Originally published: 2005.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

25 years after Reagan became president, Richard Reeves has written a new portrait, using newly declassified documents and hundreds of interviews to show a president at work day by day, sometimes minute by minute. This is the story of a bold, even reckless leader, a gambler, a man who imagined an American past and an American future--and made them real. Reeves shows a man who understands how to be President, who knows that the job is not to manage the government but to lead the nation. In many ways, a quarter of a century later, he is still leading, a heroic figure if not always a hero. He did not destroy communism, but he knew it would self-destruct and hastened the collapse. Like one of his heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has become larger than life. As Roosevelt became an icon central to American liberalism, Reagan became the nucleus holding together American conservatism. He is the only president whose name became a political creed, a noun not an adjective: "Reaganism."--Publisher description.