Because of his optimism, he never adopted the defensive power-sharing strategy of longtime anti-Communists like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. He thought Communism was bad, and he thought it was doomed. When he became president, he confidently declared that freedom and the West would “transcend” Communism, that it would end “on the ash-heap of history,” that the Berlin Wall should be torn down.

The steps he took to bring this about included rolling back Communist gains at the margins, invading Grenada, supporting a counter-revolution in Nicaragua, and sending Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance. (As in all wars, there were unintended consequences, as the Taliban and Osama bin Laden demonstrate.) He announced that he would take advantage of America’s lead in high tech by producing a missile-defense system. Critics derided the Strategic Defense Initiative as a fantasy from Star Wars; Reagan embraced the pop-culture reference. He never deployed the system, and tests of its effectiveness continue to this day, as do arguments over the results. But the threat worried the Soviets; Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, told a 1993 conference of Cold Warriors at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs that SDI caused a tug of war inside the Soviet bureaucracy that was reflected in the divided purposes of the Gorbachev regime. Former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci said at the same press conference that he “never believed” in SDI, and his skepticism may prove to be justified. On the other hand, the Cold War post-mortem at which Bessmertnykh and Carlucci spoke was hosted by the victors, in Princeton, New Jersey, not Leningrad.

No one thing wins a war by itself. But Reagan’s appearance at the end of the Cold War was crucial. When he came into office, the Soviet Union was an aggressive hard-line state; when he left, it was a reforming, improvising one, partly in response to his pressures. Less than a year after he retired, the Berlin Wall was torn down; two years after that, the Soviet Union was no more. It is hard to think of a comparably rapid collapse of a major power without major bloodletting. Woodrow Wilson

When Reagan came into office, the American economy seemed as weak as the Yeltsin-era Russian army. The oil shock of the early 70s had hit it hard, and a combination of high inflation and high unemployment known as “stagflation”—which the reigning economists’ paradigm of the Phillips curve declared to be impossible—seemed impervious to the best efforts of Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter to massage it.

Reagan’s remedy was as theological as the passage on the baby’s ear. A school of economists, called “supply-siders,” had studied the economic impact of tax rates (Robert Mundell, the school’s founder, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999). They, too, had a curve, shaped like a croquet wicket and named after one of their number, Arthur Laffer, which they said showed the diminishing returns of revenue that resulted from ever-higher rates. If you cut tax rates, they argued, the economy would be stimulated, and the federal government would collect more money in tax revenues. Making use of a post-shooting wave of good feeling, Reagan was able to persuade Congress to implement something like their program.

In the event, the Laffer curve, like the Phillips curve, had some kinks in it. The great tax-rate cut was followed by two short, sharp recessions, one at the beginning of Reagan’s first term, the other at the end of George H. W. Bush’s only one. Both Bush and then Bill Clinton repudiated the supply-side doctrine, though they did not in fact raise tax rates that much. The deficit, contrary to predictions, rose alarmingly, until the late 90s, when politicians began talking of surplus.

Still, the 80s and 90s were economically vastly different from the 70s. Americans worried less about OPEC or the potency of Asian models of capitalism, and profited from their own. Success has many fathers. The Federal Reserve, which always goes its own way, deserves credit. So, more recently, does the computer economy, which was a spin-off of high-tech military spending. But Reagan was on the bridge when the 20-year boom began.

On the third item of his agenda, “the pieties,” more commonly known as the social issues, Reagan was completely defeated. After signing an expansive abortion-rights bill as governor of California, Reagan came to oppose the practice. When he was elected president, abortion opponents spoke hopefully of a constitutional amendment returning jurisdiction on abortion to the states, or banning abortion outright, or of a congressional act (per Article III, Section 2) removing the issue from the sway of the courts. Nothing happened. When

In 1979, the Washington political operative Paul Weyrich helped the Reverend Jerry Falwell found the Moral Majority, the organization’s name confidently assuming that there was such a thing, as Weyrich and Falwell defined it. In 1999, Weyrich gloomily announced that religious and social conservatives should retreat to their families and communities because the political and cultural situation was hopeless.

More objective observers like the political scientist Mark Lilla and the journalist David Frum (author of How We Got Here: The 70’s—The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse) have amplified on Weyrich’s assessment, arguing that conservative politics and social liberalism are necessarily linked in the post-modern era. Necessity is what we make of it, but they are certainly linked in contemporary practice, and nothing Reagan professed to believe altered that.

Perhaps the pieties fell victim to simplicity. It may be that a hedgehog’s agenda maxes out at two big ideas. Abortion opponents were told during the early Reagan years to wait patiently while Communism and high tax rates were attended to; their turn would come. It never did.

Great generals and politicians often preside over social transformations they deplore. Washington’s Farewell Address deplores the party spirit, yet partisan politics became an unshakable aspect of American life in his administration. Thomas Jefferson was the harbinger of the new era, yet, as Henry Adams argued in four stout volumes, that era was not the republican, country-party ideal of Jefferson’s youth. If posterity accords Reagan some measure of their success—a world war and a 20-year boom—it will also accord him their failure.

Reagan’s presidency came at the end of the 20th century—the actual one, not the calendrical one. That century, as many historians have noted, was a short one, running from 1914 to 1991. It was also an evil century, defined by tyranny and bloodshed. The United States came through it less badly scarred than any other major power and than many small ones. Ronald Reagan, who was born in 1911, before the Evil Century began, lived to see and understand its end—which he, as much as anyone else, assured would be relatively successful. Mount Rushmore is full, and that kind of pantheon should probably be reserved for those who speak to America’s spirit (then what’s TR doing there?). But, when historians and children have to think of Ronald Reagan at the end of the 21st century, they won’t have to scratch around for some