Reagan years in review
But the lavish praise obscures that much of Reagan's record through eight years in office was highly controversial and intensified social and political divisions. Even now, nearly 16 years after he left office, some major interest groups and key voting blocs most adversely affected by Reagan policies remain bitter about his legacy.
The controversies and scandals included attacks on the federal school-lunch program and aid to the poor, anti-union tactics, the illegal sale of arms to Iran and Reagan's 1985 participation in a ceremony at a German cemetery where Nazi soldiers are buried.
No group may have chafed more at Reagan's policies and views than African Americans, who assailed the president for opposing racial quotas and for supporting tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, a Southern school.
"He was hostile to the generally accepted remedies for discrimination," said Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and a longtime civil-rights activist. "His appointments were of people as equally hostile. I can't think of any Reagan policy that African Americans would embrace."
The former actor and California governor offended blacks when he kicked off his 1980 general election campaign by promoting "states rights" — once southern code for segregation — in Philadelphia, Miss., scene of the murder of three civil-rights workers 16 years before.
Early in his first term, Reagan ordered some of his toughest budget cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children and other "means tested" programs that were critical to large numbers of lower-income black families. Until a public protest forced Reagan to back away, his Agriculture Department sought to cut the school-lunch program and redefine ketchup and relish as vegetables.
There were other controversies.
Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 after they staged a work stoppage, and he appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board who were hostile to union organizing. His interior secretary, James Watt, and senior Environmental Protection Agency officials infuriated environmentalists by assaulting safeguards and aggressively attempting to open public lands in the West to developers. Reagan, during his 1980 campaign, blamed trees for emitting 93 percent of the nation's nitrogen-oxide pollution — giving rise to jokes about "killer trees."
The combination of a huge "supply-side" tax cut, a historic military buildup and a painful two-year recession produced huge budget deficits and a nearly tripling of the national debt that drained resources from social programs.
The administration also showed indifference to an emerging AIDS crisis: By the time Reagan delivered his first speech on the epidemic in May 1988, about eight months before he left office, more than 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease and 20,849 had died.
Reaganomics failed to reduce the deficit, but the combined policies of the administration and the Federal Reserve Board helped usher in the longest peacetime economic expansion since the end of World War II — a nearly eight-year boom that made many people rich.
Reagan's June 12, 1987, speech at the Brandenburg Gate calling on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down" the Berlin Wall has been widely seen as the apogee of his moral leadership abroad. But even his top aides considered his decision to go to a German military cemetery two years earlier as the nadir.
Ignoring pleas from Jewish leaders and numerous liberal and conservative thinkers, Reagan attended a commemorative ceremony in Bitburg where 49 soldiers of the Waffen SS were among the 2,000 buried. The White House insisted the president had no choice but to honor the invitation of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Perhaps Reagan's greatest legacy was in helping accelerate an end to the Cold War and the Soviet Union's eventual collapse. He was an outspoken anti-communist who described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," yet he forged productive relations with the reform-minded Gorbachev. The stagnant Soviet system had been in decline for decades, and it came under additional pressure from Reagan's defense buildup and deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe, and the CIA-backed mujahedeen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Ten months after Reagan left office, the German people dismantled the Berlin Wall. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev stepped down and the Soviet Union and the Cold War passed into history. Some historians credit Reagan with providing the critical push that that finally led to the toppling of the Soviets.
Overall, however, the "Reagan Doctrine" of aiding anti-communist insurrections had mixed — and in some cases, catastrophic — long-term results.
Following in the footsteps of the Democratic Carter administration, Reagan surreptitiously supported mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan in their battle against occupying Soviet forces. As part of that initiative, the CIA supported Muslim radicals from other Islamic countries. One of the first non-Afghan volunteers to join the ranks of the mujahedeen was Osama bin Laden.
Reagan pursued another foreign policy initiative that later proved highly damaging to U.S. interests in the post- Sept. 11, 2001, era. Fearing that Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the shah and taken U.S. diplomats hostage might overrun the Middle East and its oil fields, the Reagan administration for five years provided military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of munitions to Iraq's armies in support of Saddam Hussein's war with Iran. The administration ignored Iraq's use of chemical weapons and treated Saddam's regime as the lesser of two evils.
The Reagan years were marred by scandals involving Watt and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver. But the most damaging was known as Iran-contra.
The administration in 1984 secretly sold arms to Iran — which the United States considered a supporter of terrorism — to raise cash for the Nicaraguan contras, despite a congressional ban on support for the Latin American insurgency.
An independent investigation concluded that the arms sales to Iran operations "were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan (and) Vice President George Bush," and that "large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld."
Fourteen officials were criminally charged and 11 convicted, although many were later pardoned. Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel who ran the inquiry, said there was "no credible evidence" that Reagan himself broke the law, but he set the stage for the illegal activities of others. Impeachment, Walsh said, "certainly should have been considered."
Watt resigned his cabinet post after a series of controversies, including the uproar that followed his portrayal of five members of an advisory panel as "every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."
On Sept. 23, 1988, Deaver was sentenced to three years' probation and fined $100,000 for lying to a congressional subcommittee and federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after he left his White House post.