The facts frequently get lost in the smoke and brimstone of political campaigns.
To hear the Democrats tell it, you'd think Ronald Reagan never did anything worthwhile during his eight years as president. All they can talk about is that he left the biggest deficit in history.This is true. But it was with a purpose for which we can all be thankful, even though Democrats conveniently forget it.
The one-time movie actor accomplished something no one had been able to do. He won the Cold War - without firing a shot.
When Reagan took office in 1980, the world had existed for decades under the threat of nuclear holocaust between communism and democracy. The two superpowers had steadily growing atomic arsenals of incredible destructive power.
At the same time they supplied weapons to Third World countries that stirred trouble throughout the world.
Instead of surviving through a balance of power, we existed through a balance of terror with no end in sight other than mutually assured destruction.
That was the situation when Reagan took office with a landslide mandate giving the Republican Party control of the Senate and a gain of 33 seats in the House of Representatives.
Early on in his presidency, Reagan moved to hone the nation's defenses to razor edge. That military buildup, together with spending billions on the so-called "Star Wars" defense program, forced the Soviets into a more heated effort to stay ahead of the United States in the arms race.
Reagan's continuing military buildup sowed the seeds of the ultimate end of communism in the Soviet Union and also the Cold War.
The U.S.-Soviet arms race turned into the most costly in the history of the world.
As it turned out, Russia lost, bankrupting itself in the process. The spending exposed the many cracks in the Soviet Union's monolithic tyranny and led ultimately to its total collapse.
Was it worth it? Of course. It must be.
Whether or not Reagan planned it that way, he was the architect of solving the biggest major problem of modern world history - a possible nuclear disaster between the two most powerful nations on the globe.
The terror is ended at last. No longer is the world haunted by the specter of a World War III that might well have destroyed much of humankind and turned the globe into a radioactive hell.