Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” By the end of Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend, a reader is confronted with the puzzle of a person almost as perplexing as the country that the British prime minister found so inscrutable.
During his eight years in the White House, 1981-88, Ronald Reagan acquired the reputation of being a “Teflon president.” Potentially detrimental incidents or situations seemed to slide off his shoulders without sticking.
Yet as this new, authoritative biography points out, the actor-turned-politician also had something of a Velcro personality — interwoven contradictions and paradoxes he couldn’t escape.
From his early years growing up in small-town Illinois until he retired to California’s sunshine, Reagan was, in Boot’s phrase, “painfully shy,” an introvert who courted solitude. Outwardly friendly, he was essentially friendless, with one conspicuous exception — his wife Nancy, “his only true friend.”
How to square these characteristics with his highly visible careers in show business (radio, movies, television) and politics (on the state and national levels)? It’s relatively simple: Steadfast, forwardly focused ambition overpowered those traits that stood in the way of this determined person’s objective. Again and again, Reagan disregarded his basic nature, usually by flashing wide smiles and displaying unfailing jauntiness. His drive for success proved stronger than his bashfulness.
As Boot reports, just nine days after Reagan won his first political campaign in 1966, California’s governor-elect held a meeting to talk about his next electoral goal: the presidency. In 1980 (after attempts in 1968 and 1976), Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, fulfilling that highest ambition.
Boot spent over a decade on Reagan, interviewing scores of people and reviewing thousands of documents. A principal conclusion he draws, another paradox, is that Reagan was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people might think.
Full-throated conservative rhetoric fueled his entry into the hurly-burly of democratic competition. His governing, however, tended to operate at a much lower decibel level — and closer to the middle of the political spectrum. The attainable trumped the ideologically charged yet often impractical illusions of Reagan’s circumscribed coterie. Working to cut deals that involved compromises on taxes, immigration and Social Security helped government function.
Boot substantiates that Reagan “was not a rigid ideologue but a pragmatic idealist.” For example, during his two terms in the White House, he worked to reduce the arms race and Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. By the time he left the Oval Office, what he’d called the “evil empire” had changed for the better, and his summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev served, in part, as the prelude to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
Complicating any assessment of gubernatorial or presidential achievement is the fact that Reagan never worried about mastering the details of policies or programs. Aides admitted they could tell he wasn’t following the ins and outs of internal debates and that briefing books went unread — especially during his second White House term. “He knows so little and accomplishes so much,” one national security adviser admiringly observed.
What counted most for Reagan were the ceremonial aspects of public service. Boot remarks that “symbolism and speechmaking were the main business” of America’s 40th president. Appointees were responsible for keeping the machinery of the executive branch running.
During his time in Hollywood, Reagan learned to take direction, a habit he carried into political life. He might revise speeches to make them completely his own, but staff members always prepared substantive “scripts” for telephone calls, meetings or ceremonies, all faithfully followed.
Out of camera range, Reagan could be puzzling, too. Though he emphasized the virtues of “family values” in countless statements, at home he was a distant parent to his children, who often experienced, in one searing phrase, “pain, resentment, and anger.” From Boot’s careful reporting, to call the household dysfunctional seems appropriate.
The book’s subtitle promises treatment of its subject’s “legend.” One legendary component of Reagan’s life was his politically resonant reliance on his nickname, “the Gipper.”
Although Boot devotes nearly three pages to the 1940 movie Knute Rockne, All American and notes that “Reagan, with one stirring screen performance [as Notre Dame football star George Gipp] appropriated the identity of one of the all-time greats of the college game,” he makes but a couple passing mentions of the moniker without explaining why it became central to the way Reagan projected himself and wanted to be viewed.
There’s complexity to the “appropriated” identity that deserves probing and interpretation. A player’s putative deathbed wish became a coach’s rallying exhortation. But, as “the Gipper” in politics, was Reagan trying to be seen more as Rockne than as Gipp, as more than just a great player but as the coach? Was this a clever reverse play with a definite purpose?
Repeated and deft usage of the nickname allowed Reagan, the politician, to make not only a connection to his former acting career but also a direct appeal for ballot-box success: “Win one for the Gipper.”
Always conveyed with a smile, the seriocomic plea reduced the distance between the self-described “citizen-politician” and the citizens. Indeed, a scene of last words from a relatively small cinematic role gave birth to a unique request that never seemed to lose its vibrancy. During three decades in politics and government, the Gipper won many more than “one” victory.
When Reagan was becoming well-known as an actor in the late 1930s and early ’40s, he was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. In ensuing years, he shifted dramatically to the right, becoming a leading voice for the conservative Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, in 1964.
What never changed throughout his decades of public prominence was Reagan’s perpetually sunny disposition or his Manichaean, good-versus-evil view of the world. Nuance tended to get lost while he reacted to knotty situations.
Boot criticizes Reagan’s “disturbingly cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy.” In trying to explain a subject as being either black or white, the governor and president repeated statistics and quotations that were inaccurate or couldn’t be confirmed. Repeatedly they came from unreliable sources, yet they served his purpose: to bolster an argument and sound informed.
The approach had a serious problem: “Once Reagan’s mind was made up, it was nearly impossible to change it, even if he was presented with evidence that he was wrong.”
One of the most gripping chapters of Reagan focuses on the assassination attempt that seriously wounded the new president in March 1981. In this almost minute-by-minute account — reminiscent of Robert Caro’s superb reporting and writing in his multivolume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson — a reader learns exactly what happened and what was said. Amazingly, Reagan remained jovial despite the mortal danger. The dozen pages Boot devotes to the shooting and its aftermath are unforgettable.
Near the end of this detailed, 836-page biography, Boot quotes from the diary of Allan Gotlieb, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. throughout the 1980s. Watching Reagan closely, the diplomat observed that Reagan “has managed to become the flag. He transcends politics.”
Some figures personify their countries and become, in the eyes of their citizens, national symbols. Churchill in Great Britain, de Gaulle in France, Ben-Gurion in Israel: They all occupy singular places in the histories of their people.
For modern times, Reagan does, too. In Boot’s striking phrase, he “idolized and idealized” the United States. Even opponents of his policies and decisions recognized he was a champion and cheerleader of America.
When Reagan’s eyes moistened at a speech or ceremony, the tears were real. He wasn’t acting. He was being himself.
Bob Schmuhl, the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce professor emeritus of American studies and journalism at Notre Dame, is the author of Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents and The Glory and the Burden: The American Presidency from the New Deal to the Present.