Ronald Reagan | 60-Second Presidents | PBS

Ronald Reagan was known as the great communicator, which shouldn't be surprising. He was a radio announcer before becoming a movie and television star. He got a taste of leadership as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, and starting in 1967, he served two terms as the Republican governor of California. Voters liked what he was communicating in 1980 and elected him in a landslide over President Carter. His message was simple. The government was too big and tax cuts would help the struggling economy grow. He had a mixed record of doing something about it. After he was shot in an assassination attempt, his approval rating soared, and Congress agreed to tax cuts to spark economic growth, and the economy eventually grew like wildfire. He had less luck shrinking government. The national debt exploded as Reagan oversaw huge increases in defense spending as his way of standing up once and for all to the Soviet Union. Of course, that spending had a purpose. Reagan once called the Soviet Union the evil empire, and he thought it didn't have the economic strength to keep up with America's military expansion. It worked. Soviet leaders agreed to new levels of diplomacy that phased out the Cold War. Reagan had some missteps, like the Iran-Contra affair, but America loved his sunny optimism, and he was a great salesman for conservative views. Many Republican politicians of today consider him their hero.