Ronald Regan never existed. Well, yes, he was president for eight years, if you want to get technical. And during that time America did see its largest peacetime economic expansion ever, a reversal of the decline that had afflicted its armed forces since Vietnam, and the beginning of the collapse of the Evil Empire. And, true enough, he did inherit a decade that began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and left it with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Yet Ronald Wilson Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with it. Rather, he was a genial old coot who happened to be sitting in the Oval Office when all these things happened. Don’t take my word for it; ask anyone in Washington: Haynes Johnson, who wrote Sleepwalking Through History; Lou Cannon, who wrote The Role of a Lifetime; or Bob Schuffer and Gary Paul Yates, who gave us The Acting President. Better yet, there’s Kitty Kelly and her portrait of a sinister Dowager Empress having her nefarious way.
Even Reagan’s erstwhile companions in arms have left us with the image of a likable dolt. Michael Deaver’s Behind the Scenes was the upscale version of Kitty Kelly. Former acting press secretary Larry Speakes informed us in Speaking Out that it was in fact Larry Speakes who was more or less running things. Donald Regan’s For the Record added the juicy bits about astrology. And one-time Office of Management and Budget chief David Stockman confesses that even before his disaster at OMB he considered the Gipper a fraud. “Ronald Reagan?” Stockman asked himself upon hearing that House colleague Jack Kemp had endorsed him. “The man was more ancient ideologically than he was in years. I considered him a cranky obscurantist whose political base was barnacled with every kook and fringe group that inhabited the vastly deep of American politics.” This remains the considered opinion of Washington’s best and brightest.
But for those of us who don’t believe in magic, who do believe that there might be some connection between, say, the 1981 tax cuts and the subsequent economic recovery; between arming the Afghan mujahedeen and the consequent Soviet defeat; between the promotion of a Strategic Defense Initiative and the success of the Patriot missiles in the Persian Gulf, two recent books give some answers.
The first, obviously, are Reagan’s own memoirs. Aptly entitled An American Life, the book ranges from his boy-hood in Dixon, Illinois, through his career in Hollywood to fireside chats with Mikhail Gorbachev. In tone, in humor, and, let’s be honest, in hastiness, the book is vintage Reagan, revealing a man entirely comfortable in his own skin. Dedicated to wife Nancy, An American Life consequently is at once far-ranging, charming, and ultimately disappointing. Not that there isn’t a great deal of information about him. But a presidential autobiography of Ronald Reagan that mentions James Cagney six times and William F. Buckley, Jr. not even once has to be missing something. A reader relying solely on this recollection would have a hard time piecing together exactly what it was about Reagan that swept him into office and allowed him to be so successful while there.
This is not to imply that Reagan spends his book navel-gazing. Mercifully, his private life is kept just that: private. Jane Wyman, his first wife, gets barely a paragraph, probably the most graceful way of handling a bad situation. About daughter Patti Davis he is likewise brief: he acknowledges serious differences but says he still dreams of the day he and his daughter will be close again. About the other children he is more upbeat, but no skeletons come dancing out of the closet here. And, of course, he makes his happiness with Nancy abundantly clear.
Alas, Reagan extends this circumspection to areas where we have a legitimate interest. The social issues, to begin with, are touched in only the vaguest fashion, and abortion is not even mentioned once. Although it may be understandable for an ex-president writing a justifiably exultant history of his administration to want to shy away from as yet unresolved and noxious issues, it might be thought pertinent to such a history to explain how a California governor who signed into law one of the most permissive abortion statutes ever would little more than a decade later make a pro-life position part of a litmus test for his appointments to the federal judiciary. More to the point, he might have elaborated about what it was that saw him bring to the Republican fold ethnic Democrats, many of whom are beginning to wonder today if the kinder, gentler GOP they see today isn’t exactly what drove them out of the Democratic Party.
Reagan might have spoken with particular authority on that subject inasmuch as the first Reagan Democrat was Reagan himself. Of his own conversion to conservatism, Reagan is pretty straightforward: it was the alarming expansion of federal bureaucracy combined with his firsthand experience as head of the Screen Actor’s Guild with Communists. While the former worried him it was the latter that woke him up politically, and in some ways he may have learned more from his enemies than his allies. “The Communists gained control of the groups through hard work and good organization—a minority of perhaps one percent moving in, coming to meetings early, and staying late and volunteering to do the hard work for the well-meaning liberals (like me) who were its members.” By 1980 conservatives had learned many of these lessons themselves, and Reagan was the beneficiary of a concerted effort by literally hundreds of motivated grass-roots organizations who saw in this one man the embodiment of all their hopes and desires.
This was bound to lead to tension once these lofty ideals began to be translated into policy. For this reason Reagan was probably more of a disappointment to his allies than his enemies, if only because the former had unrealistic expectations. Far from apologizing for his willingness to settle for half a loaf, Reagan saw in it the key to his success. “You’re unlikely to ever get all you want,” he says of his tactics. “You’ll probably get more of what you want if you don’t issue ultimatums and leave your adversary room to maneuver; you shouldn’t back your adversary into a corner, embarrass him, or humiliate him; and some- times the easiest way to get some things done is for the top people to do them alone and in private.” All that mattered was making sure that at the end of the day you had advanced down the field, which often got him in trouble with the more purist elements in his own constituency. “If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I’ve told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.”
Reagan is particularly proud of his success with Mikhail Gorbachev, which appears to vindicate Reagan’s emphasis on the importance of personal relations. Reagan’s claim that Gorbachev was different from his predecessors goes without saying, but his idea that U.S. interests are tied almost exclusively to Gorbachev’s personal political fortunes is a case of extending a principle into an ideology. Doubtless the emphasis on Gorbachev was also intended to appeal to the Zeitgeist, but the Soviet leader’s crackdown in the Baltics (and the corresponding drop in his international reputation) amply demonstrates how cruelly the fates treat those who court them. The larger tragedy is that, with very little sacrifice, Reagan might have both given Gorbachev his due and given a better account of what American policies and tactics he pursued that helped force the changes he lauds. Obviously, the tremendous defense buildup orchestrated by Caspar Weinberger was one factor, as was the decision to stand the Brezhnev Doctrine on its head by arming resistance movements from the Afghan mujahedeen to the Nicaraguan contras. East European intellectuals credit Reagan with a simple willingness to call the USSR the Evil Empire (for which he was ridiculed by intellectuals at home). Gorbachev might then have more rightly been hailed as the Soviet leader who decided to accommodate the inevitable rather than usher in a new war trying to resist.
Maybe it was just modesty. Whatever it was, his ad-ministration is much better served in the memoirs of presidential aide Martin Anderson than in his own. The new paperback put out by the Hoover Institution is particularly edifying because it includes a new introduction Anderson wrote a year after Reagan had left office and the attack on his legacy had taken off. In a faintly biblical allusion, Anderson at the outset notes that “as Reagan becomes a leg end around the world, his pivotal role in the ongoing worldwide revolution is virtually unsung in his own land.”
A former Columbia University professor, Anderson is well suited to deliver the authorized version. In 1980 he directed the research and policy development operation of Reagan’s successful campaign, going on to serve as the White House domestic and economic policy advisor; no newcomer to politics, he had done the same for Richard Nixon in 1968. With Reagan he shares something of an eye for the story, and the accepted assessments of Reagan’s persona only make the tale more dramatic.
Perhaps the great underlying mystery in all of this is: How did it happen? How did an aging, exactor from Hollywood rise to power in the United States and preside over the greatest economic expansion in history? How, by spending more on military weapons than anyone ever had, did that bring us closer to eliminating the scourge of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles? How did Ronald Reagan, with a reputation for being lazy and not too bright, manage to stay in political power so long—and to succeed as well as he did?
The Left’s answer is that it was all a masterful performance; this explanation gives Reagan more credit for acting than anyone ever gave him in his heyday in film. “Even some of his political colleagues in the White House and the cabinet,” writes Anderson, “seemed to fail to appreciate that behind the warm geniality lay a calculating, imaginative mind governed by a steely will.”
Ironically, the real secret of Reagan’s political appeal is precisely that Reagan wasn’t acting, which set him apart from almost every other politician. Although he never claimed to be an expert on any issue, he had thought most issues out for himself and arrived at certain conclusions. Consequently he arrived in the White House with a keen idea of what he wanted to accomplish and how he would go about it— and he surrounded himself with like-minded individuals who implicitly thought along the same general lines. Anderson says that this shared conception of what needed to be done took away “90 percent of the sweat and anxiety” that afflicts most White House staffs.
These ideas were reflected in the dozens of position papers Reagan issued as a candidate and ultimately in the political platform of the Republican Party. There was, notes the author, much more coherence to the Reagan candidacy than the caricatures might have indicated Reagan’s keystone economic proposal—a 30 percent across-the-board tax cut—is a good case in point: the idea had been with Reagan for some time. On October 8, 1976, in the thick of the Ford-Carter campaign, Reagan wrote a newspaper column entitled “Tax Cuts and Increased Revenue” in which he cited experiments in tax cuts by both Re-publicans and Democrats that had in fact yielded more federal revenue rather than less.
Boiled down, the argument was simply that taxes are an impediment to growth, and lowering taxes can increase incentives for national productivity, hence the term “supply-side economics.” But the campaign did not (Anderson is emphatic here) ever claim that it would instantly increase revenue. In fact, those who took the time to read the campaign position in 1980 would have found that the estimates of the effects of a supply-side tax cut on government revenue was that 17 percent of it would be recouped from the added productivity, which turned out to be far too modest. The more incredible fact, never acknowledged among those who prate about “fairness,” is that the tax changes initiated by the Reagan administration resulted in the wealthy’s paying a larger share of the total tax burden.
Ditto with defense. Although Reagan’s stated priority was to rejuvenate America’s armed forces, it would never have been possible to pay for it without restoring the country’s economic health. Nor was it merely a matter of stocking up on more weapons, though that was certainly one aspect. Of greater significance was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, whose crude prototype (the Patriot missile) more than proved its worth in the Persian Gulf. Critics immediately dubbed it Star Wars in hopes of discrediting the notion, but that only seemed to increase its appeal with the public.
Even in the afterglow of the Persian Gulf, the radical implications of SDI have yet to be appreciated, except by those with a vested interest in seeing the program killed. The reason is simple. Until Reagan the defense of the free world rested on a balance of terror called Mutual Assured Destruction in which each side targeted the other’s population base. The entire defense establishment, including elements at the Pentagon, was wedded to this theory, under which anything that helped protect populations from outright annihilation was inherently bad—”destabilizing” being the preferred term. In moral terms, this demand was outrageous: it implied accepting a status quo where missiles were targeted against civilians, not military forces, leaving leaders no options between Armageddon and surrender.
Hence SDI. Again, this was an idea that Reagan had reached largely on his own. In his memoirs Reagan goes into some detail about SDI’S importance and how it figured prominently in his negotiations with Gorbachev (the Reykjavik summit ended with no agreement because of the last- minute Soviet demand that SDI be scuttled), but Anderson adds a little color. He dates the seeds of the idea to a July 1979 visit by Reagan to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the nuclear warning facility in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. After touring the facility, Reagan learned from the Air Force officers in charge that in the event of a nuclear launch by the Soviets—deliberate or accidental—an American president would have between 10 and 15 minutes to decide whether to retaliate in kind and risk World War III or take the hit and pray it was not part of an all-out attack. “The only options I would have,” said Reagan, “would be to press the button or do nothing. They’re both bad.” Rather than debate his opponents on their assumptions, he turned the tables completely by refusing to accept their premises.
With all the praise Revolution is by no means hagiography. The author is at pains to emphasize that he considers Reagan less a cause of the revolution than a product, and the portrait that emerges is not without its warts. Of Iran-contra, the ugliest blemish, Anderson is scathing; he attributes much of it to former CIA director William Casey’s brain tumor, which he implies affected Casey’s judgment. What rankles him most about the operation was its amateurish cast, more silly than sinister, and he does not spare Reagan when apportioning blame. “Those very qualities of character that made it possible for Reagan to do so much, to rise so swiftly and surely to power, to put us on the path toward the reduction of nuclear weapons, to lead us to the greatest economic expansion in history, were the same qualities that almost destroyed him,” he writes. “The same detached, almost regal manner of managing was, on its other side, a naïve trust in aides that bordered on irresponsibility.”
Like Reagan, Anderson, too, gives no attention to the social and moral issues that were a considerable part of Reagan’s popular appeal. That’s a serious omission, particularly in such a comprehensive work. But what’s left is nonetheless the best political memoirs to come out of the Reagan era. Not least among the reasons is that Anderson treats the ideas behind Reagan as seriously as the man.
As for Reagan himself, the autobiography is the least of his monuments, which are readily apparent to everyone but those who still can’t admit to themselves they underestimated him from day one. In time he will even get his due, as historians begin to put together his remarkable story in a less hostile atmosphere. I suggest they might start at the beginning of his term, just after he was shot, when he was the commencement speaker at my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. It was here, after all, that Jimmy Carter in 1977 told us that we had to get over our “inordinate fear of Communism,” and the expectation was that Reagan would deliver a ringing counterattack. Instead, Reagan spoke mainly about the university and its traditions and his work on Knute Rockne, All American, and I distinctly remember being disappointed. Yet there was a message there about the great challenges faced by the free world, at a time when Soviet clients were on the march in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. A decade later they are well worth repeating:
The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and for the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.
Some act.