Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989 and became a highly influential voice of modern conservatism. Before his presidency, he was a Hollywood actor and union leader before serving as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975.
Reagan was raised in a poor family in a small town of northern Illinois. He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and worked as a radio sports commentator. After moving to California in 1937, he started acting and starred in a few major productions. As president of the "Screen Actors Guild", Reagan worked to remove communist influence in Hollywood. In the 1950s, he moved into television and was a motivational speaker at General Electric factories. In 1964, his speech "A Time for Choosing" earned him national attention as a new conservative spokesman. With his new-found support, Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966.
In 1980, Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination and defeated Jimmy Carter. Reagan was re-elected in 1984, winning 58% of the national popular vote and losing only Washington, D.C. and his opponent Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota, in one of the greatest landslide victories in American history.
Immediately after taking office as president, Reagan began new political and economic ideas. Reagan won enough conservative Democrats to pass his program through Congress. Reagan promised that his new economic policies, known as "Reaganomics", would turn around the economy. Over both of his terms, the economy saw a reduction of inflation from 12% to 4% and an average GDP growth of 3%. His administration saw the longest period of economic growth in peacetime American history up to that point, lasting 92 months. Reagan, in his first term, survived an assassination attempt, continued the War on Drugs, and fought public sector labor unions.
With the economy booming again, foreign affair crises dominated his second term. Major concerns were the bombing of Libya, the "Iran-Iraq" War and the renewed Cold War. In June 1987, four years after he publicly called the Soviet Union an "evil empire", Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!", during a speech at the Berlin Wall. He transitioned Cold War policy and engaged in talks with Gorbachev, which shrank both countries' nuclear arsenals.
Reagan said in November 1994 that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He died at home on June 5, 2004. He remains an icon among conservatives.