Ronald Reagan - USA History.

Ronald Reagan - USA History. I INTRODUCTION Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), 40th president of the United States (1981-1989), who implemented policies that reversed trends toward greater government involvement in economic and social regulation. He introduced a new style of presidential leadership, downgrading the role of the president as an administrator and increasing the importance of communication via the national news media. Reagan first became famous as an actor in Hollywood motion pictures and became more prominent later in his career as a television host. His emergence as a political figure stemmed from his personal charm and his identification with conservative groups who believed that the nation had strayed from its traditional values. Many saw Reagan as a personal and ideological symbol of these values. Having never held public office, Reagan became governor of California, the most populous state, in 1967, and almost immediately thereafter emerged as a serious candidate for the presidency. II EARLY LIFE Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, the younger of two sons of Nelle and John Reagan. His father was a traveling shoe salesman. Reagan was strongly influenced by his mother, who taught him to read at an early age. Most of his childhood was spent in Dixon, Illinois, a small town about 155 km (96 mi) west of Chicago. Reagan won a scholarship to study at Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ college near Peoria, Illinois. He majored in economics, and he was president of the student body, a member of the football team, and captain of the swimming team. He was also drawn toward acting, but upon graduation in 1932 the only job available related to show business was as a local radio sportscaster. In 1936 he became a sportscaster for station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1937 Reagan went to Hollywood and began an acting career that spanned more than 25 years. He played in more than 50 films, including Knute Rockne-All American (1940), King's Row (1942), and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). He soon became active in the Screen Actors Guild (the union for film actors) and was elected six times as its president. He married actress Jane Wyman and they had two children: Maureen and Michael, an adopted son. After eight years, the marriage ended in divorce. In 1952 Reagan married another actress, Nancy Davis, daughter of an Illinois neurosurgeon. They had two children, Patricia and Ronald. Reagan's first political activities were associated with his responsibilities as a union leader. As union president, Reagan tried to remove suspected Communists from the movie industry. When the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities began an investigation in 1947 on the influence of Communists in the film industry, Reagan took a strong anti-Communist stand testifying before the committee. In 1954 Reagan agreed to work with the General Electric Company to host a 30-minute television series and to make promotional tours speaking to General Electric employees around the country. Reagan spoke to large audiences, promoting the free-enterprise system. Despite his tendency to vote for Republican candidates for president (Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and for Richard M. Nixon in 1960), Reagan was a registered Democrat until 1962. Reagan emerged on the national political scene in 1964 when he made an impassioned television speech supporting the Republican presidential candidate, United States senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona. Although Goldwater lost the election, Reagan's speech brought in money and praise from Republicans around the country. A group of Republicans in California persuaded a receptive Reagan to run for governor of California in 1966. Reagan appealed to traditional Republican voters as well as to working-class Democrats. He defeated Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Sr., the incumbent Democrat, by almost a million votes. III EARLY POLITICAL CAREER A Governor of California During his first term Reagan temporarily stopped government hiring to slow the growth of the state workforce, but he also approved tax increases to balance the state budget. He cut funding for the University of California, a center of the student protest movement of the late 1960s, but after protests died down he increased funding for higher education. Reagan was elected to a second term in 1970, defeating Democrat Jesse Unruh, although he won by a much smaller margin than in 1966. Reagan worked with the Democratic majority in the state legislature to enact a major reform of the welfare system in 1971. The reform reduced the number of people receiving state aid, while increasing the benefits for those who remained eligible. By 1973 budget surpluses enabled Reagan to begin tax rebates that returned almost $6 billion to taxpayers. As governor, Reagan became one of several widely known conservative politicians who wanted to restrict government involvement in the economy and society. In 1968, during his first term as governor, he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He lost the nomination to Richard M. Nixon, who went on to win the presidency. After completing his term as governor, Reagan decided to challenge incumbent president Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Reagan won an unexpected victory in the North Carolina primary and won many delegates in the Midwest and the West, but Ford was nominated by a narrow margin at the Republican National Convention in August. Ford's defeat by Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter in the presidential election led some Republicans to wonder whether Reagan might have won had he been in Ford's place, and Reagan began to plan another presidential run in 1980. B The Election of 1980 Reagan, who had spent years making political friends at party fundraising dinners around the country, announced his candidacy in November 1979. He became the immediate favorite to capture the nomination and, except for an unexpected defeat by former Republican Party chairman George H. W. Bush in the Iowa caucuses, he easily defeated his rivals for the Republican nomination. At the 1980 Republican convention, delegates adopted a conservative political program for the party. Former president Ford was considered as the vice presidential candidate, but when Ford's negotiators proposed that the vice president should share presidential powers, Reagan rejected the plan. Instead, he chose Bush as his running mate. During the fall campaign against Carter, the biggest political issue was the economy. Reagan blamed Carter for the recession that had begun in 1980 and for increasing inflation. He also accused Carter of weakness in foreign policy and called for a stronger military. His claim that Carter had a weak foreign policy seemed to be substantiated by a lengthy hostage crisis in Tehr?n, Iran. In November 1979 after Carter had allowed the deposed shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment, a group of Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehr?n and held 53 Americans as hostages. United States media publicized the plight of the hostages and Carter's failure to win their release. They were eventually released in January 1981, on the day of Reagan's inauguration. The contrast between the television personalities of the two candidates was also very important. Carter's stiff, nervous manner had never been popular, while Reagan's charm and his call for a return to patriotism and traditional morality appealed to the public. Many voters believed that Reagan was a forceful leader who could restore prosperity at home and prevent national humiliation abroad. Reagan won the election by a landslide, receiving 51 percent to Carter's 41 percent. Moderate Republican John B. Anderson, running as an independent, received nearly 7 percent. In the Electoral College, Reagan won a ten-to-one victory. IV PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES Ronald Reagan presided over the most far-reaching changes in U.S. government economic and social policy in half a century. His administration succeeded in eliminating or reducing many social programs begun by the federal government under presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969) and in lifting many restrictions on business activities. As president, Reagan delegated much of the day-to-day administrative work to his staff. He defined his management style as "to identify the problem, find the right individuals to do the job, and then let them go to it." Reagan's chief function in his administration was as "the great communicator." He served as a spokesman for the conservative coalition that had backed his campaign for the presidency. This coalition included businessmen opposed to government regulation of private enterprise and anti-Communists who believed that the United States should build up its military strength to deter possible aggression by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Reagan also received strong support from conservative religious groups, who were unhappy about what they saw as decreasing respect for religion in public life and about increasingly permissive attitudes, especially with respect to sex and drugs, that had emerged in the late 1960s. These groups often had little in common, and it took a politician with Reagan's charm to smooth over their differences. Reagan also won a solid following among moderate middle-class and working-class Americans, many of whom traditionally had supported the Democratic Party. He won their support with his assertion that the federal government imposed excessive taxation and had grown too large and cumbersome. Reagan spoke out against what he described as overgrown government bureaucracy, expensive social programs, and federal regulatory agencies that interfered in the private lives and business dealings of U.S. citizens. Reagan's decisive defeat of Carter could be interpreted as a public desire for change. His strength in the 1980 election helped the Republicans win a majority in the Senate--for the first time in 26 years--and reduced the Democratic majority in the House. With control of the House, Democrats had the ability to block many of Reagan's initiatives. However, Reagan often appealed directly to the people through the media, and his abilities as a speaker did much to influence public opinion in favor of his programs. On March 30, 1981, an unstable drifter named John W. Hinckley shot Reagan in the chest during an assassination attempt. A court later found Hinckley not guilty because of insanity and committed him to a mental hospital. Public sympathy after the assassination attempt increased public support for Reagan, which helped him push his program through Congress. At first, the recession that Reagan had inherited from Carter deepened. Almost 11 percent of the workforce was unemployed by the fall of 1982. The recession reduced inflation significantly, but interest rates remained high and the 1982 elections brought substantial Democratic gains in the House. During the next two years, however, economic recovery began. Inflation remained low and the unemployment rate went down. In 1984 the Republicans nominated Reagan and Bush for a second term. Reagan's Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, ran a lackluster campaign in which he proposed tax increases to reduce the budget deficits. Reagan promised to keep taxes down, and won 59 percent of the popular vote and carried 49 states. In congressional races the Democrats did better, keeping a large House majority and gaining seats in the Senate. In the 1986 elections the Democrats regained control of the Senate. During his last two years in office, lacking a majority in either house of Congress and unable to run for reelection himself, Reagan found it harder to get his legislative proposals enacted. A Domestic Affairs A1 Economic Policy Reagan based his economic program on a theory known as supply-side economics. This theory, which became popularly known as Reaganomics, advocated a reduction in taxes and government spending in order to leave more money in the hands of citizens. According to supply-side theory, citizens would spend the money on products or services, which would give a boost to the economy, or they would invest the money in businesses, which would cause the economy to expand. Initially government revenues would be reduced by the tax cuts. However, supply-side theorists believed that the resulting economic growth would eventually increase taxable income, which, in turn, would cause government revenues to grow. Using this argument, in 1981 Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which enacted tax cuts of 25 percent over three years. These tax cuts mainly benefited upper-income taxpayers and large corporations, individuals who Reagan argued would be more likely to invest their money in business ventures that would promote economic growth. Between 1977 and 1988 most individuals in the income categories below the national average saw a slight increase in their tax rates, while most individuals in the upper-income categories had their tax rates reduced by a moderate amount. The greatest increase involved a 1.6 percent rate increase for taxpayers among the lowest 10 percent of wage earners. On the other end of the spectrum, those 1 percent of taxpayers with the nation's highest incomes saw their rates decrease by 6 percent over the same period. Reagan also obtained approval for cuts in spending for government social programs, including job training, college loans, food and medical programs, payments for those with disabilities, child daycare centers, and centers for the elderly. Reagan believed that many of these programs made individuals dependent on government support and weakened the structure of American families. Reagan persuaded Congress to deregulate many industries, hoping that the removal of government restrictions would allow businesses to save money as well as the time spent complying with regulations. It was also hoped that businesses would find it easier to invest in new areas. In 1982, for example, Congress passed the GarnSaint Germain Depository Institutions Act, which tried to help struggling savings and loan institutions by allowing them to make much riskier investments. As part of the deregulation process, Reagan relaxed environmental and safety standards, stating that the time and expense spent complying with these regulations caused undue hardships for American businesses. His environmental policies reversed a growing trend toward more government legislation and regulatory bodies designed to protect and improve the quality of the environment. He appointed Anne Burford, who opposed many regulations on air quality and the disposal of toxic waste, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). James Watt, Reagan's secretary of the interior, supported allowing businesses such as mining and timber harvesting to use the resources on public lands. The tax cuts, deregulation, and relaxing of environmental and safety standards did produce economic growth. It also fueled a five-year increase in the stock market (see Stock Exchange). Investors discovered that they could make profits by financing high-risk business deals that were now allowed under the administration's deregulation policy. The stock market surge was intensified by a wave of billion-dollar mergers and takeovers. As a result, the 1980s were a prosperous time for many Americans, particularly the well-to-do, who benefited most from the Reagan tax cuts. Although Reagan reduced expenditures on a number of government programs, he made several significant deviations from the principles of supply-side economics. He exempted selected programs from budget reductions, including such public assistance programs as Social Security and Medicare. These programs provided financial and medical assistance for elderly and disadvantaged citizens. Many Americans viewed them as an essential safety net against extreme poverty or personal misfortune. Another major exception was funding for the military. Unwilling to weaken the U.S. armed forces, Reagan proposed no cuts in the federal defense budget. During the Reagan presidency defense spending actually increased sharply--from $134 billion in 1980 to $290 billion in 1988. These exemptions to the budget cuts and the loss of federal revenue from tax cuts created difficulties in balancing the federal budget. As a result, the government borrowed extensively to pay its bills. Government debt rose from $908 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988. Much of this money came from abroad, especially from Japan. Borrowing money to pay the debt caused the government to spend a greater proportion of its budget on interest payments for loans. In 1980, before Reagan took office, the government set aside less than 10 percent of its budget for interest payments. That number had climbed to more than 15 percent by 1992, the final year in the presidency of Reagan's successor, George Bush, who had continued many of Reagan's economic policies. The budget deficit kept interest rates so high that the value of the dollar soared in relation to major foreign currencies. As a result, U.S. manufacturers found it difficult to compete with their foreign rivals and thousands of industrial jobs disappeared. By the end of the 1980s the percentage of workers in manufacturing jobs had decreased by one-fifth. Although unemployment declined, most new jobs were in service industries that generally paid less in wages. Consumer spending for manufactured products grew, but mainly for inexpensive imports, which enticed Americans to spend larger amounts of money on foreign products. As a result the United States further increased its foreign debt throughout the 1980s by spending more on imported goods than it earned from exports. The U.S. trade deficit climbed from $24.2 billion in 1980 to a high of $152.7 billion in 1986. In an effort to reduce foreign indebtedness, the government undertook a substantial devaluation of the dollar in 1986. Devaluation, which lowered the value of the dollar in relation to foreign currency, made American products less expensive and therefore more desirable in foreign markets. However, devaluation failed to erase the trade deficit. Confidence in the U.S. economy was shaken in October 1987, when a panic on Wall Street caused the value of stocks to plummet sharply. After the crash prominent members of Congress called for greater presidential leadership to put the government's financial house in order, and Congress approved fewer increases in the military budget. A2 Social Policy Reagan's administration had a powerful impact on civil rights initiatives. Reagan believed many of the social programs and antidiscrimination laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s to improve conditions for minorities actually worked to increase ethnic and racial divisions in the United States. For the first time since the 1960s, the federal government stopped actively promoting programs designed to promote social and economic advancement for minority groups. See Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Reagan was particularly opposed to programs such as affirmative action, which favored minorities in jobs, education, and the awarding of government contracts. While proponents of the program thought affirmative action was necessary to counteract the effects of years of discrimination, conservatives believed affirmative action amounted to reverse discrimination by granting minority groups special privileges that were denied to the majority of Americans. In 1981 the government announced that it would no longer require contractors doing business with the federal government to comply with affirmative action programs. During the Reagan administration, the U.S. Justice Department supported a number of legal challenges to affirmative action laws. The debate begun during the Reagan years over the effectiveness of affirmative action continued to generate controversy throughout the 1990s. Under Reagan the Justice Department also cut back its efforts to enforce job discrimination and fair housing laws. It opposed court-ordered school busing, in which children were bused from one neighborhood to another within a city in order to achieve racial integration in public schools. Reagan expressed the opinion that courtordered busing was an unwarranted federal intervention in local government and that it destroyed the community nature of neighborhood schools. The Reagan administration supported legal challenges to busing and defended tax breaks for private schools that were exempt from participation in busing. A3 Judicial Appointments During the Reagan years almost half of the federal district and appeals judgeships became vacant and Reagan appointed conservatives to these courts. By the end of his term, he had also appointed three of the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1981 Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor, who became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. In 1986 he nominated Associate Justice William Rehnquist as chief justice and named Antonin Scalia to replace him as associate justice. The Senate confirmed these nominations. In 1987, however, the Senate refused to confirm Reagan nominee Robert Bork. Liberal groups across the nation protested the nomination, pointing to Bork's well-known positions against abortion, affirmative action, and First Amendment protection for nonpolitical speech. Reagan's next nominee, Douglas Ginsburg, admitted that he had smoked marijuana and was forced to withdraw his nomination. Finally, Reagan named Anthony Kennedy, a moderate whose views on controversial issues were unknown, and his nomination was confirmed. B Foreign Affairs B1 Fighting Communism Reagan changed the tone, but not the course, of foreign policy. Détente, a peaceful if strained policy of coexistence with the USSR that was stressed in the 1970s, was deemphasized, and U.S. foreign policy opposed governments and movements said to be under Soviet influence. Reagan devoted particular attention to reversing the tide of Marxist revolution in Central America and the Caribbean. After the Nicaraguan Revolution deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, the United States accused the new Sandinista government of aiding Marxist rebels in neighboring El Salvador. The United States cut off its aid to Nicaragua in 1981 and began to support an anti-Sandinista guerrilla movement known as the Contras. In 1982 Nicaragua signed an aid pact with the USSR. Reagan then mounted a major campaign to overthrow the Sandinistas by supplying weapons, money, and training to the Contras. Reagan also sent arms and advisers to the regime in El Salvador. In 1983 U.S. troops invaded the Caribbean island nation of Grenada after Marxist rebels overthrew the government there. The Reagan administration also supported two other major struggles against regimes based on forms of Marxism. It sent military equipment to Muslim guerrillas fighting the Communist government of Afghanistan, which was supported by Soviet troops, and joined with the apartheid regime in South Africa in aiding guerrillas fighting the Marxist government of Angola. Under Reagan, U.S. relations with the USSR were cool, partly because of the U.S. military buildup, particularly the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI; popularly known as Star Wars). In theory, SDI would permit the United States to intercept enemy missiles before they hit their targets. The USSR objected to the Star Wars program, believing it threatened the security of the USSR. The program was also controversial in the United States, and many experts believed that SDI was technically unfeasible, prohibitively expensive, or both. Reagan's insistence on the Star Wars program brought strategic arms control talks to a standstill and provoked strong protests from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during his summit meetings with Reagan in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. In 1987 the two leaders did agree to scrap land-based nuclear missiles of intermediate and shorter range, a small fraction of their nuclear arsenals. B2 The Middle East In the Middle East, Reagan intervened several times with U.S. forces. In the early 1980s, armed conflict broke out in Lebanon between the Christian government and a number of Muslim groups. In 1982, in an effort to strengthen the Christian government, Reagan sent marines to Lebanon. In October 1983 a bomb killed nearly 250 marines and other U.S. service members at their Beirut headquarters. Reagan withdrew the surviving marines early in 1984. The Beirut bombing and incidents elsewhere created a strong reaction against Middle East-based terrorists in U.S. public opinion. In 1986 a bomb in a West German dance club killed two U.S. soldiers and injured others. The Reagan administration claimed that Libya was responsible for the bombing and other terrorist activities, and retaliated with air strikes against several Libyan cities on April 15, 1986. In 1987 U.S. naval forces were sent to the Persian Gulf after Kuwait asked for both U.S. and Soviet protection of its shipping during the Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan administration was anxious to prevent Iran from defeating Iraq, which would diminish U.S. influence in the region, and the naval patrols exchanged fire with Iranian gunboats. B3 The Iran-Contra Scandal The last two years of Reagan's presidency were marred by the Iran-Contra Affair, a political scandal that turned public attention to the effectiveness of Reagan's handsoff management style and damaged his reputation. As a result of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980, Congress had designated Iran as a terrorist nation and had outlawed the sale of arms to the Iranian government. In November 1986 newspapers reported that the U.S. government had secretly sold weapons to Iran in order to win Iranian support in freeing U.S. hostages held by Lebanese terrorists friendly to Iran. This incident was particularly embarrassing because Reagan had taken a strong public stand against governments that supported terrorism and had repeatedly urged other governments not to deal with nations that supported terrorists. Newspaper accounts also revealed that the United States had diverted profits from the weapons sales to help the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The diversion of the funds was a direct violation of the Boland amendment, a law that had forbidden U.S. military aid to the Contras. Reagan denied any knowledge of the diversion of funds to the Contras, and he claimed that the weapons deal with Iran was an attempt to open a dialogue with moderate elements in the Iranian government and did not involve negotiations over hostages in Lebanon. Nevertheless, Reagan later called the weapons deal "a mistake." When congressional hearings were held in 1987, attention centered particularly on how deeply Reagan was personally involved in the affair. A congressional report found no clear evidence that the president had known of the diversion of funds to the Contras. However, the report criticized the incompetence of the administration's secret operations as well as the president's lack of supervision over his advisers' actions. A seven-year investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh concluded that Reagan had "knowingly participated or acquiesced in covering up the scandal," but Walsh found "no credible evidence that the president authorized or was aware of the diversion of the profits from the Iran arms sale to assist the contras." C End of the Reagan Administration The Iran-Contra scandal tarnished Reagan's public image. His claim that he had been unaware of what his staff was doing was not well received, and his original assertion that the arms were not ransom payments for hostages seemed to contradict the facts revealed at the hearing. Reagan's political influence was also diminished by the efforts of politicians to position themselves for the 1988 elections, in which Reagan would not be a candidate. Congress began to reject some Reagan initiatives. The Iran-Contra scandal was followed by the rejection of the Bork nomination, a congressional override of Reagan's veto of a civil rights enforcement bill, and another congressional refusal to fund Contra military operations. V LATER YEARS After retiring to California, Reagan supported conservatives on many issues. He published his autobiography, An American Life, in 1990, and he presided at the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, in 1991. In November 1994 Reagan announced that he had Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative disease of the brain. One year later Reagan and his wife, Nancy, announced that they, along with the national Alzheimer's Association, would establish the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute to help find treatments and eventually a cure for the disease. Reagan died in Bel Air, California, on June 5, 2004. VI REAGAN'S LEGACY Many historians regard Reagan's chief legacy to be his resurrection of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and its political agenda. In doing so Reagan redefined the parameters of American political debate. After U.S. voters soundly rejected Goldwater's conservatism in the 1964 election by electing Johnson with the largest popular majority ever at 61 percent, conservatives appeared to occupy the far-right extreme of the U.S. political spectrum. Republican presidents Nixon and Ford were largely moderates who did not challenge the social policies and government economic regulation put in place by the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson. At one point in his presidency, Nixon even proposed a guaranteed income for all Americans. Reagan made conservatism mainstream. He reversed the trend toward greater government spending on social welfare programs by cutting spending on many of those programs, with the exception of Social Security and Medicare. He also freed businesses of government restraints through deregulation. Reagan succeeded in convincing many Americans that "government is the problem," as he stated in his first inaugural address. Both deregulation and cuts in social spending continued in subsequent administrations, including the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton who seemed to echo Reagan when he proclaimed the end of "big government." In achieving this aspect of the conservative agenda, however, Reagan abandoned one of the chief components of the Republican Party's traditional political philosophy--namely, fiscal conservatism. In reducing tax rates while doubling military spending, Reagan produced record deficits and nearly tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion. On issues of foreign policy, some historians believe Reagan's chief contribution was his forceful stand against the Soviet Union, which he called the "evil empire." These historians credit Reagan with helping bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War by putting strains on the Soviet economy, which was unable to match the increased U.S. military spending. Other historians, however, argue that the Soviet Union fell apart mainly due to its own internal contradictions and that the U.S. role only strengthened hardliners within the Soviet Union, thereby delaying the Gorbachev reforms that ultimately led to the Soviet collapse. Some critics of the Reagan era argue that his administration may be judged more harshly by future historians in light of the current U.S. war against terrorism. By agreeing to swap arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan indirectly rewarded the terrorists who seized the hostages and may have thereby encouraged future terrorist attacks against the United States. By attempting to keep the arms deal secret, these critics say he undermined democratic procedures and the credibility of the executive branch. At the time of his death, however, Reagan was widely agreed to have been one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history, who made conservatism mainstream and whose legacy continued long after his years in the White House. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.