Does the world need another book about Ronald Reagan? Since he left office in 1989, there have been least a dozen attempts to capture Reagan’s life, philosophy, and popular appeal. The Reagan Library lists a hundred-odd memoirs by staffers, Cabinet members, reporters, and family members. They range from the conventional Washington-insider report (Lou Cannon’s Role of a Lifetime), the hagiographic (Craig Shirley’s The Search for Reagan), the eyewitness memoir (Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution), to the score-settling narrative (Patti, Michael, Ron, Maureen, and Nancy Reagan, respectively).

The most highly anticipated Reagan biography, Dutch, written by historian Edmund Morris with the full cooperation of the former president, was a colossal dud. When it finally emerged in 1999, it surprised readers with its quirky narrative and its utter failure to capture anything meaningful to explain Reagan’s remarkable career or popularity. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg called it “radically weird.” George Will trashed it as “dishonorable” and “an act of bad faith.”

Max Boot uses Morris’s failure, along with the recent declassification of a raft of Reagan-era documents, to make his case that a fresh assessment of Reagan is needed, and that he has provided one in his mammoth new biography, Reagan: The Man and the Legend.¹ Boot is a surprising man for the job. He has been a meticulous historian of warfare, guerilla armies, weapons, and Vietnam. His strength has been to weave together the evolution of war, technology, and events to offer a fresh perspective.

But around 2016, Boot’s interests took a turn. Appalled by the rise of Donald Trump and Trump’s seduction of the Republican Party, he became an indefatigable anti-Trump voice. Instead of mining libraries, he became part of a pack of one-time rightists who emerged as reliable anti-Trump pundits in newspaper columns and on television.

His 2018 book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, was a manifesto of the moment, explaining his own departure from conservative politics and the Republican Party. The book stood out not because of the usual anti-Trump litany but rather because Boot had begun to suspect that something was rotten in the conservative movement all along.

“Extremism is embedded in the DNA of the modern conservative movement conservatism,” he wrote. Distancing himself from the alleged political naiveté of his youth, he argues that “the whole history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism.” 

On the heels of that intellectual conversion, any fair-minded reader would have to approach Boot’s new biography of Reagan gingerly. Would this new history be an attempt to trace a direct line from Reagan to Trump? Would he argue, in essence, that the authoritarian and cultish impulses of Donald Trump’s GOP find their roots in the conservative mind that Reagan brought to the Republican Party decades earlier?

It turns out that, apart from a few paragraphs at the end of book, this is not Boot’s primary objective. Instead, he wants us to take the book’s title—Reagan: His Life and Legend—in its most literal form. For Boot, Reagan’s reputation was largely “a legend” whose accomplishments have been overstated by cheerleaders. Some Reaganites want to put the 40th president on Mount Rushmore; Boot is determined to prove he doesn’t belong there.

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Boot recounts what is now a familiar story, beginning with Reagan’s modest upbringing by an alcoholic father in small-town Illinois. Gifted with a golden radio announcer’s voice, Reagan slipped into a Hollywood career based on good looks and friendly demeanor. With the exception of 1942’s King’s Row, Reagan’s film career was unmemorable. A marriage to Jane Wyman covered closely by Hollywood tabloids ended up in divorce as her acting career eclipsed his and his interest in union matters bored her.

Reagan was still discovering politics in the 1940s and ’50s, and the hyperbole and occasional fictions in which he indulged at the time were hardly surprising for someone trying to garner attention in a world not yet his own. But here Boot writes not as a historian seeking out previously undetected signs of the budding political instincts of a man who would become an unexpectedly consequential world-historical figure. Instead, he adopts the tone of today’s newspaper fact checkers, alerting readers when a politician’s words or actions should be greeted with caution.

For example, Boot reports that when Reagan struggled with a diminishing acting career, “the future politician who would preach the necessity of personal responsibility for people on welfare or in prison was ducking responsibility for the ‘rough sledding in his own life.’” Reagan, in this telling, was always also prone to simplification and falsification. Boot reminds readers that, in the postwar era, “because Reagan had not gone within thousands of miles of the front lines, his memories of World War II, while vivid, were often inaccurate.” He acknowledges that Reagan was always a compelling speaker but finds it necessary to add that this was the case “whether or not he had the facts on his side.”

As Reagan moved from actor to union leader to political player, Boot portrays him as ideologically inconstant. As governor of California, he was “not all that conservative” or “the ultimate pragmatist.” The notion of Reagan as committed ideologue, Boot wants to argue, is on shaky ground. That Reagan was finding his way in politics, compromising where necessary, never seems to have occurred to him.

Boot’s book is best when he examines two episodes in Reagan’s long road to the White House. But here, too, the tut-tutting of the author is odd. The first concerns Reagan’s 1964 speech making the case for Barry Goldwater, known as “A Time for Choosing.” Most students of American politics look at this speech, broadcast on prime time on NBC, as the moment Reagan became a national voice for a new kind of conservative politics. Contemporaneous accounts describe it as “electrifying.” Boot puts on his fact-checker green eyeshades: “A graduate student who studied the speech,” he solemnly reports, concluded that “it contained seven false or exaggerated statements and thirteen unconfirmed statements that were almost certainly false.”

The second episode was Reagan’s dramatic challenge of Gerald Ford for the presidential race of 1976. Here is one of the few moments in this history where Boot adequately captures the drama of Reagan’s high-stakes politics. Although Ford was nominated by the Republican Party at the convention, it was by the slimmest of margins; 1,187 Ford delegates to 1,070 Reagan delegates. It was the last meaningful roll-call vote at an American national political convention.

Boot then describes the moment when Ford, after delivering a triumphant acceptance speech, in-vites Reagan to the podium to say a few words. In a six-minute address, delivered without notes, Reagan described two threats: the erosion of freedom and the risk of nuclear annihilation. Although Ford had just been nominated president, “Reagan held his listeners rapt,” Boot explains. “The vast hall was entirely silent save for the lachrymal sighs of some of his more emotional supporters.”

Said John Sears, Reagan’s campaign chairman, “Even though we lost, we won.”

Alas, this evocation of an important moment in time is not equaled, or even approached, in the remainder of Boot’s turgid account. He trudges through the entirely familiar events of the president’s two terms: the assembly of a high-profile and sometimes contentious team; the assassination attempt; tax cuts; the apostasy of budget director David Stockman; the recession of 1982; the infighting of counselors Ed Meese, Michael Deaver, Don Regan, and his wife Nancy. Setbacks are followed by scandals followed by presidential speeches that, as Boot points out in increasingly pedestrian fashion, contained inaccuracies. The quotidian details of life in the White House that appeared so urgent at the time have lost their impact.

Even with major events and themes of the Reagan era, Boot is determined to underplay their significance and cast Reagan as a cheerful but aloof bystander. He tells us that the Reagan’s economic success was “an accident of timing,” with much of its impact exaggerated by supporters. He argues that Reaganomics increased economic inequality and led to the rise of the populist movements we see today. We also read that Reagan and his wife encouraged “the conspicuous consumption of the decade.”

On foreign policy, Reagan is portrayed either as an exaggerator or out of touch. In meetings with Gorbachev, he often read from note cards. His interest in missile defense was based on “religious conviction that Armageddon was imminent.” The Iran-Contra affair was part of a list of now-forgotten scandals Boot calls a “roll call of dishonor,” caused by a “disengaged president uninterested in running the federal government.” Even Reagan’s much-celebrated speech telling Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” gets sapped of its importance; it was a “feint to keep conservatives happy.”

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Whatever evidence there might be for these harsh judgements, they miss the point. Conspicuous by its absence in this 700-page history is any serious reflection on what explains Reagan’s electoral success and consistent popularity. His 1980 victory created an unprecedented coalition of cold-warrior hawks, libertarian economists, country-club Republicans, Christian conservatives, and ethnic Democrats, an alliance no leader has been able to replicate since. His 1984 campaign against a former vice president delivered victory in 49 states—unthinkable in the current environment.

Boot believes that the Reagan presidency was “therapeutic” for the nation but ascribes no greater meaning to its role in realigning the country’s politics or focus. Like banal critics and dull historians before him, Boot believes that Reagan’s sunny demeanor, his “penchant for wishful thinking,” and his persistent detachment provide the best explanation for his success.

Yet the Reagan era was suffused with a level of political drama and upheaval entirely missing from this account. The Reagan coalition was not just a temporary truce among different factions; it was a widespread rejection of establishment thinking on economics, foreign policy, and social issues. Even with all its mistakes, the Reagan presidency spurned the prevailing wisdom that had overtaken the country through the defeat in Vietnam, a decade of slow growth, an activist Supreme Court, and an increasingly arrogant Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

What makes the best of the Reagan histories or memoirs so valuable—and so much more enjoyable to read than this humorless tome—is how they capture the sense of transformation and ideological tumult. The fights between the supply-siders and the deficit hawks or among factions at the State Department were not efforts to accumulate power; they were battles of ideas, conducted at a startlingly high level, especially considering the childish quality of such discussions today. However successful or unsuccessful Reagan policies may have been, the 1980s forged a real platform for different stripes of conservatives and free marketers, interventionists, and negotiators. They made politics consequential.

Boot is at pains to demonstrate that much of the Reagan history was a series of errors mixed with ideological exuberance that helped set the country “on the path that ultimately led it to embrace divisive figures such as Donald Trump.” This line, squeezed into the final pages of this biography, shows that Boot’s recent career as a daily pundit has flattened him as a thinker and observer. What he provides, in the end, is a vapid account of the vital questions that the Reagan administration was compelled both by circumstance and avocation to grapple with every day of its full eight years. Boot displays an utter incapacity to grasp what it was inside the man himself that made Reagan the most important president of our time.

^{1 Reagan: His Life and Legend, Liveright, 880 pages}

Photo: AP Photo/Dennis Cook

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