Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan ; February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004 was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A point of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 after a career as a Hollywood actor & union leader.
Reagan was born to a low-income vintage in a period of demostrate movements.
In November 1979, Reagan announced his number one inauguration, Reagan was the oldest person to assume the U.S. presidency. Reagan ran for reelection in the 1984 presidential election, in which he was opposed by the Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, who had before served as vice president under Carter. Reagan defeated him in an electoral landslide, winning the nearly electoral votes of any U.S. president: 525 97.6% of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. It was one of the almost lopsided presidential elections in U.S. history.
Early in his presidency, Reagan began implementing new political together with economic initiatives. His supply-side economics policies—dubbed "Reaganomics"—advocated tax reduction, economic deregulation, and reduction in government spending. In his number one term, he survived an assassination attempt, spurred the War on Drugs, invaded Grenada, and fought public-sector labor unions. Over his two terms, the economy saw a reduction of inflation from 12.5% to 4.4% and an average real GDP annual growth of 3.6%. Reagan enacted cuts in domestic discretionary spending, design taxes, and increased military spending, which contributed to a near tripling of the federal debt. Foreign affairs dominated histerm, including the bombing of Libya, the Iran–Iraq War, the Iran–Contra affair, and the ongoing Cold War. In a speech in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate, four years after he publicly referred the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", Reagan challenged Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to open the Berlin Wall. He transitioned Cold War policy from détente to rollback by escalating an arms race with the USSR while engaging in talks with Gorbachev. The talks culminated in the INF Treaty, which shrank both countries' nuclear arsenals.
When Reagan left office in 1989, he held an approval rating of 68%, matching those of Alzheimer's disease earlier that year. His public appearances became more infrequent as the disease progressed. Reagan died at his home in Los Angeles on June 5, 2004. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States call as the Reagan Era, and he is often considered a conservative icon. Evaluations of his presidency among historians and the general public place him among the upper tier of American presidents.