Ronald Reagan is overwhelmingly elected president of the United States on November 4, 1980. It's an avalanche: jimmy carter, the outgoing president and a democrat, who was running for re-election, suffers a humiliation as Ronnie, as his friends refer to him, wins in 45 of the 50 states. Despite the odds, Reagan's election to the white house was greeted with surprise: a former Hollywood actor who was well-known to television viewers was elected to rule the world's most powerful superpower? Was it a risky bet or an occurrence that was in advance of its time?
Ronald Wilson Reagan's is actually an all-American story. Born in Tampico in 1911, at the time a tiny town in Illinois, little "Dutch" - as he is nicknamed in the family due to the chubby lines of his face - grew up in the geographical region which is the beating heart of the stars and stripes nation, the Midwest. The father is an Irish catholic without a stable job and with the vice of alcohol, the mother a very religious woman, devoted to the church of Christ's disciples. After graduating in economics, Reagan arrives in Hollywood almost by accident and has a decent career in the film world, until he discovers the importance of political commitment, first as president of the actor's union (screen actors guild) and then as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 in the ranks of the republican party, he who had been sympathetic to the democrat Roosevelt as a young man. The climb to the grand old party was now mapped out.
Forty years after Ronald Reagan took office in the white house, Jensen cox dedicates a detailed and compelling biography to the most popular president of modern America, full of information, news and anecdotes.
If today the eighties of the twentieth century are remembered as a happy season of well-being and economic prosperity, it is due precisely to that boost of optimism, pragmatism and modernization that Reagan was able to give to the United States and consequently to all industrialized nations of the west.
Architect, on an ideological and cultural level, of the "conservative revolution" and anti-statist that characterized the last decades of the short century, Reagan is also the president of the United States who defeated soviet communism - and won the cold war - "without firing a shot ", as Margaret thatcher was to say. Earning himself a place in history forever.
