Ronald Reagan Born: The Great Communicator Arrives

Ronald Reagan was fifty-five when he was elected governor of California, his first political office. He'd spent the previous decade giving a single speech, refined over hundreds of corporate appearances for General Electric, called "A Time for Choosing." It was about freedom and government overreach, and he gave it with such conviction that conservatives began to see him as more than a spokesman. The speech, televised in support of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, raised more money than any political broadcast in history at that point. Born in Tampico, Illinois on February 6, 1911, Reagan grew up in a series of small towns, the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman and a devoutly religious mother. He worked as a lifeguard, a radio sportscaster, and a Hollywood actor, appearing in over fifty films without ever becoming a top-tier star. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild during the Red Scare and cooperated with the FBI in identifying suspected communists in the film industry, a period he rarely discussed afterward. He won the governorship of California in 1966 and the presidency in 1980, defeating Jimmy Carter in a landslide. He was 69, the oldest person elected president at the time. Two months into his first term, John Hinckley Jr. shot him outside the Washington Hilton. The bullet lodged an inch from his heart. He joked with surgeons: "I hope you're all Republicans." His presidency cut taxes dramatically, tripled the national debt from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion, and presided over the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. He fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, breaking the PATCO union and sending a signal about federal labor relations that lasted decades. His administration's response to the AIDS crisis was late and inadequate; he didn't publicly address the epidemic until 1987, by which time over 20,000 Americans had died. He negotiated arms reduction treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev and left office in 1989 with approval ratings above 60 percent. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994 and died on June 5, 2004, at 93.