Ronald W Reagan

Encyclopædia Britannica


40th president of the United States (1981–89), noted for his conservative Republicanism, his fervent anticommunism, and his appealing personal style, characterized by a jaunty affability and folksy charm. The only movie actor ever to become president, he had a remarkable skill as an orator that earned him the title “the Great Communicator.” His policies have been credited with contributing to the demise of Soviet communism.

… [A former Democrat,] he delivered a 30-minute nationally televised address [in the last week of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign], “A Time for Choosing,” that The Washington Post described as “the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his 'Cross of Gold' speech.”

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… At his first press conference as president, Reagan audaciously questioned the legitimacy of the Soviet government; two years later, in a memorable speech in Florida, he denounced the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” … [Observers argued that] Reagan's massive military spending program, the largest in American peacetime history, … — through the strain it imposed on the Soviet economy — was actually responsible for a host of positive developments in Reagan's second term, including a more accommodating Soviet position in arms negotiations, a weakening of the influence of hard-liners in the Soviet leadership, making possible the glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) policies of moderate Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after 1985, and even the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1990–91.

A significant component of Reagan's military buildup was his 1983 proposal for a space-based missile defense system that would use lasers and other as-yet-undeveloped killing technologies to destroy incoming Soviet nuclear missiles well before they could reach their targets in the United States. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars” after the popular science-fiction movie of the late 1970s, was denounced by the Soviets, including Gorbachev, as a dangerous escalation of the arms race, a position also taken by many critics at home. Meanwhile, others argued that the project was technologically impossible and potentially a “black hole” in the country's defense budget. In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared for and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan.

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… National Airport in Washington, D.C., was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport by Congress and President Bill Clinton in February 1998. Reagan's conservative policies and heated rhetoric had always infuriated liberals…. But to his millions of fans and political admirers, this tribute was the least the government could do for the man who had helped to end the Cold War and restored … the country's confidence in itself and its faith in a better tomorrow.