Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan served as president of the United States from 1981 to 1989 after careers in film, broadcasting and California politics. His administration pursued tax reduction, deregulation, anti-union policies and a major military build-up while confronting the Soviet Union.

Reagan later negotiated arms reductions with Mikhail Gorbachev, but his presidency was also marked by the Iran–Contra scandal, the AIDS crisis and widening economic inequality. Ronald Reagan was born in Birthplace of Ronald Reagan and died in Bel Air.

Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity carries its interlinked families into the last phase of the Cold War, where Ronald Reagan’s presidency forms part of the political environment surrounding renewed superpower confrontation, nuclear fear and the later negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan is one of the real public figures through whom the novel connects its private characters to the ideological hardening of the early 1980s and the reforms that culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall. His role is therefore historical rather than biographical: the book uses the decisions and rhetoric of his administration as part of the pressure shaping lives on both sides of the Iron Curtain.