The Right's Man

Max Boot offers a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic figure in 'Reagan: His Life and Legend'

I didn’t intend to read this book. Back in 1988, I read Garry Wills’s Reagan’s America, which was published when Ronald Reagan was still president, and found it to be a remarkably edifying portrait that put Reagan’s career in a wide historical context. (I later re-read it to good effect.) Edmund Morris’s 1999 book Dutch (Reagan’s nickname) was supposed to be the definitive official biography—he actually followed around the president while he was in office—but was so flummoxed by his unfailingly polite and yet unfathomable subject that he ended up fictionalizing the story by inserting himself as an old friend who knew him from boyhood. Morris was roundly criticized for this, but I regarded the account as compelling and informative nonetheless (Morris liked experimenting; his posthumously published 2019 biography of Thomas Edison is narrated backward from the Wizard of Menlo Park’s death and ending with his birth, which I found very unwieldy.) There have been lots of other good books about RR as well, whether on the assassination attempt he survived (Rawhide Down) to his legislative record (Reckoning with Reagan.)

So I felt I kinda knew the Reagan story. The fact that Max Boot is a longtime military historian and conservative columnist led me to think that this was likely to be a piece of hagiography, though I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that he was moving left as a Never-Trumper. As the good reviews kept coming in, my resolve weakened and I finally picked it up. I’m glad I did.

In one sense my hunch was right: there aren’t many surprising revelations here, except perhaps Reagan’s indecisiveness when confronted with hard choices. The key interpretive angle is Reagan as pragmatist: contrary to his image as a right-wing ideologue, he was surprisingly flexible in key periods in his life, notably his first term as governor (when he raised taxes and expanded abortion rights) and his second term as president (when his rapprochement with the Soviet Union led to the end of the Cold War). We learn, once again, that Reagan was kind, remote, sincere, and incurious. Morris repeatedly cites foreign leaders who are bemused, even appalled by meeting what they regard as an amiable dunce (to cite the famous words of the Democratic wise man Clark Clifford) who find themselves ultimately liking and admiring him.

Actually, the biggest surprise is how critical Boot is of his subject. While he certainly gives Reagan his due, he is unsparingly critical of multiple episodes in his career, whether his under-handed betrayal of union members as head of the Screen Actors Guild during the Red Scare, his handling of student protests at Berkeley in 1969, the poorly executed invasion of Greneda in 1983, or Civil Rights issues over the course of his career, among others. Of particular note is the way he challenges the standard view that Reagan’s toughness—and emphatic embrace of the Strategic Defense Initiative in particular—helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union, because he says Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev never believed SDI would work, but opposed it because it was making it harder for him to convince Soviet militants to direct national resources for civilian purposes. Boot’s thumbnail accounts of these chapters in Reagan’s career are likely to be definitive, in a book that’s notably easy to read in short, well-organized chapters. (Just goes to show that journalists continue to be among the best of historians.) On balance, Boot is notably balanced with a portrait of a man whose “soaring vision made his presidency a success but whose inability to manage the government and aversion to uncomfortable realities inflicted heavy costs on his administration and the country as a whole.”

It’s hard to avoid thinking—as Boot himself acknowledges in a notably concise concluding comparison of similarities and differences—that the root of Trumpism can be found in Reagan’s career as a showman turned politician whose command of the issues and intellectual suppleness is shaky at best. But reading this book has actually somewhat assuaged my worries about Kamala Harris, who I think knows what she’s talking about on some issues (crime, abortion) while seeming totally out of her depth in others (economics, political horse-trading). But Reagan’s career shows that the republic can survive, even thrive, with less than a master of detail at the helm. Let’s hope our luck holds out a little while longer.