THE DEATH OF RONALD REAGAN brings to a close the most surprising political life of the 20th century. A century that through 1979 was notable for world wars, ideological mass murder, and the relentless advance of statism had a happy final act no one but he expected. If he had not lived and succeeded, the 20th century would not have been, in the fullest sense, the American century it turned out to be.

Reagan was utterly American. He dreamed vast optimistic dreams, and lived to see some of the most unlikely ones come true. He was accused of living a Hollywood-shaped fantasy life, and in a way he did. But rather than inhabit a dream world of his own making, Reagan had an ability to mold reality until it resembled his dreams.

Reagan was utterly of his century. Born in 1911, he aspired to a personal heroism of the Jack Armstrong variety, fulfilled in the 1920s by his many rescues as a lifeguard. Captivated by the drama of major league baseball, he became a radio announcer and mastered the forgotten art of "re-creation"--transforming unadorned narrative from a ticker tape into a dramatic spectacle that existed mainly in his own head. Reagan fought his way from the sticks to the big city in the openly ambitious yet innocent way replicated in so many early 20th-century success stories.

As a successful Hollywood actor, he went through the midcentury flirtation with the left--not only, as some biographers imply, the anti-Communist left--characteristic of young idealists of that time

Beginning in the 1940s, Reagan devoted much of his life to a political struggle against the left in general and Soviet-style communism in particular. He fought and plotted against the Communists everywhere he could--from the grubby, petty politics of the actors' union all the way to private councils with the first Polish pope and the climactic summits of the Cold War. Today, few on either side of that struggle would deny that this American dreamer proved to be communism's worst nightmare.

As president, Reagan won the Cold War with a host of specific moves, some of them well known and some of them only recently revealed, with the declassification of documents and the work of a small but growing group of appreciative scholars.

He made these moves believing, from the outset of his presidency, that they could help bring final victory. Of his close advisers, probably only two--the second of his six national security advisers, William Clark, and CIA director William Casey--shared so extravagant a hope. But isolation of this kind never stopped Reagan. It didn't even seem to bother him. He operated on faith, and openly announced his vision in London in 1982, consigning communism to the "ash heap of history" in a world where democratic ideas are destined to triumph.

Little more than nine years later, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, which together had spanned northern Eurasia, no longer existed. For many, the completeness, even more the swiftness, of his prophecy's fulfillment is the biggest barrier to understanding the magnitude of Reagan's achievement. Most now concede Reagan gave communism a shove, but for a system to disappear so utterly, it must have been a hollow shell to begin with. No matter who was president, many believe, it would have been only a matter of time before the inevitable collapse took place.