Election of Regean

The Election of Regan

And

Space Shuttle Challenger

Leah Jones

CTU Online

HIST125-1202A-07

There are many things that happened in American history after World War 2. There was the rise of rock and roll, the assassination of an American president, and our involvement in others conflicts and wars. Many of the events are important because they allowed us to advance in the world. Two events that can be linked in American history are the election of President Ronald Wilson Reagan and the crash of the 1986 space shuttle challenger that killed seven crew members.

Born February 6, 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President to be elected in the United States of America; he served his term from 1981 to 1989. Before becoming the 40th president, Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, against Edmund Brown and was ridiculed by Brown for his "lack of experience" (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2012). Reagan turned his disadvantage into an quality, representing himself as a normal civilian that was sick and tired of "a state government that had become inefficient and unaccountable (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2012)". He won the election by nearly a million votes. He served two terms as governor before running for presidency in 1976 after Nixon resigned from office and Ford was put in office. Reagan was not willing to wait another eight years, so he challenged Ford by critiquing his policies and appointments but had lost the election by 60 votes (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2012). In 1980 Reagan ran for President again, this time against George Bush. In Regan's only debate of the campaign, he notably reminded the national television audience of the country's economic problems by asking, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" ("Ronald W. Reagan", 2012). The day of the election Regan won with a little more than half the popular vote, the vote in the electoral college was 489 to Carter's 49 ("Ronald W. Reagan", 2012).

With the start of his presidency, he did what Carter failed to do; he got Iran to release the 52 U.S. hostages, which had been held by Iran for 444 days. According to an article from CNN.com (2012); President Reagan entered office in 1981 with two primary goals: to shrink government and to "make America strong again" by boosting the military. During his inauguration Reagan had made a statement "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem", signaling a challenge to what he called the "unnecessary and excessive growth of government" (The White House years, 2012). On March 30, 1981, an assassination attempt was made on Reagan. A drifter name John W. Hinckley, Jr., used a .22 caliber revolver and fired six shots at Reagan, the bullet had punctured his lung and were lodged in his chest just inches away from his heart ("Ronald W. Reagan", 2012). Reagan implemented sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomic", supported reducing the tax rates to try and help the economic growth by controlling the money supply to reduce inflation, deregulation of the economy, and reducing what government was spending too much money on. He made several acts in law to try and help the economy, he lowered federal tax rates with the signing of Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 which lowered the top marginal tax bracket from 70% to 50% and the lowest bracket from 14% to 11%, however other tax increases passed by Congress and signed by Reagan, ensured that tax revenues over his two terms were 18.2% of GDP as compared to 18.1% over the 40 year period 1970-2010 (Sahadi, 2010).

The crash of the space ship Challenger on January 28, 1986 showed a critical moment in Reagan's presidency, all seven astronauts that were on board were killed. On the night the shuttle crashed Reagan had delivered a speech in which he stated: "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave... We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God" (Address to the Nation, 1986).

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was set to launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. It was supposed to launch on January 22 but delays in the previous mission caused the launch date to be pushed back to a later date. Weather conditions kept them from launching on a later date and had to be changed again. The morning of January 28, the weather was unusually cold; temperatures were almost 31 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the minimum temperature allowed for launching. About six months before Challenger was to launch, Roger