ABSTRACT
Ronald Reagan’s historical renown rests on both his personal achievement and his political achievement. His personal achievement is that he was the first actor or, as he himself called it sarcastically, ‘ham’, in history to have become not only the leader of a state, but of the most powerful state at the time. It is said that Ronald Reagan, when asked on completing his degree in economics at the Eureka College, to which career he intended to devote his many gifts, answered unhesitatingly: ‘show business’. The period of Reagan’s official political activity stretches from 1 January 1967, when he was elected governor of California for two consecutive terms, to 1 January 1989, when he concluded his two-term presidency of the United States. ‘The Reagan Revolution required a full frontal assault on the American welfare state’ writes David Stockman. The pervasiveness of interdependence is as clearly illustrated in Reagan’s historical record as the moral of a fable.
