Reagan's Leadership

Ronald Reagan possessed a leadership quality that set him apart from a great many other leaders of this or any other time. The concept of leadership is easy to define, but it is not as easy to execute; Reagan was not only able to characteristically recognize the inherent demands of the job as President of the United States, but he also rose to the challenge. Although Reagan's leadership skills showed great promise through his public persuasion by capturing Americans and economic management by decreasing inflation, but he failed at international relation because of Iran-Contra and the dispute in the Caribbean.

Reagan possessed the quality of being a gifted public speaker. The skills he learned from being an actor later helped him in being a persuasive speaker. Reagan had a gift of conveying complex ideas in short, friendly sound bits that stirred the American soul. In the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, lie thousands of documents proving how devoted a politician Reagan was. For decades Reagan drafted his own speeches, even with the crushing workload of being president (Troy 8-9).

When Reagan took office in 1980, the country was in a major inflation. Interest rates were near 20 percent and the value of a dollar was dropping. Reagan blamed this inflation on federal spending and taxation. Reagan made federal spending his number one priority, and by doing this inflation had dramatically in his presidency (Economic Data). Reagan appeared before a joint congress session to cut budgets by $41 billion; Reagan had achieved the greatest reduction in government spending, and was also successful in cutting income taxes (Divine 916). Reagan's next economic agenda was dealing with the increasing of Social Security benefits. March 1983, Congress approved of changes that would guarantee solvency: gradually raising retirement age, delaying cost-of-living increases, and taxing pensions paid to the well-to-do elderly (Divine 917).

The first day Reagan took office he scored his first foreign victory, the 53 hostages that were taken by the Iranian militants, had been released, but after that it all went downhill with foreign affairs. In October 1983, Reagan sent U.S. forces to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada. At the time Reagan's reason was that the lives of American citizens were in danger due to a recent coup (Zinn 588). In 1985, the national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, proposed to trade American missiles to Iran, for the release of six Americans held hostage by Lebanese groups. At this time Iran was still at war with Iraq, and in desperate need of weapons, was willing to comply. The arms deal with Iran became a bad policy. In 1984 Congress cut off any financial aid to Nicaragua for the training of Contras, called the Boland Amendment. Ever since 1984, Reagan had been looking for new ways for US to aid the Contras. The whole deal was illegal and unconstitutional. When the secret got out, the administration