Ronald Reagan

On this day in 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois. Reagan went on to fame as a Hollywood actor, and as the 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989.

“Reagan is described as 'delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique'.”
― H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life

In his new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the twentieth century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how the confident force of Reagan’s personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today. Reagan follows young Ronald Reagan as his ambition for ever larger stages compelled him to leave behind small-town Illinois to become first a radio announcer and then that quintessential public figure of modern America, a movie star. When his acting career stalled, his reinvention as the voice of The General Electric Theater on television made him an unlikely spokesman for corporate America. Then began Reagan’s improbable political ascension, starting in the 1960s, when he was first elected governor of California, and culminating in his election in 1980 as president of the United States. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/220029/reagan/