Ronald Reagan so succeeded in reshaping his party and times that, on learning of his old mentor's death, Dick Armey looked around the staff of his Washington think tank and realized something.

"I'm surrounded here by people in their 30s. They're too young to have participated in that era, but they're Reaganites. They're influenced by Ronald Reagan," Armey said.

The principles of Reaganism -- an unabashed conservatism, a distrust of government, an impulse to cut taxes, and a foreign policy one analyst called "a truculent nationalism" -- have permeated political thought among Republicans to the point that it is hard to recall a time they were not at its core.

"He set the standard for us," said Armey, a former House Republican leader from Texas.

The standards Reagan set derived from a resurgent conservative intellectualism that was embodied by writers such as Russell Kirk and brought into the public arena most notably by Barry Goldwater, the arch conservative from Arizona whose 1964 bid for the presidency galvanized the Republican Party's right wing while costing it the White House.

It was Goldwater's campaign that brought Reagan to the fore. Still an actor in those years, Reagan gave an electrifying speech before the Republican convention and campaigned ceaselessly for Goldwater. From that campaign grew the cadre of conservatives on whom Reagan would later draw after two terms as governor of California.

When Reagan emerged as a presidential candidate, his party had only 38 seats in the U.S. Senate -- 17 of them belonging to moderates or liberals. He was thought too conservative to sell to the American public. In Michigan in 1976, union leaders urged their members to cross over and vote for Reagan in the Republican primary because he seemed the easiest candidate -- President Gerald Ford won the nomination -- to defeat in November.

Four years later, Reagan returned, snared the nomination from then-moderate George H.W. Bush, and ushered in an unabashedly conservative regime.

While Reagan set out to reform the presidency, with unenforceable promises to slash federal spending, reduce the federal payroll and eliminate entire departments, his primary domestic legacy appears to have been to remake Congress in his image.

One flesh-and-blood example of the transition is Mike Pence, a former Democratic youth coordinator for Bartholomew County, Indiana.

"When I began to listen to Ronald Reagan and began to hear the values he expressed, I just began to find a voice for those values," Pence said. Today, after several tries, he is U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana.

Frustrated by the "Iron Triangle" of Congress, the federal bureaucracy and special interest groups that fed off the federal budget, Reagan's first-year bid to slash $41.4 billion from domestic spending and to dismantle the departments of energy and education, foundered.

"Reagan's domestic policies themselves, if not their implementation, became a rallying cry for congressional conservatives," said Robert Moffit, who served in Reagan's administration.

"There's a legacy and there's a continuum," said Richard Fenno, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester. "You could argue that Barry Goldwater started the resurgence of conservatism and Reagan picked up the Goldwater banner, moved it along, and Newt Gingrich's version in 1994 captured Congress."

Details often eluded Reagan. He quoted movie scripts as if they were real-life, and he occasionally seemed more than arm's length from the people affected by his policies. Yet his legacies in both foreign and domestic affairs are as unmistakable as a later Democratic successor's declaration that "the era of big government is over."

That 1994 proclamation by President Bill Clinton underscored the way in which Reagan had forced even the opposition party to accommodate his policies.

"There was a psychological shift in 1980 that was profound and that was lasting," said Lee Edwards, a scholar at The Heritage Foundation, one of a trio of think tanks from which the Reagan administration drew experts for advice and government appointments.

Prior to Reagan, Edwards said, there had been nearly 50 years of uninterrupted expansion of government programs to solve problems ranging from poverty to the price of oil.

Reagan displaced government as an engine of change with a free-market theory called supply-side economics. Supply-side acolytes argued that lower tax rates would increase the incentive to produce, generating more tax revenue than would be lost by cutting taxes.

Reagan assigned two economists, Lawrence Kudlow and John Rutledge, to oversee the drive to cut the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent.

"In the '70s, inflation and high tax rates had driven investors to move more than half of their wealth into hard assets, like commodities," said Rutledge, who now runs his own investment service.

Many critics noted that the economic transformation came at a profound cost. Manufacturing industries withered or moved overseas, and the gap between rich and poor widened as investment income was sheltered from taxes. Others observed that the drop in interest rates and the control of inflation were really a product of the policies of then Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Reagan's tax cuts, deregulation of industries and promotion of international trade pushed things along, however. And his open trade policy went hand-in-hand with a stunning victory in the Cold War. Essentially, by committing billions to an expanded and rebuilt military, Reagan challenged an ailing Soviet Union to a spending battle it could not win.

"The Soviet Union should have fallen apart on its own, but it didn't. It needed pushing and shoving," said Peter Schramm, who worked in the Reagan White House and now heads the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio.