None of this is likely to matter much in the long view of history. Reagan got many small things wrong. He got most of the big things right. He was lucky, but luck comes to the well prepared and the optimistic; and Reagan, ever the optimist, saw that America could become well prepared to prevail abroad and prosper at home. During his years in office and after, Reagan was disparaged and patronized by journalists and academics—few of whom, after all, ever voted for him. But as they look over the record, journalists have become more respectful, and treatment of Reagan by liberal academics, in the words of pro-Reagan academic Paul Kengor, "has been far better than most people would imagine in light of established biases."

What grew most robustly during the Reagan and Roosevelt presidencies was not the American economy or American power abroad—though both did grow—but American confidence. In their last years in office, both men were physically weakened: Look at Reagan's Iran-Contra testimony and Roosevelt's Yalta speech. But both of these unlikely presidents had already won their great victories. Most of all, they both left the nation and the world confident of the superiority of America's economy, the supremacy of its military power, and the paramountcy of its moral example. Without their achievements and their confidence, what would the 20th century have looked like?

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