The Presidency: The Bottom Line on Reagan

There is a tendency in the fervid national catharsis over the Iran arms scandal to treat the past six years of Ronald Reagan's presidency as a kind of hallucination.

In the white-hot center of the controversy, it is as if inflation had not been bested, the interest-rate genie not stuffed back into the bottle. The exuberant entrepreneurship that created 630,000 new businesses and 11 million new jobs is forgotten, as if the thought had never darkened the detached cerebrum of the Hollywood has-been. The truth is that Reagan's unabashed enthusiasm for competition, risk and profit has given the managers of U.S....