Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Main
president of United States
in full Ronald Wilson Reagan
born February 6, 1911, Tampico, Illinois, U.S.
died June 5, 2004, Los Angeles, California
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.
Early life and acting career
Reagan was the second child of John Edward (“Jack”) Reagan, a struggling
shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan. Reagan’s nickname, “Dutch,”
derived from his father’s habit of referring to his infant son as his
“fat little Dutchman.” After several years of moving from town to
town—made necessary in part because of Jack Reagan’s alcoholism, which
made it difficult for him to hold a job—the family settled in Dixon,
Illinois, in 1920. Despite their near poverty and his father’s drinking
problem, Reagan later recalled his childhood in Dixon as the happiest
period of his life. At Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, Reagan played
gridiron football and was active in the drama society but earned only
passing grades. A popular student, he was elected class president in his
senior year. Graduating in 1932 with a bachelor’s degree in economics
and sociology, he decided to enter radio broadcasting. He landed a job
as a sportscaster at station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, by delivering
entirely from memory an exciting play-by-play description of a Eureka
College football game. Later he moved to station WHO in Des Moines,
where, as sportscaster “Dutch Reagan,” he became popular throughout the
state for his broadcasts of Chicago Cubs baseball games. Because the
station could not afford to send him to Wrigley Field in Chicago, Reagan
was forced to improvise a running account of the games based on sketchy
details delivered over a teletype machine.
In 1937 Reagan followed the Cubs to their spring training camp in
southern California, a trip he undertook partly in order to try his hand
at movie acting. After a successful screen test at Warner Brothers, he
was soon typecast in a series of mostly B movies as a sincere,
wholesome, easygoing “good guy.” (As many observers have noted, the
characters that Reagan portrayed in the movies were remarkably like
Reagan himself.) During the next 27 years, he appeared in more than 50
films, notably including Knute Rockne—All American (1940), Kings Row
(1942), and The Hasty Heart (1950). In 1938, while filming Brother Rat,
Reagan became engaged to his costar Jane Wyman, and the couple married
in Hollywood two years later. They had a daughter, Maureen, in 1941 and
adopted a son, Michael, a few days after his birth in 1945. Their
marriage ended in divorce in 1948. Reagan was the only president to have
been divorced.
Commissioned a cavalry officer at the outbreak of World War II,
Reagan was assigned to an army film unit based in Los Angeles, where he
spent the rest of the war making training films. Although he never left
the country and never saw combat, he and Wyman cooperated with the
efforts of Warner Brothers to portray him as a real soldier to the
public, and in newsreels and magazine photos he acted out scenes of
“going off to war” and “coming home on leave.” After leaving Hollywood,
Reagan became known for occasionally telling stories about his
past—including stories about his happiness at “coming back from the
war”—that were actually based on fictional episodes in movies. Some of
Reagan’s detractors pointed to such lapses to suggest that he lacked a
basic interest in the truth and that he had trouble distinguishing
between reality and fantasy.
Reagan had absorbed the liberal Democratic opinions of his father and
became a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt after his election in 1932.
Reagan’s father eventually found work as an administrator in a New Deal
office established in the Dixon area, a fact that Reagan continued to
appreciate even after his political opinion of Roosevelt had
dramatically changed.
From 1947 to 1952 Reagan served as president of the union of movie
actors, the Screen Actors Guild. He fought against communist
infiltration in the guild, crossing picket lines to break the sometimes
violent strikes. (Such violence and chaos were abhorrent to Reagan, and,
when police and students clashed in Berkeley in May 1969, Reagan, as
governor of California, called out the National Guard to restore order.)
Much to the disgust of union members, he testified as a friendly witness
before the House Un-American Activities Committee and cooperated in the
blacklisting of actors, directors, and writers suspected of leftist
sympathies. Although Reagan was still a Democrat at the time (he
campaigned for Harry Truman in the presidential election of 1948), his
political opinions were gradually growing more conservative. After
initially supporting Democratic senatorial candidate Helen Douglas in
1950, he switched his allegiance to Republican Richard Nixon midway
through the campaign. He supported Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the
presidential elections of 1952 and 1956, and in 1960 he delivered 200
speeches in support of Nixon’s campaign for president against Democrat
John F. Kennedy. He officially changed his party affiliation to
Republican in 1962.
Reagan met Nancy Davis (Nancy Reagan), a relatively unknown actress,
at a dinner party in 1949, and the two were married in a simple ceremony
in 1952, at which actor William Holden was best man. The Reagans
appeared together in the war movie Hell Cats of the Navy in 1957. Nancy
Reagan’s conservative political views encouraged her husband’s drift to
the right.
After his acting career began to decline in the 1950s, Reagan became
the host of a television drama series, General Electric Theater, as well
as spokesman for the General Electric Company. In the latter capacity he
toured GE plants around the country, delivering inspirational speeches
with a generally conservative, pro-business message. Eventually,
however, his speeches became too controversial for the company’s taste,
and he was fired as both spokesman and television host in 1962.
Ronald Reagan
Governorship of California
Reagan campaigned actively for Nixon in his run for governor of
California in 1962 and supported the presidential candidacy of
conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, serving as cochairman
of California Republicans for Goldwater. In the last week of the
campaign, he delivered a 30-minute nationally televised address, “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.” Reagan’s
speech, which resulted in $1 million in campaign contributions for
Republican candidates (the most attributable to any political speech in
history), catapulted him onto the national political stage and made him
an instant hero of the Republican right.
Reagan announced his candidacy for governor of California in 1966.
The incumbent, Democrat Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown (who had defeated
Nixon’s challenge in 1962), ridiculed Reagan’s lack of experience,
declaring that while he (Brown) had been serving the public, Reagan was
making Bedtime for Bonzo, a 1951 movie in which Reagan starred with a
chimpanzee. But Reagan turned this apparent liability into an asset by
portraying himself as an ordinary citizen who was fed up with a state
government that had become inefficient and unaccountable. The public
also reacted well to Reagan’s personality, in particular to his apparent
genuineness, affability, and self-deprecating sense of humour. (When
asked by a reporter how he would perform in office, Reagan replied, “I
don’t know. I’ve never played a governor.”) Reagan won the election by
nearly one million votes. During his two terms as governor (1966–74),
Reagan erased a substantial budget deficit inherited from the Brown
administration (through the largest tax increase in the history of any
state to that time) and instituted reforms in the state’s welfare
programs. As some observers have noted, Reagan’s administrative style as
governor was essentially the same as the one he would later adopt as
president: he left most of the day-to-day business of government to
assistants and department heads, preferring to focus on larger issues of
policy and vision. Reagan followed a rigid schedule, which his aides
would prepare and type up for him daily.
Reagan made a halfhearted bid for the Republican presidential
nomination in 1968 as a favourite-son candidate, finishing third behind
Nixon and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. During his
remaining years as governor, he made plans for a more serious run for
the presidency, expecting that his chance would come in 1976, at the
anticipated end of Nixon’s second term. But Nixon’s resignation in 1974
put Vice President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office. Unwilling to wait
another eight years, Reagan challenged Ford with a blistering critique
of his policies and appointments but lost the nomination by 60 votes.
Election of 1980
Reagan dominated the Republican primary elections in 1980. Although his
strongest opponent, George Bush, won an upset victory in the Iowa
caucuses, Reagan bounced back after a notable performance in a debate
with other Republican candidates in Nashua, New Hampshire. The debate,
initially sponsored by a newspaper, was first extended to only Reagan
and Bush, but Reagan decided to pay for the debate and invite the rest
of the candidates. When all the candidates took the stage that evening,
the Bush team appeared surprised, and, as Reagan began to explain the
situation, the moderator from the newspaper instructed that Reagan’s
microphone be turned off. Reagan responded memorably with an angry line
he remembered from a Spencer Tracy movie: “I am paying for this
microphone!” Reagan went on to win New Hampshire and most of the other
major primaries and entered the convention with a commanding lead; he
won the nomination on the first ballot with 1,939 votes to 37 for John
Anderson and 13 for Bush, who had withdrawn from the contest before the
vote. After some tense and ultimately fruitless negotiations with
representatives of Ford, Reagan chose Bush as his running mate, and the
two men campaigned against Democratic incumbents Jimmy Carter and Walter
Mondale on a platform promising steep tax cuts, increased defense
spending, a balanced budget, and a constitutional amendment to ban
abortion.
Carter began the campaign in a vulnerable position. Inflation had
increased from 6 percent to more than 12 percent since his first year in
office, and unemployment and interest rates were also high. An even more
important factor than the economy, however, was Carter’s apparent
inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, which had continued for
almost a year at the time of the election. On November 4, 1979, a mob of
Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and taken the
diplomatic staff there hostage. In April 1980, after months of fruitless
negotiations with students and officials of Iran’s revolutionary
government (which had sanctioned the takeover), Carter ordered a
military rescue operation, which failed dramatically. The hostage crisis
contributed to a general public perception of the Carter administration
as weak and indecisive, and the failed rescue mission reinforced
Reagan’s charge that the Democrats had allowed the country’s military to
deteriorate badly. In their only debate of the campaign, Reagan
memorably reminded his national television audience of the country’s
economic problems by asking, “Are you better off now than you were four
years ago?” Carter, for his part, tried to make the most of Reagan’s
image among some of the electorate as an extremist and a warmonger,
charging that as president Reagan would eliminate cherished social
programs and threaten world peace. Reagan’s smiling response to such
charges—“There you go again” (a line he had practiced in preparation for
the debate)—did not directly address the point, but it did convey a
disarming image of sincerity, self-confidence, and friendliness, which
most voters found appealing. On election day Reagan defeated Carter and
John Anderson (who ran as an independent) with slightly more than half
the popular vote, against Carter’s 41 percent and Anderson’s 7 percent.
The vote in the electoral college was 489 to Carter’s 49.
Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan waving from the limousine during the
Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day, 1981
Presidency
First days
Reagan’s presidency began on a dramatic note when, after the inaugural
ceremony (see original text), he announced at a luncheon that Iran had
agreed to release the remaining American hostages. The timing of Iran’s
decision led to suspicions, which were never substantiated, that the
Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranians to prevent the
Carter administration from unveiling a so-called “October surprise”—the
release of the hostages in October 1980, before election day. Then, on
March 30, 1981, a deranged drifter named John W. Hinckley, Jr., fired
six shots from a .22-calibre revolver at Reagan as he left a Washington,
D.C., hotel. One of the bullets entered Reagan’s chest, puncturing a
lung and lodging one inch from his heart; another critically wounded
Press Secretary James Brady. Rushed to George Washington University
Hospital for emergency surgery, Reagan joked with doctors as he was
being wheeled into the operating room: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”
After his release 12 days later, Reagan made a series of carefully
staged public appearances designed to give the impression that he was
recovering quickly, though in fact he remained seriously weakened for
months and his workload was sharply curtailed.
In August 1981, 13,000 members of the national union of air traffic
controllers, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization
(PATCO)—one of the few unions to endorse Reagan in the 1980
election—walked off their jobs, demanding higher pay and better working
conditions. As federal employees, the PATCO members were forbidden by
law to strike, and Reagan, on the advice of Transportation Secretary
Drew Lewis, refused to negotiate and gave them 48 hours to return to
work. Most of the striking controllers ignored the ultimatum and were
promptly fired. Although the firings caused delays and reductions in air
traffic until replacements were hired and trained, the public generally
reacted positively to Reagan’s action, seeing it as a sign of
decisiveness and conviction. As he later wrote, it “convinced people who
might have thought otherwise that I meant what I said.”
Domestic policies
Following the so-called “supply-side” economic program he propounded in
his campaign, Reagan proposed massive tax cuts—30 percent reductions in
both individual and corporate income taxes over a three-year
period—which he believed would stimulate the economy and eventually
increase revenues from taxes as income levels grew. At the same time, he
proposed large increases in military expenditures ($1.5 trillion over a
five-year period) and significant cuts in “discretionary” spending on
social-welfare programs such as education, food stamps, low-income
housing, school lunches for poor children, Medicaid (the major program
of health insurance for the poor), and Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC). In 1981 Congress passed most of the president’s budget
proposals, though the tax cut was scaled back slightly, to 25 percent.
The results were mixed. A severe recession in 1982 pushed the
nation’s unemployment rate to nearly 11 percent, the highest it had been
since the Great Depression. Bankruptcies and farm foreclosures reached
record levels. The country’s trade deficit increased from $25 billion in
1980 to $111 billion in 1984. In addition, the huge increases in
military spending, combined with insufficient cuts in other programs,
produced massive budget deficits, the largest in the country’s history;
by the end of Reagan’s second term, the deficits would contribute to a
tripling of the national debt, to more than $2.5 trillion. In order to
address the deficit problem, Reagan backed away from strict supply-side
theories to support a $98.3 billion tax increase in 1982. By early 1983
the economy had begun to recover, and by the end of that year
unemployment and inflation were significantly reduced; they remained
relatively low in later years. Economic growth continued through the
remainder of Reagan’s presidency, a period that his supporters would
hail as “the longest peacetime expansion in American history.” Critics
charged that the tax cuts and the fruits of economic growth benefited
mainly the wealthy and that the gap between rich and poor had grown
wider.
In keeping with his aim of reducing the role of government in the
country’s economic life, Reagan cut the budgets of many government
departments and relaxed or ignored the enforcement of laws and
regulations administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, and
the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, among other
agencies. After the administration and Congress reduced regulations
governing the savings and loan industry in the early 1980s, many savings
institutions expanded recklessly through the decade and eventually
collapsed, requiring bailouts by the federal government that cost
taxpayers some $500 billion.
During his tenure in office, Reagan appointed more than half the
federal judiciary and three new justices of the Supreme Court: Sandra
Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, Anthony
Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia. He also elevated William Rehnquist to chief
justice in 1986 upon the retirement of Warren Burger.
Foreign affairs
When he entered office in 1980, Reagan believed that the United States
had grown weak militarily and had lost the respect it once commanded in
world affairs. Aiming to restore the country to a position of moral as
well as military preeminence in the world, he called for massive
increases in the defense budget to expand and modernize the military and
urged a more aggressive approach to combating communism and related
forms of leftist totalitarianism.
Relations with the Soviet Union
Reagan’s militant anticommunism, combined with his penchant for harsh
anti-Soviet rhetoric, was one of many factors that contributed to a
worsening of relations with the Soviet Union in the first years of his
presidency. 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.”
(The Soviets responded by saying that Reagan’s remarks showed that his
administration “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose,
lunatic anticommunism.”) The behaviour of the Soviet Union itself also
strained relations—especially in December 1981, when the communist
government of Poland, under intense pressure from Moscow, imposed
martial law on the country to suppress the independent labour movement
Solidarity; and in September 1983, when the Soviets shot down a Korean
airliner en route from Alaska to Seoul as it strayed over strategically
sensitive territory on Sakhalin Island. All 269 people aboard were
killed, including 61 Americans. Reagan’s massive military spending
program, the largest in American peacetime history, was undoubtedly
another factor, though some observers argued that the buildup—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. Although Reagan never abandoned his support
for SDI, it was eventually reconceived as a much smaller and more
conventional defensive system than the one he originally proposed.
U.S.-Soviet relations improved considerably during Reagan’s second
term, not least because Reagan softened his anticommunist rhetoric and
adopted a more encouraging tone toward the changes then taking place in
the Soviet Union. At a dramatic summit meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland, in
October 1986, Gorbachev proposed a 50 percent reduction in the nuclear
arsenals of each side, and for a time it seemed as though a historic
agreement would be reached. Although the summit ended in failure owing
to differences over SDI, it was followed up in December 1987 by a treaty
eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) on European soil.
The INF Treaty was the first arms-control pact to require an actual
reduction in nuclear arsenals rather than merely restricting their
proliferation.
Ronald Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the
Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987.
The Middle East and Central America
Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Reagan
dispatched 800 Marines to join an international force to oversee the
evacuation of Palestinian guerrillas from West Beirut, then surrounded
by Israeli troops. After Israel withdrew its troops from the Beirut area
in September 1983, the Marine contingent remained—along with forces from
Italy, France, and Britain—to protect the fragile Lebanese government,
thereby identifying itself with one of the factions in the country’s
long and bloody civil war, which had begun in 1975. On the morning of
October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives
into the Marine compound at the Beirut airport, killing 241 Marines and
wounding 100 others. Although later investigations blamed the Marine
chain of command for poor security at the base and “serious errors in
judgment,” Reagan decided to accept full blame for the tragedy himself,
saying that the Marine commanders had “suffered enough.” Reagan withdrew
the Marines from Lebanon in February 1984.
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, Prime Minister
Maurice Bishop was deposed and executed in a bloody coup by radical
elements of his leftist New Jewel Movement. Less than a week later, and
only one day after the bombing of the Marine compound in Lebanon, Reagan
ordered an invasion, which he justified as necessary to prevent the
country from becoming a dangerous Soviet outpost and to protect American
students at the medical school there. Joined by a contingent of troops
from neighbouring Caribbean countries, U.S. forces quickly subdued
elements of the Grenadan army and a small number of Cuban soldiers and
construction workers. Critics immediately charged that the
administration had staged the invasion to divert public attention from
the bombing in Lebanon.
In January 1986 Reagan announced the imposition of economic sanctions
on Libya and froze the country’s assets in the United States, charging
the Libyan government of General Muammar al-Qaddafi with sponsoring acts
of international terrorism, including the December 1985 attacks on
offices of the Israeli airline El Al in Rome and Vienna. In March a U.S.
Navy task force conducted “freedom of navigation” exercises in the Gulf
of Sidra, beyond the self-proclaimed territorial boundary Libya called
the “Line of Death.” Libya fired antiaircraft missiles at American
warplanes, and the United States responded with attacks on Libyan ships
and missile installations. Then, on April 5, two people, including an
American serviceman, were killed by a bomb explosion in a discotheque in
West Berlin. Blaming Libya, the United States carried out retaliatory
bombing raids on “terrorist-related targets” in Libya on April 14–15,
including an attack on Qaddafi’s residential compound in Tripoli.
In keeping with Reagan’s belief that the United States should do more
to prevent the spread of communism, his administration expanded military
and economic assistance to friendly Third World governments battling
leftist insurgencies, and he actively supported guerrilla movements and
other opposition forces in countries with leftist governments. This
policy, which became known as the Reagan Doctrine, was applied with
particular zeal in Latin America. During the 1980s the United States
supported military-dominated governments in El Salvador in a bloody
civil war with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente
Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional; FMLN), providing the
country with some $4 billion in military and economic aid and helping to
organize and train elite units of the Salvadoran army. In Nicaragua,
following the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship by the Sandinista
National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional;
FSLN) in 1979, the Sandinista government strengthened its ties to Cuba
and other countries of the socialist bloc, a move that the Reagan
administration regarded as a threat to the national security of the
United States. In 1981 Reagan authorized $20 million to recruit and
train a band of anti-Sandinista guerrillas, many of whom were former
supporters of Somoza, to overthrow the Sandinista government. Numbering
about 15,000 by the mid-1980s, the “Contras,” as they came to be called,
were never a serious military threat to the Sandinistas, though they did
cause millions of dollars in damage to the Nicaraguan economy through
their attacks on farms and cooperatives, infrastructure, and other
civilian targets. Using its influence in international lending agencies
such as the World Bank, the United States was able to block most
Nicaraguan loan requests from 1982, and in 1985 the administration
declared a trade embargo. These measures, combined with Contra attacks
and the Sandinista’s own mismanagement, effectively undermined the
Nicaraguan economy by the end of the 1980s.
The Iran-Contra Affair
At the time of the presidential election of 1984, Reagan was at the
height of his popularity. Using slogans such as “It’s morning in
America” and “America is back,” his reelection campaign emphasized the
country’s economic prosperity and its renewed leadership role in world
affairs. On election day Reagan and Bush easily defeated their
Democratic opponents, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, by 59
percent to 41 percent of the popular vote; in the electoral college
Reagan received 525 votes to Mondale’s 13, the largest number of
electoral votes of any candidate in history. With most of the country
behind him, Reagan’s prospects in his second term appeared bright. Only two years
later, however, he would become embroiled in the worst scandal of his
political career, one that would cost him much popular and party support
and significantly impair his ability to lead the country.
In early November 1985, at the suggestion of the head of the National
Security Council (NSC), William (“Bud”) McFarlane, Reagan authorized a
secret initiative to sell antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Iran in
exchange for that country’s help in securing the release of Americans
held hostage by terrorist groups in Lebanon. The initiative directly
contradicted the administration’s publicly stated policy of refusing to
negotiate with terrorists or to aid countries—such as Iran—that
supported international terrorism. News of the arms-for-hostages deal,
first made public in November 1986 (only one month after Reagan ordered
raids on Libya in retaliation for its alleged involvement in the Berlin
bombing), proved intensely embarrassing to the president. Even more
damaging, however, was the announcement later that month by Attorney
General Edwin Meese that a portion of the $48 million earned from the
sales had been diverted to a secret fund to purchase weapons and
supplies for the Contras in Nicaragua. The diversion was undertaken by
an obscure NSC aide, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,
with the approval of McFarlane’s successor at the NSC, Rear Admiral John
Poindexter. (North, as it was later revealed, had also engaged in
private fund-raising for the Contras.) These activities constituted a
violation of a law passed by Congress in 1984 (the second Boland
Amendment) that forbade direct or indirect American military aid to the
Contra insurgency.
In response to the crisis, by this time known as the Iran-Contra
Affair, Reagan fired both North and Poindexter and appointed a special
commission, headed by former senator John Tower of Texas (the Tower
Commission), to investigate the matter. An independent counsel, Judge
Lawrence Walsh, was also appointed, and the House and Senate began joint
hearings to examine both the arms sales and the military assistance to
the Contras. As a result of Walsh’s investigations, North and Poindexter
were convicted on charges of obstructing justice and related offenses,
but their convictions were overturned on appeal, on the ground that
testimony given at their trials had been influenced by information they
had supplied to Congress under a limited grant of immunity. Reagan
accepted responsibility for the arms-for-hostages deal but denied any
knowledge of the diversion. Although no evidence came to light to
indicate that he was more deeply involved, many in Congress and the
public remained skeptical. Nevertheless, most of the public eventually
appeared willing to forgive him for whatever they thought he had done,
and his popularity, which had dropped dramatically during the first
months of the crisis, gradually recovered.
Retirement and declining health
In the presidential election of 1988, Reagan campaigned actively for the
Republican nominee, Vice President Bush. In large part because of
Reagan’s continued popularity, Bush defeated Democratic candidate
Michael Dukakis by 53 percent to 46 percent in the popular vote; the
vote in the electoral college was 426 to 111. Reagan retired to his home
in Los Angeles, where he wrote his autobiography, An American Life
(1990). In 1994, in a letter to the American people, Reagan disclosed
that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer disease, a degenerative brain
disorder.
To some observers Reagan’s declining health had been evident for many
years. Mindful of her husband’s diminished capacity, Nancy Reagan
occasionally would screen him from the press by intercepting reporters’
questions and then whispering an appropriate response in his ear.
Reagan’s health problems made public appearances difficult for the
former president, but his popularity hardly waned. 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, and his administration had experienced its share of scandals
and disappointments. 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, however fleetingly, the
country’s confidence in itself and its faith in a better tomorrow.
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