(born 1911) US president from 1981 to 1989. A second-tier Hollywood leading man, Ronald Reagan shifted from New Deal Democrat to anti-communist conservative while serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild during the McCarthy era. His first taste of political success came in 1964 when he made the most financially successful campaign commercial for Barry Goldwater. After the electoral debacle, Reagan replaced Goldwater as the voice of the Republican Party right wing.

In 1966 he was elected governor of California, running against Berkeley student radicals, civilrights militants and anti-Vietnam protesters. Over the next decade, Reagan used his base in California to build what became known as the New Right, a coalition of free-market libertarians, traditionalists and ideological anti-communists, augmented by evangelical Christians, neoconservative intellectuals and those voters, called Reagan Democrats, increasingly estranged from liberalism, which seemed less patriotic, more culturally deviant and more inclusive.

In the late 1970s, with stagflation and hostages dominating the news, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for the presidency. Reagan’s victory seemed to mark a conservative ascendancy—the Reagan Revolution—with international parallels, for example Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Reagan, supported by conservative Democrats, pushed through a 25 percent tax cut, significant cuts in social welfare spending, a host of de-regulatory measures and enormous increases in the military budget. He also introduced a new antiunion use of “replacement” workers, or scabs, in breaking the air-traffic controllers’ strike of 1981.

In foreign policy he countered calls for a nuclear freeze with his Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, which sought a costly hi-tech missile defense system. Reagan also funded a variety of efforts to combat left-wing governments in Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan, and radical movements in El Salvador and Angola. Yet, he would later astonish his hawkish advisors by exploring radical reductions in nuclear missiles with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.

In 1984, with the economy reviving, Reagan romped over Walter Mondale, carrying forty-nine states. But, soon after, the Iran-Contra scandal broke, revealing that his administration had exchanged missiles for the promise of help with hostages from Iran and, in addition, had used profits from the sales to illegally fund the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua. But with no “smoking gun,” Reagan himself escaped indictment.

Reagan’s legacy is part of the ongoing ideological war—s supporters claim that he restored US economic prosperity and won the Cold War. Critics note that Reaganomics: fueled massive federal deficits and a burdensome national debt; violated conservative fiscal commitments to balanced budgets in support of dubious “supply-side” notions; ravaged the social welfare safety net; turned the clock back to the nineteenth century with his Supreme Court appointments; and encouraged religious dogmatism, racial intolerance and an “era of greed.”