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But Reagan’s real goal was even larger than that. As budget director David Stockman hinted in a published interview that earned him a trip to Reagan’s woodshed, the tax cuts were a "Trojan horse" that would eventually force the dismantling of almost all social programs as federal revenues dwindled away.

The same strategy of using tax cuts to defund the government — "starving the beast," as the anti-tax ideologues put it — today remains the strategic core of George W. Bush’s tax-and-budget policy.

Reagan succeeded in his first couple of years in part because he and his people were good at the game, and in part because the public responded to the undeniable courage and grace he displayed after being shot in an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. But Reagan also succeeded because Speaker O’Neill let him succeed; as John Aloysius Farrell recounted in Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, O’Neill made a strategic decision in 1981 to let Reagan have most of his tax and budget cuts.

O’Neill’s gamble — that the effects of Reagan’s sharp budget cuts, coupled with a recession, would drive voters to support Democrats in the midterm congressional elections — paid off in spades. The Democrats picked up 27 House seats in the 1982 by-elections, and Reagan’s domestic agenda was effectively stalled for the rest of his presidency.

Reagan’s record on foreign policy was more complicated. He enjoyed tremendous success in boosting defense spending, including billions for the early stages of the missile-protection "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative. His supporters steadfastly maintain that Reagan’s sponsorship of SDI was the move of a master poker player, forcing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves in a fruitless effort to keep pace with his defense spending.

This view is more than a little simplistic — American victory in the Cold War was the product of decades of US foreign-policy initiatives and the decisions of nine presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike — but it has retained a certain currency. No less a liberal light than Senator Edward M. Kennedy praised Reagan after his death as "the president who won the Cold War." Closer to the truth would be "the president who accelerated the end of the Cold War."

Elsewhere in the world, Reagan’s foreign policy veered between mundane and catastrophic: his invasion of Grenada was a bit of a joke, his intervention in Lebanon a tragedy. And then there were the contras.

The series of events that became known as the Iran-contra scandal was born of two distinct strands of Reagan’s philosophy: the muscular patriotism that led him to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels against the Marxist Sandinista regime in Managua, and the old-fashioned sentimentality that drove him to fixate on the fate of Americans being held hostage in Lebanon. That the two strands would eventually merge, resulting in a bizarre scheme that covertly sent American arms to Iran and illicitly funneled the resulting profits to the contras, may have been inevitable but at the time was simply mind-boggling.

Iran-contra made a star — and, until a higher court ruled otherwise, a felon — of White House aide Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. But it did not bring down Ronald Reagan. Shielded by public affection and his own affability, Reagan again proved himself the "Teflon president." Still, the scandal raised serious questions that, with his death from Alzheimer’s disease, once again seem relevant. Was Reagan’s inability to recall key conversations and memos simply a transparent ruse to distance himself from responsibility for the scandal, as was widely assumed at the time? Or was his forgetfulness genuine, and for that very reason much more troubling?

In 1987, Reagan tapped former senator Howard Baker as his chief of staff, and charged him with cleaning up the mess that Iran-contra had made of his White House. As recounted by respected journalists Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus in Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, Baker asked a top aide to interview all the principals and assess the situation. That assessment described a White House adrift and virtually leaderless, and included a recommendation that Baker consider invoking the 25th Amendment — the mechanism for replacing a disabled president who is no longer capable of carrying out his duties.

Baker never acted on that recommendation, and Mayer and McManus’s book — written six years before Reagan announced that he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s — never specified what sort of disability might have befallen Reagan. But the shadow of Alzheimer’s, even in its very earliest stages, cannot be discounted.

Charles P. Pierce, author of Hard To Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story, contends that Reagan may have shown symptoms of Alzheimer’s as early as 1984, in his disastrous first debate with Walter Mondale. Even if that’s not the case, Reagan’s subsequent medical history suggests that his confusion and memory lapses during the Iran-contra period, if genuine, may have been early signs of the disease that stole his final years.

HISTORY HAS a long way to go before it passes final judgment on Ronald Reagan, and the early returns are mixed. There’s no question that Reagan deserves credit for his handling of the Soviets, and for helping to speed the end of the Cold War; just as clearly, his policies in the Middle East and Central America engendered fiasco.

On the domestic front, Reagan won his tax cuts and his military build-up — which together tripled the national debt in just eight years. "Reaganomics" managed to produce a short-term economic boom; massive deficit spending usually does, but that’s Keynesian economics, not Reaganomics. In the long term, Reagan’s economic policies further widened the gap between rich and poor, spawned the wretched corporate excesses of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and set the stage for the massive savings-and-loan debacle.

Reagan failed, fortunately, to roll back abortion rights or affirmative action. Nor did he simplify the tax code, or rein in the Environmental Protection Agency to any significant degree. He busted one union — the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — but did not greatly advance the anti-union right-to-work agenda.

Measured against his platform and his stated policy goals, then, Reagan as president probably deserves a B; measured against the needs of the country, probably a bit lower. He was successful in some important areas, but less successful overall than Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and possibly even Bill Clinton were.

Reagan’s lasting legacy, however, is not a matter of policy but of politics. He was a consummate movement politician, and his conservative movement has reworked the American political landscape to an extent that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago.

Largely because of Ronald Reagan, moderate establishment Republicans — the onetime Rockefeller wing of the GOP — have all but vanished. Reagan brought Nixon’s Southern strategy to full fruition, and the once solidly Democratic South is now solidly Republican. The national conversation has been yanked rightward, and the debate over tax cuts is not one of whether?, but of how much? and for whom?

Ronald Reagan has given way to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott and Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney, hyper-partisans of the Republican ascendancy. And, of course, to George W. Bush, who claims Reagan’s mantle even as he disowns his father’s.

That, then, is Reagan’s true legacy: a ruling clique of hard-right Republican ideologues who have gained the arrogance of power even as they have lost all touch with the needs and concerns of everyday Americans. Reagan’s legacy is W., and for that, history should render a stern judgment.

Francis J. Connolly is a senior analyst at Kiley & Company, a Boston-based public-opinion research firm. He covered the Iran-contra hearings for the Phoenix in 1987.