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I can still remember election night, 1980. My best friend and I were making a birthday cake for my girlfriend (green cake with purple icing, yum!) and we watched as one state after another turned "Republican blue" for Ronald Reagan. (Republican states were blue in those days.)

Even though we were 17 at the time, we were excited by the prospect of Ronald Reagan leading the country. We were not political zealots or party activists by any stretch of the imagination. We had simply grown up in Jimmy Carter's America, where prices spiraled out of control, the economy kept stalling and government thrashed about with clumsy Keynesian attempts to influence the economy. For us, the final blow came when my friend's dad had to turn in the Z-28 (company car) for a Citation (company car). Oh, what a blow that is for 17 year old boys!

Ronald Reagan's optimism about America's future, his plan to return money to the wage earners of America and his promise to fight the Cold War to win gave us hope for the future. No longer was America going to go out with a whimper, a humbled former power that had "learned to accept second place". America was going to fight, not just in a figurative sense, but all over the globe against the evil that was (and still is) communism.

It is ironic how Reagan's critics called him a war-monger back then. For them confronting communism meant war, and war meant Vietnam. They simply could not comprehend that Reagan could combat communism by proxy; waging war on the economic and societal fronts as well as supporting military action when necessary. Such a plan meant that the chance that America would actually enter direct conflict with the Soviet Union was much lower than if America continued to give in to communist advances around the world.

I suppose Reagan's critics had bought into the bully's propaganda. Confronting him would just make him angry, so you should just hand over your lunch money and consider yourself lucky. No need to risk a bloody nose, right? However, as every school child eventually learns, a bully runs amok until he is confronted, and to confront this bully America needed to rebuild its military. Once the Soviet Union saw that it could not simply bluff its way across the world, it had a decision to make. Should it try to keep up with the United States? The ball was now in the other court. It was the Soviet Union that needed to decide whether it wanted to "learn to accept second place". As we saw, eventually the Soviet Union realized that second place might not even be achievable, and in the end the Soviet Union disintegrated under the pressure of trying to keep up with the United States.

The defeat of Soviet communism is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Reagan era. Hundreds of millions of people are now free. It is almost impossible to measure that achievement against any other in history except the defeat of totalitarianism in WWII. As a historian I consider myself privileged to have witnessed it. The world stepped back from the brink of nuclear war because of Ronald Reagan—just the opposite of what his critics had predicted.

Economically Reagan achieved a dramatic revolution in thinking. Prior to Reagan everyone assumed that the government was the best tool to control the economy, that the government knew best, and taxing money away from wage earners so this wise entity could allocate it fairly was the only way to go.

Under Reagan, the wage earner would reign supreme. They could keep more of what they earned, use it for what they believed was important, and the government should get out of the way. While it seemed like a new idea at the time, this is essentially the way America had been before the New Deal and Great Society programs had beaten down the work ethic in America.

Reagan's across the board tax cuts (that means everyone got them, not just the rich) worked as advertised. With more money in their pockets consumers spent and invested more, businesses had more revenues and hired more workers and the tax receipts received by the government increased—faster than they had been before the tax cuts.

The Reagan expansion, one that would grow to become the longest peace time expansion in United States history, is the second great achievement of the Reagan era. America was back, not only as a military super power, but as the world's greatest economy. Those who had predicted a Japanese supremacy to replace the "American Century" were as wrong as those who predicted a Soviet win in the Cold War.

Harder to recognize is Reagan's help in restoring the soul of America. Not just in a spiritual sense, but also in a patriotic, "can do" attitude that had guided America for almost 200 years. People once again had faith that tomorrow would be even better than today, and the day after that better still. Confidence is contagious, and America was brimming with confidence. When it came time to spread the free trade evangelism, the world listened. Taxes and tariffs and overbearing government bureaucracies fell like so many dead trees in a storm. The world wanted what America had found.

These three great achievements—any one of which would have tremendous achievement for a President—are the reasons why President Reagan will go down in history as one of America's greatest Presidents. President Reagan left the United States (and the world) a better place than he found it. Reagan's vision, which even 17 year old boys could recognize, was of a better America. The fulfillment of that vision is Reagan's legacy.

We had simply grown up in Jimmy Carter's America.

No longer was America going to go out with a whimper.

The defeat of Soviet communism is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Reagan era.

America was back, not only as a military super power, but as the world's greatest economy.