Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan moved from radio sports commentary and Hollywood films into politics, serving as governor of California and then as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. His tax cuts, military build-up and hard line against the Soviet Union, followed by arms-control deals with Mikhail Gorbachev, made him the defining figure of American conservatism in the late 20th century and a central player in the final decade of the Cold War.

Reagan was born on 6 February 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, and grew up mainly in Dixon. After graduating from Eureka College in 1932, he became a radio sports announcer in Iowa, recreating baseball games from wire reports. A screen test in 1936 won him a contract with Warner Bros., and he went on to appear in 53 films, most memorably Knute Rockne, All American (1940), source of his nickname "the Gipper", and Kings Row (1942). Severely short-sighted, he spent the Second World War in the United States, making army training films. He was twice president of the Screen Actors Guild, and in the 1950s hosted General Electric Theater on television.

Reagan began as a New Deal Democrat but moved steadily to the right, joining the Republicans in 1962. A televised speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964, "A Time for Choosing", made him a conservative star. Elected governor of California in 1966 with 58 per cent of the vote, he raised taxes to close a deficit, cracked down on student protests at Berkeley and pursued welfare reform. He narrowly lost the 1976 Republican nomination to Gerald Ford, then in 1980, amid high inflation and the Iran hostage crisis, defeated President Jimmy Carter, carrying 44 states.

Reagan took office on 20 January 1981 declaring that government was the problem, not the solution. He survived being shot by John Hinckley Jr. that March. His 1981 tax act sharply cut income tax rates, and he fired some 12,000 striking air traffic controllers, a blow to organised labour. A deep recession, with unemployment reaching 10.8 per cent in late 1982, gave way to a long expansion, and inflation fell from about 12 to under 5 per cent. But military spending soared, the national debt roughly tripled, and inequality grew. Critics also fault his slow response to AIDS.

Reagan rejected détente. He built up the armed forces, backed by allies such as Margaret Thatcher, deployed new missiles in Western Europe, called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in 1983 and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile shield nicknamed "Star Wars". Under what became known as the Reagan Doctrine he backed anti-communist forces, from the Afghan mujahideen to the Contras in Nicaragua, an approach criticised for overlooking abuses by allies. In 1983 he ordered the invasion of Grenada, and in 1986 he ordered air strikes on Libya. He won re-election in 1984 with 49 states.

In November 1986 it emerged that his administration had secretly sold missiles to Iran in hopes of freeing American hostages in Lebanon, and that profits had been diverted to the Contras despite a congressional ban. The Tower Commission found no conclusive proof that Reagan knew of the diversion, but the scandal badly damaged him. Meanwhile, after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the two leaders held four summits from 1985 to 1988. At Berlin in June 1987 Reagan urged Gorbachev to "tear down this wall", and that December they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated both sides' medium- and shorter-range missiles.

Reagan left office in January 1989 still popular. In 1994 he announced that he had Alzheimer's disease, and he died in Los Angeles on 5 June 2004. Historians broadly credit him with reviving conservatism and with a share in ending the Cold War, though they weigh his role against Gorbachev's reforms and the Soviet Union's own weaknesses; critics stress the deficits and widening inequality of the period.

Our 1985 map shows the United States and the Cold War blocs during his presidency; by the 1994 map the Soviet Union had broken apart.