Ronald Reagan: “Evil Empire” Speech

About the Author

Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, into a poor family that moved several times before settling in Dixon, Illinois. Despite the hardships of his youth, Reagan developed a strong sense of optimism that he carried with him throughout his life. His mother, a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taught him that everything occurred according to God's plan. Reagan graduated from Eureka College in 1932, when the Great Depression was most severe, yet he still found a job as a sports announcer at a radio station in Davenport, Iowa. Sports announcing soon allowed Reagan to embark on a movie career. In 1937, he signed a contract with Warner Bros. Pictures, and he gave solid performances mainly in what were then called B movies: low-budget films that were the second halves of the double features that commonly played in theaters. Between April 1942 and December 1945, Reagan served in the Army Air Forces, making official films connected to the U.S. war effort during World War II.

After the war, as his film career declined, Reagan became involved in politics. Between 1947 and 1952, he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union representing performers in film and television. As the cold war emerged and fears about Communist influence in the motion picture industry rose, Reagan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and provided names of alleged Communists to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although he had been a liberal Democrat, his politics became more conservative, especially after he began working for General Electric in 1954. He was the host of the weekly television drama series General Electric Theater, and he also spoke at General Electric plants around the country. His talks became increasingly political, and he developed a few basic ideas that shaped his thinking on public issues for the rest of his life. He denounced high taxes; he believed that the government had grown so big that it interfered too much in the economy and undermined personal responsibility; and he called for stronger efforts to stop the spread of international Communism. In 1962, he registered as a Republican. Two years later, he gave a famous speech in support of the Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater.

After Goldwater's defeat, Reagan made his first run for political office, winning the governorship of California in 1966 by appealing to voter discontent with rising crime rates, urban riots, and anti–Vietnam War protests. In 1975, at the end of his second term, Reagan left the governor's mansion and challenged President Gerald R. Ford for the Republican nomination for president. Ford won a narrow victory over Reagan but lost the election to Jimmy Carter. Four years later, Reagan easily secured his party's nomination and overwhelmed Carter in November.

As president, Reagan proposed sweeping changes in both domestic and foreign policy. Reagan's first priority when he took office on January 20, 1981, was to lift the nation's economy out of stagflation, a severe and persistent combination of high inflation and unemployment. Believing that government was the source of the nation's economic problems, not the solution to them, Reagan secured cuts in income tax rates, reductions in federal economic regulations, and decreases in the rate of spending on social welfare programs. Although the economy fell in 1981 into a severe recession that lasted through 1982, it recovered the following year, with inflation falling to its lowest level in more than a decade. Reagan also made drastic changes in national security policies. He secured sharp increases in defense spending, which he said were necessary to protect against Soviet efforts to gain power and influence around the world. Reagan easily won reelection in 1984, and his second term witnessed a remarkable improvement in Soviet-American relations after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow in 1985. Reagan and Gorbachev held several meetings, established a cooperative relationship, negotiated important treaties, and made progress in ending the cold war. Despite the notorious Iran-Contra scandal over the provision of arms to secure the release of hostages in the Middle East and the illegal support of counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, Reagan left office a popular president in January 1989. He died of complications related to Alzheimer's disease on June 5, 2004.