President Ronald Reagan was personally moved when recounting the story of a World War II bomber pilot who opted to go down with his plane — and his gunner — when the latter was trapped and couldn’t bail out. “We’ll ride it down together,” said the empathetic pilot.
“Congressional Medal of Honor,” noted Reagan, “posthumously awarded.”
In fact, the incident never happened. Most likely, Reagan adapted it from a 1944 Don Ameche movie. His repeated telling of the story had his staff sweating bullets, given that even before Snopes, it was easy for press to discern the story’s apocryphal nature.
Today, the White House staff’s concern with a president’s fluffing of an inspirational anecdote seems positively quaint. After all, Reagan wasn’t out there declaring that a legitimate U.S. election was “stolen,” or suggesting that AIDS patients try injecting bleach. Even after the Iran-Contra Affair, Reagan apologized, demonstrating a deference to the rule of law.
“If Reagan had still been alive in 2016,” writes Max Boot in his new biography, “he undoubtedly would have been derided by most Republicans as a RINO (Republican in Name Only) like the two Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.”
Boot himself would be considered such if he hadn’t left the party: he’s the author of 2018’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. It would be understandable if a never-Trumper looked back nostalgically on the Reagan era, and there are many who might miss a time when a Republican could actually say in a debate, as Reagan did in 1980, “We are talking about putting up a fence. Why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for [Mexican immigrants] to come here legally with [a] work permit?”
The author, though, is determined to land in the middle of a divide between hagiography and excoriation that has more or less applied to the numerous biographers before him. The middle ground, to the extent it exists, has been befuddlement — as in Dutch, the 1999 work of creative writing produced by would-be official biographer Edmund Morris.
Boot credits Reagan with an unappreciated willingness to compromise, and with raising the nation’s spirits by effectively acting the role of a confident leader. As the subtitle of an insightful book by close Reagan observer Lou Cannon had it, the presidency was The Role of a Lifetime for the onetime movie star.
However, Boot also sees Reagan as a figure whose disregard for the truth went well beyond not being able to resist a good war story. Crucially, he bases that argument in a fresh examination of the pivot anyone who seeks to understand Reagan must tackle: the candidate’s conversion from an FDR Democrat to a Goldwater Republican.
Previous biographers have largely explained this as a combination of political and personal expedience, spurred by Reagan’s frustration with the tax burden he bore as a well-off man who struggled to finance a Hollywood lifestyle while effectively supporting two families. Boot is too dismissive of this latter consideration, but correctly points out that Reagan’s conversion owes a great deal to the power of narrative and the people with whom he chose to surround himself.
Even as Reagan deftly avoided being considered a red-baiter, he fell for a conspiracy-minded fairy tale about the dangers of communism. Boot cites several details that make clear Reagan was attentive to the John Birch Society’s propaganda, repackaging bogus quotes and baseless claims while making increasingly conservative speeches across the country in his post-Hollywood, pre-Sacramento years.
Boot locates Reagan’s astonishing political success in an ability to frame the world in Manichaean terms that added urgency and pleased the Republican base, while maintaining an appealing persona and making behind-the-scenes compromises that allowed him to accomplish things a more rigid doctrinaire never could have.
Reagan was a convincing communicator because he truly believed what he was saying. In contrast to both “Slippery Dick” and Nixon’s antithesis Jimmy Carter — who was painfully honest, and looked pained while being so — Regan wove a gauzy, optimistic fantasy that he sold like the professional pitchman he once was. Boot’s account of the Iran-Contra Affair makes clear that the President was deeply shaken by the scandal, though he certainly knew about many of its details and should have known the rest. In Reagan’s mind, as he told the American people, he really believed he was on the side of the angels in doing whatever seemed necessary to free American hostages.
Where Boot particularly excels, as a biographer, is in connecting his subject’s accomplishments and failures to Reagan’s essential character. If Reagan’s triumph as President was to act the part superbly, Boot argues, the ways in which he let Americans down are related to his shortcomings as an actor.
Reagan felt and appeared sympathetic, but he lacked true empathy: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. “He often did not even understand what his own children were going through,” writes Boot. That hindered his ability to play against type and left Reagan puzzled at the frustrations of, for example, Black Americans.
Reagan was convinced he wasn’t personally racist, so what could his non-white constituents have against him? He seemingly couldn’t comprehend that his own Horatio Alger story wouldn’t work the same way for a person without his privilege.
While Boot critiques Reagan’s liability to fall for a good story, another of the biographer’s own strengths is that he knows he’s telling a good one. Few political lives have had as much (literally) cinematic drama as Reagan’s, from his plucky play for stardom to his unlikely rapport with a Soviet leader. Still, Boot respects his readers’ patience and avoids dwelling too long on Reagan’s childhood or getting bogged down in the transcripts of his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Although the author doesn’t put too fine a point on the ways in which the Trump era of Republican politics has cast Reagan’s legacy in a new light, he seems to understand the topic is bound to be on readers’ minds. Reagan may still be valorized by today’s Republicans, who define the movement that’s come to dominate the party by way of an acronym for a campaign slogan that was Reagan’s before it was Trump’s (“make America great again”), but many of Reagan’s policies — and certainly his willingness to compromise — are decidedly out of fashion.
What stands out now, in revisiting Reagan’s story, are the subtle ways in which the actor presaged our current era of emotion-driven, data-skeptical Republican leadership. Consider the following, all of which are detailed by Boot.
- A paranoid, proto-Q willingness to blame vaguely defined “communist” forces for everything up to and including the sag in his Hollywood career (Reagan cited a nonexistent whispering campaign).
- A skepticism of federal bureaucracy (today’s “deep state”), which Reagan described in 1961 as “the very essence of totalitarianism” insofar as it shaped policy without direct voter input.
- A susceptibility to utter fantasies, which became the basis for significant policy decisions.
Most notably, in the latter category, was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — dubbed “Star Wars” by Ted Kennedy, in one of the few jibes that stuck to the Teflon President. It was a science-fictional concept of a space defense shield, and it exasperated Gorbachev when it became a sticking point at the leaders’ Reykjavik summit despite the Soviets’ willingness to make unprecedented concessions. SDI was something “almost no government officials” believed could work “in any realistic timeframe,” Boot notes.
Reagan’s biggest, most consequential lie — to the American people, and to himself — may have been supply-side economics. The idea that tax cuts would “pay for themselves” by spurring economic growth and hence increased revenues was understood from the beginning to be ultimately an article of faith with Reagan, never a notion that mainstream economists found plausible. After Reagan used the bogus notion, successfully, to pass eye-watering tax cuts for the wealthy, it entered the playbook for accomplishing such cuts repeatedly over multiple administrations to follow.
Boot’s dedication to puncturing the myths that have arisen around the Gipper will doubtless earn him enmity from the Reagan-saved-the-world faction, but the author’s gimlet-eyed biography stands as a highly readable review of one of the most consequential lives in the 20th century. There may never be a truly definitive biography of a man whose inner life was a mystery to many, sometimes including his own beloved wife, but Boot’s Reagan is both essential and accessible.
I was born in 1975, so Ronald Reagan was in the presidency when I first learned what that meant. My initial impression, I remember, was that it was odd to have the world’s most powerful person sharing a first name with a fast-food clown — but Reagan’s performance in the role grew on me, as on so many others.
Reagan was the president of my childhood, and although I couldn’t process the impact of his policies (and although I knew my own state was all in for our homegrown hero Fritz Mondale in ’84), I was reassured by Reagan’s grandfatherly presence at the podium. His manner was perfectly calibrated to exude a balance of gravity and levity. It was easy to believe Reagan when he praised our country, because he looked like he was actually enjoying the job of leading it.
In the end, Boot determines, Reagan’s greatest positive accomplishment might have been his lifting of the national mood. While he didn’t make everybody feel as sunny as his television ads implied they ought to, the extraordinary extent of Reagan’s public support had a lot to do with how much people simply liked him.
In 2024, we call this phenomenon “vibes.” The importance of good vibes is central to the Democratic strategy: shifting from Joe Biden, who no one got excited about despite his extensive legislative accomplishments, to Kamala Harris, whose campaign’s explicit focus has been to bring the “joy” back to politics.
How far the Democrats’ happy warriors will take them is a subject of intense conjecture as I write, and both sides have been at least implicitly playing on the lingering affections of Reagan fans. Reagan is still a repeated point of reference for the GOP, even as Democrats tout the endorsements of would-be Reagan Republicans like his vice-president’s granddaughter.
For better and for worse, Reagan was the greatest giver of vibes since his Democratic hero, Franklin Roosevelt. The fact that this year’s election will seemingly be decided on vibes, rather than on facts or policies, is Reagan’s lasting legacy.
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