagan’s first term   came in the weeks before Able Archer ‘83. In  the early hours of the 25th of October 1983,   a US expedition invaded the Caribbean island  of Grenada in response to a military coup days   earlier that had led to the overthrow and  murder of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop.  

The invasion led to Hudson Austin, who had  seized power at the end of the disturbances,   being removed and fresh elections were held in  December 1984. Despite the success of the mission,   the unilateral action by Reagan’s administration  was condemned at the United Nations, from which no   approval had been sought.

 The Grenada expedition  meant that the US response to the bombing of its   peacekeeping barracks in the Lebanon on the  23rd of October 1983, leading to the death of   241 US military personnel, was initially muted,  even though the attack was one of the bloodiest   strikes against American forces since the Second  World War. It occurred within the context of the   lengthy Lebanese Civil War.

 Reagan only responded  in February 1984 with a massive bombing campaign   against Beirut and other targets in the country.  Again, the Americans did not become entangled   in any way beyond the strikes. Reagan was not  going to risk sustained foreign wars like the   Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan.  There is no denying that many foreign   leaders and observers found Reagan’s  actions questionable in 1983 and 1984.  

The intervention in Grenada had possibly been  merited, but Reagan had acted unilaterally without   any international debate on the issue. At home  people were much more supportive of his actions,   not least because after two initially difficult  years in office, the American economy had   roared to life in the second half of Reagan’s  first term. US GDP growth in 1984 was 7.

2%,   the only time since 1951 that the US economy  has grown by over 7% in a single year. With   this economic performance providing a political  tailwind, Reagan and Bush brushed aside Walter   Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro in the Presidential  Election on the 6th of November 1984. The Reagan   campaign featured a famous ad entitled Morning in  America in which it was stated that “It’s morning   again in America.

 Today more men and women will  go to work than ever before in our country’s   history. With interest rates at about half the  record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today   will buy new homes more than at any time in the  past four years … It’s morning again in America,   and under the leadership of President Reagan,  our country is prouder and stronger and better.   Why would we ever want to return to where  we were less than four short years ago?”   Most Americans agreed and Reagan and Bush won  every state except Mondale’s native Minnesota.  

For all of Reagan’s aggressive Cold Warrior image,  he succeeded on the economy and the Morning in   America ad indicated that his team was well  aware that this was where his strength lay.     In his second term, Reagan would be facing up  against a new and more energetic Soviet leader.   Konstantin Chernenko, the third head of the Soviet  Union while Reagan had been in office after the   deaths of both Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov,  died on the 10th of March 1985.

 Chernenko,   Brezhnev and Andropov had all been born between  1906 and 1914 and came of age during the Stalinist   era. They were older Soviet leaders whose world  views were shaped by the Second World War,   the Stalinist terror and the early decades of  the Cold War. Conversely, Chernenko’s successor,   Mikhail Gorbachev, was born in 1931 and had a  different mindset.

 He had come of age in a more   prosperous and less tyrannical Soviet Union in  the 1950s and 1960s. However, he had then seen   the Soviet economy stagnate in the 1970s and fail  to recover in the way that Reagan’s US economy was   in the 1980s.

 This economic malaise, combined with  incidents like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant   meltdown in Ukraine on the 26th of April 1986,  convinced Gorbachev that the Soviet Union was in   drastic need of reform to modernise it. Thus, he  initiated policies like glasnost and perestroika,   whereby he sought to make the USSR more open to  discussion about reform and also to adopt a less   rigid economic system.

 Gorbachev wanted to reform  the Soviet Union, not destroy it – that needs to   be stressed, as in the end his reform programme  did end up bringing the USSR to a swift end.   Reagan often gets the credit for bringing the Cold  War to an end, and he certainly played a role, but   Gorbachev was the really critical figure.  Reagan met Gorbachev for their first official   summit in November 1985 at Geneva in Switzerland.

  They immediately established a rapport, having   both come from humble backgrounds and noting that  ordinary Americans and Russians had a lot to gain   from a more peaceful relationship between the  two superpowers. The meetings ran on beyond the   scheduled time and at one juncture Reagan returned  to his diplomatic team after a conversation with   Gorbachev and proclaimed that the Soviet Union had  a fundamentally different leader now to what had   gone before. A second summit followed at Reykjavik  in Iceland in October 1986. Here Reagan stood firm  

on a number of issues concerning defence and  instead pressed Gorbachev to reform the Soviet   Union and at a minimum to grant greater autonomy  to the Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe like   East Germany and Poland. All of this bore fruit  during their third official summit in Washington   D.C. in December 1987.

 In the middle of this an  announcement was made that the Intermediate-Range,   Nuclear Forces Treaty was to be signed between  the two countries who controlled virtually all   of the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons  at the time. The treaty banned the development   of intermediate-range missiles that could carry  nuclear warheads across distances of around 5,500   kilometres.

 This was hardly an end to the nuclear  stand-off that had existed between the two nations   since the Russians tested their first atomic  weapon in 1949. On the other hand it was a deeply   symbolic move which signalled a clear thaw in the  Cold War relationship and a desire to end decades   of tensions. Further agreements were signed during  the Presidency of George H. W. Bush which could   certainly be described as part of the legacy  of Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev.   

Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev bore a lot  of fruit in the long run. Elsewhere, though,   his administration ended up mired in controversy  in the middle of his second term. This focused on   the Middle East and Central America. The US had  started out supporting Saddam Hussein and Iraq in   the Iran-Iraq War that raged from 1980 to 1988.

  Over time the position of Reagan’s government   changed as Hussein began using chemical weapons  against both the Iranians and the Kurdish minority   in northern Iraq. Although the US embassy hostage  crisis in Iran between the Iranian Revolution of   1979 and the freeing of the hostages in January  1981 meant that the US could never be seen to be   supplying the Iranians with weapons, that is  exactly what was occurring in the mid-1980s.  

This formed part of a complex planned triangular  trade whereby the clandestine proceeds would then   be used to fund the Contra rebels who opposed  the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua’s civil   war. The initial enterprise soon became mired  in attempts to use the proceeds to free hostages   held by the Iran-linked Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 The  Iran-Contra affair was exposed in November 1986   and Reagan had to make a televised national  address in March 1987 where he attempted to   explain away the manner in which the trading of  arms to Iran had become entangled in different   geopolitical issues. What sharpened the criticism  was that the Iran-Contra affair broke at the same   time that Kuwait was requesting American aid to  defend its oil tankers moving through the Persian   Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz from attacks by  Iran.

 This was in an era when the shock of the   1973 Oil Crisis and the economic damage it had  caused remained fresh in the memory of Americans.   The idea that Reagan’s administration had  conspired with Iranian officials and yet was now   dispatching a US naval force to the Persian Gulf  to defend Kuwaiti tankers trying to deliver oil   onto the world market against potential Iranian  attacks did not sit well with many Americans.  

The Iran-Contra affair was the biggest controversy  of Reagan’s tenure in the White House.    Elsewhere in foreign policy terms, Reagan  responded to the growing international   condemnation of the Apartheid regime in  South Africa by adopting what was termed the   “Constructive Engagement” policy.

 Via this, Reagan  sought to convince the South African government   to abandon elements of Apartheid over time. It was  not a popular approach and in 1986 the US Congress   overrode Reagan. His conciliatory approach  towards South Africa reflected a desire to   keep as many African nations within Washington’s  sphere of influence as possible at a time when   many civil wars with Cold War elements to them  were underway across the continent, notably in   Ethiopia. Libya had also become an issue.

 On  the 5th of April 1986 a terrorist bombing was   carried out on a discotheque in West Berlin,  killing three people and injuring over 200. It   was quickly concluded that the regime of Muammar  Gaddafi was connected to the terrorists and on   the 15th of April Operation El Dorado Canyon was  carried out on Reagan’s orders. A swift strategic   bombing raid hit several of Libya’s airports and  depleted part of Gaddafi’s air force.

 This also   led to a greater split between Libya and the  west and in the final weeks of Reagan’s second   term the Lockerbie Bombing took place on the 21st  of December 1988, an attack on a passenger plane   that led to 270 deaths in Scotland. Gaddafi was  widely believed to have sanctioned the attack.    Despite these foreign policy issues, it is likely  that had Reagan not been term limited he would   have managed to win a third term.

 He remained  extremely popular at home, in part because the   American economy continued to perform well.  Even the stock market crash of Black Monday,   the 19th of October 1987, proved to be more of  a rapid flash crash that the US recovered from   comparatively fast. Hence, with the Reagan  economy having performed well on the whole,   his Vice-President, George H. W.

 Bush, who was  deeply implicated in the Intra-Contra affair,   managed to win election as the 41st President  of the United States following the election on   the 8th of November 1988. He won 426 votes of the  Electoral College against Michael Dukakis’ 111.   Reagan’s Cold War activity really came to fruition  during Bush Sr.’s single term. There had already   been major internal unrest in Poland in Reagan’s  final year in office.

 This spread to Hungary,   Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989, leading  to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of   the Iron Curtain. Germany reunited in 1990 and the  USSR collapsed with surprising speed in 1991. The   Cold War was over.

 Reagan didn’t win it, as some  over exuberant analysts sometimes claim, but he   did contribute substantially to ending it.  Reagan was the oldest president to leave office   when he did so at 77 years of age early in  1989, although Joe Biden has since exceeded   that tally. Despite his advanced age, Reagan  publicly stated that he had extensive plans   for his post-presidency.

 He busied himself with  work on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library,   which opened in Simi Valley in California in 1991.  He and Nancy had returned to the West Coast after   leaving the White House, where they lived between  their ranch and a house in Bel Air in Los Angeles.   Nancy was busier than Ronald in a way, as she  had launched the Nancy Reagan Foundation to   continue her efforts on the War on Drugs after  her time as First Lady.

 After a respectful   period in which he avoided the public gaze so  as not to distract from Bush taking up office,   Reagan began to make public appearances again  and to give speeches. One of his main concerns in   retirement was to promote the continuation of the  2nd Amendment to the US Constitution, the right   to bear arms.

 This was a longstanding concern of  Reagan’s and the National Rifle Association had   endorsed him in 1980 and 1984. A caveat is that  Reagan became a critic of the ownership of assault   weapons and machine guns in the 1990s, stating  that he saw no practical reason why Americans   should own them. On another constitutional issue  Reagan was in favour of repeal. He was not a fan   of the 22nd Amendment that had been ratified in  1951 to limit US Presidents to serving two terms.  

There is no indication that Reagan was  opposed to this on personal grounds.   He had no intention of trying to run again  for a third term. Instead, he was opposed to   term restrictions as he believed it was an  undemocratic principle. These speeches and   public outings came to an abrupt end in 1994 when  Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.  

Although he lived down to 2004, he spent his  last years out of public view as his condition   deteriorated very drastically. By the end of  the 1990s he recognised few people that visited   him. Reagan died on the 5th of June 2004 in  Los Angeles at 93 years of age.    Ronald Reagan is amongst the ten most  consequential presidents in American history,   alongside the likes of George Washington, Abraham  Lincoln, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.  

But Reagan is usually bracketed with consequential  presidents like Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and   Lyndon Johnson in that, unlike Washington, Lincoln  and the Roosevelts, he divides opinion. His rise   to the White House was unusual.

 He started life  as a sports broadcaster in the age of radio and   then became a prominent actor in Hollywood. After  a divisive role in the Red Scare in Hollywood,   he moved into politics and became Governor of  California in 1967. From that point forwards his   star was in the ascendant and as early as 1968 he  ran to become the Republican Party’s presidential   candidate.

 A second campaign, challenging  the incumbent, Gerald Ford, in 1976, was   surprisingly close and from thereon Reagan was the  clear frontrunner to be the Republican candidate   in 1980. He breezed into the White House in that  election with George Bush Sr. as his running mate,   defeating an unpopular Jimmy Carter, who was  facing economic and political headwinds. In   office Reagan is known for two things.

 He  took a firm stance on the Soviet Union and   signalled his determination to win the Cold War  at a moment when the Russian economy continued   to deteriorate and the USSR had become mired in  its equivalent of the Vietnam War in Afghanistan.   Secondly, he adopted a new economic approach which  echoed the one being employed by Margaret Thatcher   in Britain, specifically tax cuts, deregulation  and privatisation.

 Although Reaganomics possibly   created long-term issues, there is no disputing  that the American economy rebounded in a very   tangible way in the 1980s after the challenging  1970s. Similarly, his approach to the Cold   War divides opinion. Clearly Reagan played a  considerable role in winning it for America,   but critics would argue that the real driving  force behind the end of the conflict was internal   reform within the USSR and the Warsaw Pact  countries.

 Whatever the truth of the matter,   historians and others will continue to debate  Reagan’s legacy for a long time to come.     What do you think of Ronald Reagan? Was he the  pivotal figure in America’s victory in the Cold   War or was the Soviet Union doomed to collapse  regardless of anything that Reagan did? Please   let us know in the comment section, and in the  meantime, thank you very much for watching.