Book Review: Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot

Max Boot’s new book, Reagan: His Life and Legend, is now the definitive biography of Ronald Reagan. The author, who once characterized himself as a Reagan Republican, did a prodigious amount of research over 10 years, which ultimately impelled him to a more balanced view of our 40^th U.S. President.

The book is most interesting in the chapters of his pre-presidential life. In these sections, spanning his childhood, his Hollywood career, his leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, and his governorship of California, there is much that was new to me and some that reminded me of certain episodes. It is interesting and provides some understanding of a man, who, for all his charming demeanor, remains somewhat of a mystery, even to his children.

One aspect of Reagan’s career in the 1960s that the book does not discuss in more than a glancing fashion is his association with J. Edgar Hoover. This is a sordid tale of a mutually beneficial relationship and is detailed in a 2012 book by Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. Boot is aware of this book by a former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle and lists the book in his bibliography, but does not appear to have used it very much. It is part of the Reagan story.

As for Reagan as President, Boot is particularly critical of the invasion of Grenada, the Iran-Contra affair, and the response to the AIDS crisis. Moreover, Boot depicts Reagan as a bad manager; he did not pay much attention to what “the fellas” were doing. In some cases, they performed very well (for example, James Baker); at other times, it was disastrous.

Boot argues that the worst personnel move Reagan made was allowing James Baker, then Chief of Staff, to swap jobs with Don Regan, then Treasury Secretary. This was bad for the White House and Boot thinks that Nancy Reagan did the right thing by forcing Don Regan out (though the way she did it can be criticized). What Boot does not mention since this is a book about Ronald Reagan, was that the job swap was good for the Treasury Department, as I can attest from personal experience. Don Regan as Treasury Secretary made sensible policy decisions, but he created and encouraged open bureaucratic warfare among sections of Treasury. (I was involved in some bitter disagreement between Domestic Finance, where I worked, and the International division of Treasury, then known as “OASIA,” about various debt management issues. This also involved Tax Policy and the Economic Policy sections of Treasury. An organization cannot sustain that level of animosity for very long. The hostility abruptly ended when Baker became Secretary.)

Surprisingly, Boot mentions but hardly discusses a major bipartisan legislative accomplishment of the Reagan Administration, the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Whole books have been written about this; given its importance, Boot might have devoted more than a paragraph to this.

As for the ending of the Cold War, Boot takes a contrarian position that its end was due to Reagan. He thinks most of the credit should go to Mikhail Gorbachev and argues that Reagan’s insistence on the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) and the military buildup may have increased domestic pressure on Gorbachev to divert from his chosen path. Boot makes a strong case, and does credit Reagan for having a productive relationship with Gorbachev and putting pragmatism above his ideology.

Reagan was a significant President, and he successfully moved U.S. politics to the right. In many of his decisions he was pragmatic rather than ideological. For example, he recognized that his first major tax legislation went too far and effectively raised taxes in the following years. He also can be given credit for not interfering with Paul Volcker in the punishing and successful Federal Reserve efforts to conquer inflation.

This book is a necessary corrective to the sunny recollections many have of the Reagan years. As President, Reagan had a mixed record and at the end of his Presidency he was hardly the “great communicator.” He also appealed to racism in his campaigns but with much more subtlety than the openly racist Donald Trump. Boot comments at the end of the book:

“...by 2016, Reagan’s party had left his seemingly genteel brand of politics for the harder-edged populism of Donald J. Trump. Many analysts wonder if Trump represented a repudiation of Reagan’s legacy or a continuation of it. The truth, as with question of Reagan’s intelligence, was complicated.”

 Boot notes both policy and demeanor differences between Reagan and Trump, and clearly is much more of an admirer of Reagan than Trump, whom he probably despises. However, Boot concludes, perhaps reluctantly:

 

“...If Reagan had been alive in 2016, he undoubtedly would have been derided as RINO (Republican in name only) like the two Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney; indeed, conservatives had frequently expressed their frustration with Reagan even during his presidency. Yet Reagan had helped set the GOP–and the country–on the path that ultimately led it to embrace divisive figures such as Donald Trump. Reagan’s legacy included, after all, not only empowering the Christian Right and a growing white backlash against minority empowerment but also economic policies that helped hollow out the middle class, thereby creating the conditions for Trump’s populist movement. (Of course, once in office, Trump’s policies favored the well-off as much as Reagan’s had.)”

Memories of Ronald Reagan’s presidency are fading and the current Republican Party is significantly different from the one that Reagan headed, even if he was viewed then as on the right. His presidency was consequential and important, and, even though this book has some omissions I have noted and a great amount of detail about other aspects of his life and political career, I recommend it for anyone interested in Reagan’s life or the period of American history were he loomed large. The book is both a detailed history of Reagan’s life and career and a balanced assessment of the man.