The former Hollywood actor turned 40th president did indeed become the symbol of America's final victory over the Soviet Union in the cold war. Side by side with Margaret Thatcher, he also led the rightwing reaction to the settlement bequeathed to the boys who stormed the D-day beaches by FDR's New Deal and the 1945 Attlee Labour government. From being the solution, the state became the problem. Much of the confusion inherent in current US policy - from Kyoto to Baghdad - stems from that flawed insight. As such, Reagan has a lot to answer for at the bar of history, as much at home as abroad. You do not find poverty anywhere else in the first world quite like you can find in America in the big city slums or the black districts of mid-size towns. You can find it in the former USSR, of course, but that too is a charge for which Reaganomics must bear some blame.
Reagan knew that the appeal of individualism, both noble and selfish, would defeat the Soviet fox. Armed with "evil empire" rhetoric - which he believed - and a chequebook, he outspent it. Missile defence tests were fiddled, then as now, but worked. All this was combined within a bundle of contradictions. Though a believer in Armageddon, Reagan himself was not particularly religious, but his influential wife, Nancy, had an astrologer. He was a divorcee, and personally tolerant. And his own family was a dysfunctional prototype of the Osbournes.
