The Magazine: On Political Books
Efforts to elevate Ronald Reagan’s reputation to Rooseveltian heights continue. Time to stand athwart historians and yell “Stop!”
When I think of Ronald Reagan, I am reminded of a car salesman named Mo who once put me in a used Nissan. The car I wanted had a sticker price that seemed a little steep. Seeking to negotiate, I made an offer. Mo—who I should mention was irrepressibly pleasant and impossible to dislike—proved unwilling to budge at all. This surprised me, and I tried to haggle, but to no avail. I exercised my only leverage by thanking him for his time and leaving the dealership. We continued this dance by phone and in person for several days, with Mo sticking hard to his terms while coaxing me to buy. I confess that he began to get in my head. Who was this master negotiator? How did he keep moving me from my position while maintaining his own? He took a nominal amount off the sticker to cushion my ego and threw in some floor mats, but when I bought the car it was more or less on Mo’s terms. I drove it off the lot utterly bested.
I came to realize that Mo was not in fact a king among dealmakers. He simply would not lower his price. Mo confounded me by having a simple goal and holding to it, in the process forcing me to negotiate against myself. I can imagine how Mikhail Gorbachev must have felt when he faced Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986. The president was determined to preserve his Strategic Defense Initiative, the planned antimissile shield that could theoretically stop an incoming Soviet weapon. No matter how many times Gorbachev pressed, Reagan would not relent. It did not matter that granting Gorbachev’s request—limiting SDI to the laboratory setting for ten years—meant conceding nothing; in no conceivable universe would SDI be ready for active testing within that time frame. Reagan’s firmness prevented a deal at Reykjavik, and the parties walked away embittered. But sure enough, they held another summit the following year. And Reagan eventually got his way.
Reagan: The Life
by H.W. Brands
Doubleday, 816 pp.
Reagan’s goals as president were as simple as Mo’s, and like Mo he stuck to them relentlessly. According to H. W. Brands, the author of Reagan: The Life, Reagan’s goals were “to shrink government at home and defeat communism abroad.” He left more detailed matters—that is to say, all detailed matters—to subordinates, to the point where he himself could seem a little simple. (Reagan shocked Paul Volcker at their initial meeting by asking the chairman to explain the purpose of the Federal Reserve.) And yet simplicity can be a form of genius. Reagan viewed public affairs through a lens of right and wrong and refused to let details obstruct his clear-eyed view. In Brands’s words, “Communists and their sympathizers were bad, anti-communists and their supporters were good.” In this way the United States found itself in bed with Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, and apartheid South Africa. Who would imagine that such a basic, unimaginative thinker could win the Cold War?
American presidents are remembered for two, or at most three, big things. While historians traffic in nuance, the public does not, constructing instead a narrative around a president’s most significant acts, accomplishments, failures, and omissions. Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the union. Grant’s administration oozed corruption. Hoover coddled the rich and ran the country into depression. Johnson passed the Great Society and lost Vietnam. Barack Obama—I predict history will say—enacted universal health insurance and ended the Iraq War. This is not to imply that the day-to-day activities of a president do not matter; obviously they shape national and often international events. But if Reagan boiled things down to their simplest terms, so do we.
Ronald Reagan stands to benefit more than most presidents from this reductive process of historical memory. Big picture, he looks impressive. A man of unblemished optimism and an enduring hero to generations of Republicans, he stood tough and presided over the fall of the Soviet Union. And yet even as we learn more about Reagan, we increasingly overlook troubling details in favor of grand themes. Eleven years after his death, archives are opening, associates are speaking up, the ramifications of his policies are coming into perspective, and judgments are being reached. Brands’s biography—the first since Reagan’s death—is an important part of this process, since the author is a historian at the University of Texas whose judgments are well informed and credible. Brands’s conclusion is this: Reagan stands alongside Franklin Roosevelt as one of the two major presidents of the twentieth century. Roosevelt oriented the country to the left and defeated fascism. Reagan reoriented the country to the right and defeated communism.
There are many ways to respond to this claim. The first is to note that the extent to which Reagan defeated communism is a matter of lively debate. He had the good fortune to be president at a propitious moment. Decades of economic retardation had finally caught up with the Soviet Union. Eastern Europeans, led by Lech Walesa in Poland, had begun to resist Soviet oppression. And the USSR had buried three crusty old premiers in quick succession and selected an ambitious young reformer in the person of Gorbachev. He and not Reagan deserves credit for ending the Cold War, to the extent that one person must be feted. Yet Reagan’s opponents must concede that the president tested Gorbachev while giving him space to enact precarious reforms. We cannot know what Gorbachev would have done without Reagan pushing him, but it is a safe bet that the answer is: “Less.” Reagan broke with his party by negotiating with Gorbachev on the question of nuclear arms reduction, and by trying to change rather than contain the Soviet Union.
It is important to note that Brands’s conclusion about Reagan is not a partisan one. While pairing Reagan with Roosevelt, he acknowledges that both remain highly controversial presidents, and he does not take sides on the merits of their policies. Brands is correct that both Reagan and Roosevelt succeeded in pushing their respective agendas, which amounts to success of a kind. Reagan and Roosevelt also had comparable influence in pulling the national conversation hard to one side, although here again there is an asterisk. In the twenty-six years since Reagan left office, Democrats have held the presidency for fourteen years—not exactly a windfall for the right. Yet today’s Democratic Party is far more centrist, and the Republican Party is far more right-wing, than in the 1960s. This is partly a result of the rightward pressure that Reagan exerted over national politics.
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