June 6, 2004

BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, whose career glided with apparent ease from Hollywood stardom to the White House, died Saturday.

He was 93.

The only native Illinoisan elected president, Mr. Reagan exuded a folksy charm and warm humor that delighted supporters and infuriated opponents. A former corporate spokesman, he embraced big business and was a staunch opponent of communism and the Soviet Union, which he famously dubbed the ''evil empire.''

''The Great Communicator'' never lost an election. When he left the White House in 1989, public opinion polls showed him to be the most popular president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, Mr. Reagan also had his impassioned detractors, who dubbed him ''the Teflon president,'' for his ability to deflect criticism, and found his immense charm hollow in the face of his policies regarding Central America, AIDS, the environment and defense expenditures.

Mr. Reagan was the nation's oldest president -- just two weeks shy of his 78th birthday when he left office -- and he suffered from Alzheimer's disease in recent years that kept him mostly out of the public eye, though his name and legacy were invoked at the 1996 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, above a bakery in tiny Downstate Tampico, the second son of Nelle and John Reagan. His father, a shoe salesman, was also an alcoholic, and more than one historian has suggested that Mr. Reagan developed his relentless cheeriness as a defense against his father's frequent drunken lapses.

His family moved around frequently. Briefly, as an infant, he lived on the South Side of Chicago, and then in Galesburg, Monmouth and back in Tampico. When he was 9, his family moved to Dixon, where he went to high school.

Mr. Reagan graduated in the class of 1928. ''Life is just one grand sweet song,'' his yearbook caption read, ''so start the music.''

He went to Eureka College on a partial football scholarship. There, he became active in student politics and was elected student body president.

He graduated in 1932, with a degree in sociology and economics. The same year, he was hired as a sports announcer for WOC in Davenport, Iowa. He worked his way to WHO in Des Moines and became a local celebrity for his broadcasts reconstructing games from telegraph reports.

In 1937, Mr. Reagan took a screen test, and Warner Bros. offered him a seven-year, $200-a-week contract.

His first film, ''Love Is on the Air,'' was a disposable B-movie trifle that set the pattern for most of his 50 or so films. Mr. Reagan was seen as a dependable, workmanlike actor, often playing clean-cut, all-American roles.

He did act in several critically acclaimed movies, notably ''Kings Row'' (1942) and ''Knute Rockne -- All American'' (1940). In the latter, his portrayal of dying football star George Gipp led to one of his presidential nicknames, ''the Gipper.'' He made his last Hollywood movie in 1964.

In 1940, Mr. Reagan wed actress Jane Wyman, whom he met while they were filming ''Brother Rat'' (1938). They had two children, Maureen and Michael (a third, born premature, died the day after birth in 1947). They were divorced in 1949. He was the first and only president to have been divorced, but it was not an issue in his campaigns.

In the divorce proceedings, Wyman blamed Mr. Reagan's involvement with the Screen Actors Guild -- and his wanting her to share his interest -- as putting a strain on their marriage.

Mr. Reagan honed his political skills in the guild, serving as its president from 1947 to 1952 and from 1959 to 1960.

He entered the Army in 1942 as a second lieutenant, rising to the rank of captain by the time he was discharged in July 1945. While his opponents made much of the fact that he spent the war making training films, Mr. Reagan's poor eyesight -- he wore contact lenses his entire professional life -- kept him out of combat.

In 1952, he married another actress, former Chicagoan Nancy Davis. Mr. Reagan had met Davis when, alarmed that her name had gotten on mailing lists for left-wing organizations, she appealed to him for help.

They had two children, Patti and Ronald, and appeared in several productions together. Nancy Reagan was to have a tremendous influence on her husband's life and was a powerful figure, both in public and behind the scenes, after he became president.

Mr. Reagan's movie career slumped in the mid-1950s, and he signed on to host television's ''General Electric Theater.'' His experience as a corporate spokesman, more than anything else, is thought to have influenced his switch from liberal Democrat to right-wing Republican -- a move he did not formally make until the early 1960s.

When ''GE Theater'' ended in 1962, he switched over to the TV series ''Death Valley Days,'' which he hosted until 1965.

By then he had become a political powerhouse. He co-chaired California Republicans for (Barry) Goldwater in 1964 and delivered a televised speech in support of the GOP presidential nominee that established Mr. Reagan as a major fund-raiser and rising Republican star.

Despite his Hollywood success, Mr. Reagan tended to downplay his experience as an actor. When he first ran for the California governorship in 1966, he listed his occupation as ''rancher.''

The first public office Mr. Reagan held was governor of California. He won handily, defeating incumbent Pat Brown by nearly a million votes.

Mr. Reagan was a conservative governor, reining in spending and cutting the size of government, raising taxes and reducing welfare rolls. Talk of his running for president was almost immediate. He was put forward by the party's right wing in 1968 and won 182 delegate votes at the convention, third behind Nelson Rockefeller and Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Reagan was re-elected as governor in 1970 and support built for him to run for president if Nixon didn't run for a second term. In 1971, Mr. Reagan was the top pick among voters asked who should run if Nixon stepped aside.

But Nixon ran for re-election.

Mr. Reagan did not try for re-election as governor of California, leaving office in 1975. He spent several months on the lecture circuit, then announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.

He narrowly missed pulling off a coup, receiving 1,070 convention votes, 60 short of what he needed to deny President Gerald R. Ford the party's nomination. Still, he delivered a stunning speech, ostensibly in support of Ford but of such power and vision that many in the hall saw it as confirmation that they had just nominated the wrong man.

Mr. Reagan had a lock on the 1980 nomination, sweeping the primaries and driving out all rivals.

He showed his rhetorical power in debating incumbent President Jimmy Carter, already handicapped by the dual woes of a miserable economy and the hostage crisis in Iran. Brushing aside charges that he would undermine world peace with a genial, ''There you go again,'' Mr. Reagan delivered his famous question: ''Are you better off than you were four years ago?''

The country answered a resounding ''No.'' Mr. Reagan carried 44 states -- 90 percent of the electoral vote -- and received 8.5 million more votes than Carter, his margin of victory a full 10 percent of the popular vote.

Mr. Reagan's inauguration was a day of high drama. As he finished his brief inaugural address, the Islamic revolutionaries who had been holding 52 American hostages in Iran finally freed them.

His first formal act as president was to declare a national day of thanksgiving for the return of the hostages.

Mr. Reagan's eight-year presidency nearly was cut short at the start. Seventy days after he took office, he was shot in the chest by a deranged man outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.

He was rushed to George Washington Hospital, where he walked into the emergency room. He had lost three pints of blood, and doctors later said that had treatment been delayed for five minutes, he probably would have died.

Even at such a moment of duress, Mr. Reagan displayed his quick wit. ''Honey, I forgot to duck,'' he told Nancy when she rushed to his side.

A vibrant man who enjoyed horseback riding and cutting wood at his California ranch, Mr. Reagan surprised everyone with his quick recovery.

Significant occurrences of the Reagan years include the nomination of the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and a brand of supply-side economics that was dubbed ''Reaganomics.''

Mr. Reagan addressed the faltering economy that had helped elect him with a combined three-stage tax cut and slashed federal spending.

The nation responded by going into severe recession -- by late 1982, unemployment was at 10.6 percent, its highest since before World War II.

But the economy gradually responded -- whether on its own or in reaction to Mr. Reagan's medicine -- and by 1984, matters were healthy enough for Mr. Reagan to win a landslide victory over Carter's former vice president, Walter F. Mondale.

During the first debate between the two, Mr. Reagan seemed faltering and uncertain, and his age became an issue in the campaign. But once again, he used humor and a deft delivery to defuse the issue, quipping in the second debate: ''I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience.''

People bought it. Mr. Reagan's electoral victory -- 525-13 -- was the most lopsided in history. He also carried 59 percent of the popular vote.

The recovery that helped re-elect Mr. Reagan was built on borrowed money, however. Mr. Reagan's budgets added more than $1 trillion to the national deficit.

Foreign relations under Mr. Reagan were marked by his firm anti-communist stand. His ''Star Wars'' defense program, which called for constructing a laser-guided anti-missile shield around the nation, was much discussed. Billions of dollars was spent toward its development, though many doubted that the system was technically feasible, and in the end it came to nothing.

While Mr. Reagan had declined to meet with a Soviet leader during his first term, upon re-election, the Soviets softened their stance toward the United States, and Mr. Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev when he rose to power, meeting with him four times at summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow.

Mr. Reagan considered his resilience against the Communists as responsible for the fall of communism across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

The culmination of Mr. Reagan's Soviet policy was the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty in 1987, slashing the stockpile of nuclear weapons and providing for on-site inspections.

Mr. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and provided money, arms and training to the contra rebels in Nicaragua in an attempt to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government.

The president clashed repeatedly with Congress over his support for the contras, and Congress' withholding of funding led to the great scandal of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra affair.

In late 1986, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran in exchange for Iranian assistance in freeing hostages in Lebanon.

This embarrassment turned into full-blown crisis when it became known that the Iranians were overcharged for the arms, with the profits illegally funneled to aid the contras.

Though Mr. Reagan claimed not to know of the activities, he was harshly criticized by the Senate commission formed to look into the affair, and several members of his administration went to prison.

After he left office, Mr. Reagan busied himself at his California ranch. In late 1994, he announced to the nation, via a handwritten note, that he had Alzheimer's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that erodes the mind and memory.

Even after being found to have Alzheimer's, Mr. Reagan continued to go to his office at Los Angeles' Century City, exercise, chop wood at his ranch, golf and attend church on Sundays.

In 1995, the Reagans allowed their names to be used by the Chicago Alzheimer's Association, which renamed its grantmaking division the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute.

While his family reported that Mr. Reagan remained physically strong and kept the good-humored ''twinkle'' so characteristic of him, his memory deteriorated severely in recent years as his disease progressed, and he often failed to recognize family members and close acquaintances, and was kept almost entirely out of the public eye.

Reagan's oldest daughter, Maureen, died in August 2001 at age 60 from cancer. Along with Nancy Reagan, his three other children survive.