Ronald Reagan seemed an unlikely candidate for that role. Coming from small-town roots in Illinois, he was the son of an alcoholic father, lived on the fringes of the middle class, and never had a fancy education. He managed to make it into the movies, but never to the top—the "Errol Flynn of the B's," he said. By the time he entered elective politics, he was 55, older than Bill Clinton when he left office. Even when he won the White House, the doyens of Georgetown still weren't impressed. "An amiable dunce," sniffed Clark Clifford, and heads nodded sagely.
Reagan also came to the presidency when the tides were running against the office itself. Five straight chief executives had left there in death, disgrace, or rejection by the citizenry. Americans were tired and grim about public life after two decades of assassinations, scandals, a war lost in jungles overseas, social unrest, stagflation, and a government whose response was uneven at best. President Jimmy Carter had meditated at Camp David for 10 days in 1979 and, coming down from the mountain top, pronounced that there was a sickness at the soul of the nation. His esteemed general counsel, Lloyd Cutler, was among those who worried that no one could govern anymore and called for a rewriting of the Constitution. Many tended to agree as they watched American diplomats held hostage for over a year by an old man in a turban in Tehran—and as an American rescue mission went down in the sands of Iran. There was a heaviness in the land.
As he came riding in from the West, Reagan did not change things instantly. Barely inaugurated, he was cut down by a bullet that lodged within an inch of his heart. Less than a year after he took office, the economy took its steepest plunge since the Depression. In his first midterm elections, Democrats picked up 27 seats in the House. Then, and throughout his tenure, he was dogged by the perception that his policies helped the rich and left others behind.
Yet by the end of his first term, the national mood had obviously changed. The Olympics in Los Angeles in the summer of 1984 brought an outburst of patriotic celebration, and they were soon followed by Reagan campaign commercials proclaiming it was "morning again in America."
In elections that fall, he swept 49 states—only Minnesota didn't get the word. While his second term was marked by the Iran-Contra scandal and was less successful than his first, the economy kept up a brisk forward momentum, creating record numbers of jobs amid low inflation. The long boom had started. Reagan left office on billows of nostalgia, the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to finish two terms and the first since Andy Jackson to see his vice president elected to succeed him. Ten months after he left, the Berlin Wall collapsed.
No wonder people were smiling again.
Many hands could claim a degree of credit, but the man whose name defines the 1980s is Reagan, and the conservative movement that he brought to power is Reaganism. He casts a shadow that continues to shape our politics today. Clinton announced that the "era of big government is over." George W. Bush picked up Reagan's banner in matters of style and substance. Lou Cannon, the definitive biographer of the 40th president, points out that Reagan left office with the highest public approval ratings of anyone since FDR but only middling marks from historians. Since then, he has made some headway with them, too. James MacGregor Burns, whose studies of leadership are widely read, wrote in 1999 that Reagan will rank with FDR among the "great" or "near-great" presidents of the 20th century.
