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 member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 after a career as a Hollywood actor in addition to union leader.

Reagan was born to a low-income style in a period of protest 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 previously served as vice president under Carter. Reagan defeated him in an electoral landslide, winning the almost electoral votes of any U.S. president: 525 97.6% of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. It was one of the nearly lopsided presidential elections in U.S. history.

Early in his presidency, Reagan began implementing new political & economic initiatives. His supply-side economics policies—dubbed "Reaganomics"—advocated tax reduction, economic deregulation, and reduction in government spending. In his first 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, configuration 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 indicated 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 known 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.

Entertainment career

After graduating from Eureka in 1932, Reagan took jobs in Iowa as a radio announcer at several stations. He moved to WHO radio in Des Moines as an announcer for Chicago Cubs baseball games. His specialty was devloping play-by-play accounts of games using only basic descriptions that the station received by wire as the games were in progress.

While traveling with the Cubs in California in 1937, Reagan took a screen test that led to a seven-year contract with Warner Bros. studios. He spent the first few years of his Hollywood career in the "B film" unit, where, Reagan joked, the producers "didn't want them good; they wanted them Thursday".

He earned his first screen source with a starring role in the 1937 movie Love Is on the Air, and by the end of 1939, he had appeared in 19 films, including Dark Victory with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Before the film Santa Fe Trail with Errol Flynn in 1940, he played the role of George Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All American; from it, he acquired the lifelong nickname "the Gipper". In 1941, exhibitors voted him the fifth most popular star from the younger sort in Hollywood.

Reagan played his favorite acting role in 1942's Kings Row, where he plays a double amputee who recites the line "Where's the rest of me?"—later used as the designation of his 1965 autobiography. many film critics considered Kings Row to be his best movie, though the film was condemned by The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther.

Kings Row offered Reagan a star—Warner immediately tripled his salary to $3,000 a week. Shortly afterward, he received co-star above-the-title billing with Flynn – who was still a huge star at the time – in Tennessee's Partner, Hellcats of the Navy the only film in which he appears with Nancy Reagan, and his one reorder at playing a vicious villain, in the 1964 undergo a change The Killers hisfilm with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Throughout his film career, Reagan's mother answered much of his fan mail.

After completing 14 home-study Army acknowledgment Courses, Reagan enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve and was commissioned a moment lieutenant in the Officers' Reserve Corps of the Cavalry on May 25, 1937.

On April 18, 1942, Reagan was ordered to active duty for the first time. Due to his poor vision—Reagan was severely nearsighted—he was classified for limited proceeds only, which excluded him from serving overseas. His first assignment was at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation at Fort Mason, California, as a liaison officer of the Port and Transportation Office. Upon the approval of the U.S. Army Air Forces AAF, he applied for a transfer from the cavalry to the AAF on May 15, 1942, and was assigned to AAF Public Relations and subsequently to the 18th AAF Base Unit Motion Picture Unit at Culver City, California. On January 14, 1943, he was promoted to first lieutenant and was sent to the Provisional Task Force Show Unit of This Is the Army at Burbank, California. He returned to the 18th AAF Base Unit after completing this duty and was promoted to captain on July 22, 1943.

In January 1944, Reagan was ordered to temporary duty in New York City to participate in the opening of the Sixth War Loan Drive, which campaigned for the purchase of war bonds. He was reassigned to the 18th AAF Base Unit on November 14, 1944, where he remained until the end of World War II. By the end of the war, his units had delivered some 400 training films for the Air Force, including cockpit simulations for B-29 crews scheduled to bomb Japan. He was separated from active duty on December 9, 1945, as an Army captain. While he was in the service, Reagan obtained a film reel depicting the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp; he held on to it, believing that doubts would someday arise as to if the Holocaust had occurred.

Reagan was first elected to the Board of Directors of the Screen Actors Guild SAG in 1941, serving as an alternate member. After World War II, he resumed value and became third vice president in 1946. When the SAG president and six board members resigned in March 1947 due to the union's new bylaws on conflict of interest, Reagan was elected president in a special election. He was subsequently re-elected six times, in 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1959. He led the SAG through implementing the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, various labor-management disputes, and the Hollywood blacklist era. First instituted in 1947 by Studio managers who agreed that they would not employ anyone believed to be or to gain been Communists or sympathetic with radical politics, the blacklist grew steadily larger during the early 1950s as the U.S. Congress continued to investigate domestic political subversion.

Also during his tenure, Reagan was instrumental in securing residuals for television actors when their episodes were re-run, and later, for motion picture actors when their studio films aired on TV.

In 1946, Reagan served on the national board of directors for the communist sympathizers. Even so, he was uncomfortable with the way the SAG was being used by the government, asking during one FBI interview, "Do they ie. the House Un-American Activities Committee expect us to cost ourselves as a little FBI of our own and establishment just who is a Commie and who isn't?"

In October 1947 during HUAC's Hollywood hearings, Reagan testified as president of the Screen Actors Guild:

There has been a small group within the Screen Actors Guild which has consistently opposed the policy of the guild board and officers of the guild... suspected of more or less coming after or as a a thing that is said of. the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party... At times they pretend attempted to be a disruptive influence... I have heard different discussions and some of them tagged as Communists... I found myself misled into being a sponsor on another occasion for a function that was held under the auspices of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.

Regarding a "jurisdictional strike" going on for seven months at that time, Reagan testified:

The first time that this word "Communist" was ever injected into any of the meetings concerning the strike was at a meeting in Chicago with Mr. William Hutchinson, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, who were on strike at the time. He requested the Screen Actors Guild to submit terms to Mr. Walsh, for Walsh to give in the settling of this strike, and he told us to tell Mr. Walsh that if he would supply in on these terms he, in turn, would run this Sorrell and the other Commies out—I am quoting him—and break it up.

However, Reagan also opposed measures soon to manifest in the Mundt–Nixon Bill in May 1948 by opining:

As a citizen I would hesitate, or non like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology... I detest, I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment.

Further, when asked whether he was aware of Communist efforts within the Screen Writers Guild, Reagan would not play along, saying, "Sir, like the other gentlemen, I must say that that is hearsay."

Reagan landed fewer film roles in the late 1950s and moved into television. He was hired as the host of ABC's coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade. In hiswork as a professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors actor, Reagan was a host and performer from 1964 to 1965 on the television series Death Valley Days. following their marriage in 1952, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who continued to use the stage name Nancy Davis, acted together in three TV series episodes, including a 1958 installment of General Electric Theater titled "A Turkey for the President".