An American President
In August 2004, Glen Jeansonne wrote a nuanced appreciation of the recently deceased Ronald Reagan. At the time, non-scholarly hagiographies and hatchet jobs competed to shape popular understanding of the 40th president’s ___ 31 ___ .
Jeansonne assessed Reagan as neither a great president nor a mediocre one, a rather broad judgment but one that defied the prevailing scholarly tendency to underrate him. Today, many historians, whether favourable to Reagan or not, regard him as the most consequential president of the second half of the 20th century. He demonstrated that remarkable individuals can influence the ___ 32 ___ of history.
Reagan was instrumental in bringing near to conclusion the 40-year Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. While many 21st-century conservatives think he engineered a Reagan Revolution, this catchy alliteration claims too much. He moved America rightward without making it a conservative nation, but this was ___ 33 ___ a significant transformation following the prolonged liberal ascendancy of the mid-20th century.
Reagan’s unstinting optimism helped restore widespread confidence in America’s future after the turmoil of the 1960s and the misery of the 1970s. Yet this outlook inhibited acknowledgement that there were many Americans who still needed the government’s help. He was slow to support AIDS sufferers and never used his bully pulpit to inspire popular understanding of their ___ 34 ___ . He failed to appreciate that African-Americans needed a benevolent state to protect them from racial discrimination. Though not himself a bigot, he misunderstood how deeply embedded racial problems were in the United States.
Whatever his ___ 35 ___ , Reagan demonstrated the capacity of the American presidency for effective leadership at home and abroad. Whether the changes he promoted made the US a better country or not is an ongoing debate. But his capacity to combine conviction with pragmatism offers lessons for politicians of all hues.
IWAN MORGAN, HISTORY TODAY