Books: "REAGAN: His Life and Legend" By Max Boot

 

REAGAN: His Life and Legend

By Max Boot

Liveright; hardcover, 880 pages; $45 

Max Boot is a historian and foreign-policy analyst who is a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

REAGAN is Boot's new biography of the 40th President, a work that's been a decade in the making, with the result being one of the most-detailed biographies of Ronald Reagan. It is the story of an actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership brought in a transformative conservative era in American politics. 

This is a journey of a young Reagan from Depression-era America to "Morning in America" when he was President in the 1980s. This comprehensive biography drew from previously unavailable archives and new interviews with nearly 100 of Reagan's aides and family members, many of whom have since passed away.

There is, obviously, a lot on Reagan's presidency, and how he governed from the center even though he was a flag-bearer of conservatism. There is a reevaluation of his foreign policy wins over the "Evil Empire," and how they succeeded more through cooperation than confrontational messaging. There is also an evaluation of how Reagan is both different and similar to Donald Trump, at a moment when a lot of Trump's supporters have been open about how they don't view Reagan in such a favorable light anymore.

The thing about a biography like this, and what gives it such appeal, is how much is in here that is usually glossed over in most of his biographies, tracing the arc of his story to when his great-great grandfather arrived in the Midwest in 1851.

Reagan, who was born in 1911, grew up in Tampico, Illinois, and just a few months after he was born, his parents, Jack and Nelle Reagan, moved into a new house with modern amenities, which included indoor plumbing a flush toilet. In December 1914, the Reagan family took a big step as it moved to Chicago, which was becoming one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of 2.4 million people.

In his teenage years, Reagan came into his own, and in 1926, he took a summer job as a lifeguard that greatly influenced his development. He was hired by Edward and Ruth Graybill, fellow members of the Disciples of Christ Church who were granted a commission to operate a bathhouse and food stand at the municipally-owned Lowell Park. His days began with loading the Graybills' pickup truck with hamburgers and hot dogs, soda, and pounds of ice, and he worked until dark when the pool closed.

In the mornings, when the pace was slow, he would give swimming lessons to kids, some as far away as Chicago. He had to supervise as many as 500 swimmers at a time in the water, and over seven years, he saved 77 people from drowning, each one adding to his record of accomplishment. His son, Ron Reagan, feels that his work as a lifeguard taught him self-worth, but also the satisfaction that came from helping others. Of course, one fringe benefit was that girls were swooning over the handsome lifeguard, which Dutch, as he was called, was aware of and didn't mind. 

By the time Reagan was old enough to vote, he followed his father and became a Democrat, voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and writing later that he was an "ardent New Dealer." This was telling, as Boot writes that there were a lot of similarities between Roosevelt and Reagan in their time in the White House. Both were master communicators who, Boot writes, "were master communicators who employed an intimate and informal speaking style and possessed an almost mystical connection with the American people. And both men were endowed with a preternatural sunniness, unflagging optimism, copious warmth, and bountiful charm and good cheer." Reagan also studied FDR's inaugural address and could do a pretty good impersonation of his idol. He used one of FDR's most memorable phrased in a 1964 speech that launched his political career, "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

One similarity they shared, as well, on the dark side was that both presidents were nearly assassinated - Roosevelt just before he took office and Reagan a couple months after entering office. Roosevelt was in Miami when an assassin aimed at him on February 15, 1933, and wound up hitting Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak. Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981, just over two months after he entered the White House by John Hinckley after he exited a hotel where he attended a meeting.

Soon after, Reagan was off to Hollywood, whose messaging of an idealized America captivated him, especially after the tough upbringing he endured. These were themes of a lot of his movies, as well as his political campaigns. There also is a fair deal about how Reagan's life story mirrored that of the movie titans at the time, including the brothers Warner, who were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who fled pogroms and were viewed as outsiders when they arrived in Hollywood.

Reagan's first movie, Love Is on the Air, and it came out in September 1937, a "B picture" whose premiere was in Des Moines. He started in four Brass Bancroft movies, the first of which was Secret Service of the Air, released in 1939. While it now would be viewed as primitive compared to today's special effects, inspired recruits for the Secret Service, including Jerry Paar, who saved Reagan's life. 

Hollywood had a big influence on Reagan's life, as that is where he met both of his wives. Jane Wyman was an actress who had a similar Midwest upbringing, as she hailed from St. Joseph, Missouri. She fell in love with Reagan the second she laid eyes on him, and their first met when they shared a table at the Warner Brothers commissary. Their romance blossomed while their shot their first movie, based on a Broadway comedy called Brother Rat, in San Diego in July and August 1938. It took some convincing for Jane to convince Ronnie to marry him, as she was already twice-divorced. By the spring of 1939, she threatened to kill herself if he didn't marry her, to the point she took an overdose of pills, a story that has been backed up by the fact they were engaged while she was in the hospital.

They were married for nearly a decade, until their divorce in 1948, and that fall, Reagan went to England to get over it, his first trip to Europe. It was a tough period for England, in the aftermath of World War II, staring with inedible food, which the wealthy Reagan resolved by having steaks sent in from the "21" in New York. Jane was still on his mind, and he even sent her a peace offering, a model ship from London, which she rejected. Reagan began to date actively, with some revelations that would astonish people used to how he was portrayed as President. 

Then, as head of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was an arbiter of the blacklist of Communist sympathizers. One day, in 1949, Nancy Davis read that she was on the list, as she was mistaken for an actress with the same name. Eventually, she got in touch with Reagan, who suggested they go to dinner to discuss this, a date that went until 3 A.M. Eventually, she visited his ranch and was introduced to his children, but it took nearly three years for them to be married, with Nancy pushing the issue by saying she had an agent find her a Broadway play in New York. The ultimate push was that Nancy was pregnant, and when it was revealed, they were engaged on February 21, 1952, and were married just 12 days later, as quickly as possible in order to present the pregnancy as a premature delivery.

Soon after, Reagan became interested in politics, partly because he saw his savings dwindle by 1956 due to being in the 91 percent income tax bracket. He burnished his image when he turned to television and he hosted General Electric Theater.

Reagan became Governor of California in 1966, and he was already being talked about of a run for President two years later. Another major name being talked about was Bobby Kennedy, who Reagan hated with a passion, who he blamed for having him fired from GE Theater. It was to the point, in the Governor's office, he had a book that was an attack on RFK from a right-wing provocateur that had every fact or rumor about the New York Senator. A preview of what their race for the White House would look like came in 1967 when Reagan battled Kennedy in a CBS Town Hall on the Vietnam War, which is available on YouTube. Kennedy blamed his press secretary for having him do the debate, which the consensus was that he lost, and Reagan saw the coming presidential run as a case for more "retribution."

1968 would turn out to be a far more different year, first with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., then on June 4, when Robert F. Kennedy was murdered. Perhaps because it occurred in his adopted home, Reagan seemed more shaken by seeing RFK assassinated than when his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was slain nearly five years before. Reagan wrote to Patti, who was at a boarding school in Arizona, "Even though I disagree with him on political matters and even though I disapprove of him and his approach to these problems, I still feel very deeply the tragedy of this young man taken from his family in this way."

In this excerpt, Boot writes of Reagan's personality and how it shaped his Presidency: Ronald Reagan was one of the most famous people in the world from the 1930s onward, but he remained an enigma even to those who knew him, which suggests that his very inscrutability may have contributed to his appeal. He was the most affable of men -always ready with a story or joke, always genial, always polite, always thoughtful on a one-to-one basis that transcended race or class. As a result of his acting experience, he could connect with an audience like few other politicians, yet his own children said they did not know him well. Behind his practiced bonhomie was a glacial reserve that forced the person closest to him - his wife, Nancy - to say that he walled off part of himself even from her. 'He was just plain hard to figure out,' noted one White House aide. He preached family values, but he was the first divorced man and the only one other than Donald J. Trump to win the presidency. He presided over an often-dysfunctional family and did not know until long afterward that one of his children (Michael) had been molested by a camp counselor or another (Maureen) had been beaten by her first husband. He never knew the names of his children's friends. 

He would call aides and acquaintances to comfort them when a parent died, and his aides were slavishly dedicated to him, but he barely noticed when aides left his employ and seldom did anything to buck up their morale while they were working for him. Sometimes, long before the onset of Alzheimer's, he could not remember their names. James A. Baker III, his White House chief of staff and later US Treasury secretary, told me that Reagan looked on him as just one of the 'hired hands,' and even political consultant Stuart K. Spencer - an essential strategist on all four of Reagan's successful political campaigns going back to 1966 - said that he always viewed himself as a 'solid acquaintance,' not a real friend of Reagan's. Spencer felt much closer to former president Gerald Ford in spite of having run only one of his campaigns. Reagan was fundamentally a loner who, by the time of his presidency, had few real friends beyond his wife and two former state police officers who worked with him on his ranch. He would have made, in the words of Spencer, 'a pretty good hermit,' yet he was so good-natured that he utterly lacked the resentments and paranoia of presidents such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump.

Reagan had strong convictions and could be quick on his feet as a speaker, but he lacked intellectual depth or curiosity. His mind was full of finely honed stories and factual nuggets, many of them apocryphal, some of them based on movies he had seen or acted in, others invented by right-wing propagandists. No matter how many times his claims were revealed to be false, he stubbornly kept repeating them. He often bored aides and visitors by reciting the same well-worn tales over and over instead of engaging in the intricacies of policy arguments. When he was working in Hollywood, he drove many associates to distraction with his incessant talk about politics; when he was in Sacramento and Washington, he drove many associates to distraction with his incessant talk about show business. Yet he was seen as more successful in implementing his agenda than such presidents as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, all of whom would presumably have scored higher on an IQ test. His memoirs were ghostwritten, as were most of his presidential speeches, yet he could be an extremely effective writer in his own right, producing words that were meant to be spoken rather than read.

He could be famously stubborn. Yet he was usually willing to compromise and settle for 70 percent of what he wanted to get a deal done. He had a near-photographic memory honed by memorizing movie scripts yet claimed to not recall crucial details of decisions that proved scandalous, whether a deal he made with the Music Corporation of America (MCA) as president of the Screen Actors Guild or his administration's initiative to sell arms to Iran and funnel the proceeds to the Contras. Sometimes he could make tough decisions when he felt they were necessary - firing thousands of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981, invading Grenada in 1983, bombing Libya in 1986, walking out of the Reykjavik summit later that year rather than trading away missile defense - yet often, as in the aftermath of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, he was paralyzed by indecision. He was a distant and disengaged chief executive who found it impossible to fire aides, and he was terrible at managing his staff, allowing disagreements and jealousies to fester out of control."