Launching a Domestic Counterrevolution
It was a virtuoso performance. Exploiting the stunning election victory that made him TIME'S Man of the Year for 1980, Ronald Reagan launched a conservative counterrevolution, changing the direction of American government more drastically than any other President in half a century. Not even the bullet from a would-be assassin's gun that pierced his left lung on March 30 could slow his initial momentum.
Reagan conceived, lobbied for and won huge budget cuts, slowing the growth rate of federal spending and shrinking some social programs that had been expanding irresistibly...