Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States. He was known as a transformational President with his leadership. He has a symbiotic relation ship with a Soviet leader which set the stage for a solution to the Cold War to end peacefully. He's legacy is mixed because of tax reduction and a tightening of interest rates by the Federal Reserve led to a record period of peacetime economic growth and then on the oposite side of the street this growth was accompanied by record growth in the national debt, the federal budget deficit, and the trade deficit.
John Adams was the 2nd president of the United States. His legacy has been difficult for many historians to assess. On the one hand his refusal to enter directly into political conflict probably undermined his effectiveness and cost him his reelection. His stubborn independence left him politically isolated and alone. Even his own cabinet opposed his policies much of the time. He valued no one's opinion half as much as his own except for that of his wife. Adams seems to have been hopelessly out of place in the partisan-style Republic that he had helped bring to life.
Jefferson has been a great democratic icon precisely because he so eloquently articulated fundamental tensions in Americans' understanding of the people's power. Where an enlightened people determined their own destiny, Jefferson promised, there was no necessary or inevitable conflict between private rights and public good. efferson will always be celebrated for articulating the American national creed, the fundamental and universal principles of self-government that he set forth in the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, those very principles—most notably, that "all men are created equal"—have been turned against him, as successive generations of critics have condemned him as a hypocritical slave owner.
