Several Steps In The Right Direction: Reagan by Max Boot

Of all the American presidents, the 40th is the one who still lacks a clear consensus decades after he left office. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, in 1911 and was, in 1980, the oldest president ever elected. The record has since been surpassed with unflattering results.

Anyway, back to the ‘80s. President Reagan is venerated—nauseatingly—by those on the political right. His rhetoric, viewpoints, and policies were firmly conservative, and he accordingly moved the country in that direction. For readers who were yet to be born, President Reagan’s domestic agenda came with a wide range of deregulation, expansion of markets, cracking down on labor unions and a large fightback against inflation which his supporters credit for breaking the economic misery of the 1970s. Furthermore, President Reagan’s foreign policy involved increased defense spending and a tougher stance on the Soviet Union, which his proponents claim hastened the end of the Cold War shortly after he left office. It should be no surprise that subsequent right-wingers have sought to emulate him in style and substance.

However, President Reagan’s detractors are equally vocal about his numerous shortcomings. Not only did he respond painfully slow to the AIDS epidemic, his deregulation policies put more power into the hands of financial markets, which set America on the road to the 2008 financial crisis. Not only that, his lax management style led to the Iran-Contra Scandal, a complex fiasco involving illegal arms trading to Iran where the profits would fund a right-wing militia in Nicaragua. This kind of scandal doesn’t happen to presidents with their house in order. Critics also say his secretly arming the rebels fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan had equally dire consequences down the road. After all, one of those rebels was a guy named Osama Bin Laden…

Given all this, the divisive attitude toward President Reagan and his policies has left a literary market hole waiting to be filled. Books hitherto written about President Reagan have either been slavish hagiographies or harshly-worded hatchet jobs that unfairly straw-man the 40th president. No biography written in the years since Ronald Reagan’s death has come close to being ‘definitive’ for readers looking to understand his role in the American story.

Then, in 2024, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations entered the picture with Reagan: His Life and Legend. Built on newly declassified documents and an extra 30 years of hindsight, did Max Boot produce the definitive biography?

Let’s find out…

Couldn’t they use a color photo instead of one that blends into the background of my website?

OVERVIEW

Reagan: His Life and Legend is a straightforward, single volume biography of America’s 40th president. His impoverished early life, his time as a Hollywood actor, Screen Actors Guild union leader (bet you weren’t expecting that), governorship of California and finally his presidency are all covered in clear detail. Readers unfamiliar with Reagan’s personal history before 1980 will learn quite a lot from Boot’s doorstopper. Tidbits that were news to me include a first marriage to another actress, Jane Wyman, that ended in disaster; a considerable period when he was an FDR Democrat; and four dysfunctional children he struggled to connect with.

Boot opens the book, weirdly, with Reagan’s death and funeral, and continues with an introductory chapter that read...oddly. I distinctly remember sitting in my living room reading this introduction with an eyebrow raised.

It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind about him, I thought to myself.

Authors approaching a subject with a clear set of ideas are often in danger of contorting the evidence in front of them into a narrative that either makes no sense or defies the written record. Boot’s introduction thankfully doesn’t go that far, but it certainly foreshadows the character of the book. From there, the introduction is a mixture of previewing Reagan’s achievements and shortcomings, and Boot describing his fortunate access to people who knew Reagan personally (always a plus for books like this).

After that, the biography begins proper, and the pros and cons hit you in the face almost immediately.

Pros

Whatever else Boot hoped to achieve with Reagan: His Life and Legend, his primary mission was undoubtably ‘setting the record straight’. The aforementioned hagiography/straw-manning in the Reagan literature means a revisionist biography of this kind is frankly necessary.

By setting the record straight, Boot reveals a man who is neither the paterfamilias of hyper-patriotic Americanism nor a devil who wanted to rollback progressive achievements to enrich his cronies. Instead, we meet a surprisingly passive, non-confrontational politician who was pragmatic in the extreme and cared little for small management details. This portrait gives readers the bizarre impression that Ronald Reagan was never in the driver’s seat for anything he ever did in his entire life.

To build this weirdly passive character, Boot frequently compares Reagan’s political rhetoric, folksy storytelling, and written memoirs with the hard evidence of actions and reactions to show a staggering disparity between the two. Reagan supporters will be dismayed to see how often he deviated from what they thought he did, while his detractors will no doubt delight in what seems like blatant hypocrisy.

Another major strength of this book is Boot’s access to recently declassified Reagan documents. Readers of this blog know I’m a sucker for books incorporating previously unseen material. New documents do a much better job putting decisions into context than educated guesses about what happened in the halls of power.

One event where such new information came in particularly useful was the recounting of the March 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan’s life. Previous depictions do not adequately convey the severity of the situation. I knew Reagan had been shot and needed surgery, but I did NOT know that he had no exit wound which required doctors to find the bullet, extract it, and then constantly turn him on his side to prevent excess fluid build up (Jesus). Several other events in Reagan’s life are covered in a similar fashion to the book’s benefit.

This combination of fresh material, historical hindsight, and crisp chronology already means Reagan: His Life and Legend is worth a read even if you strenuously disagree with either Boot or Boot’s subject.

However, there is a trade-off to employing that particular research recipe when writing a biography like this.

Cons

Boot’s method of ‘setting the record straight’ involves this constant compare-and-contrast between Reagan’s beliefs and the reality hindsight affords. Like any politician, Reagan often said one thing but was forced by circumstances to do quite another. Boot takes an almost perverse pleasure in pointing out the many, many, many times Reagan either misremembered something, committed a sin of omission, or simply did not follow through on a political promise. And so, large portions of the book can be humorless bordering on pedantic.

Some readers may object here. Isn’t the whole point of political biography to assess a politician’s words vs their ultimate actions? To some degree, yes, but degree is the key word. In this book, Boot fact-checks Ronald Reagan immediately after Reagan says or does anything.

Every. Single. Time.

We get it, Ronald Reagan was wrong in his beliefs.

Speaking of Reagan’s beliefs, his journey from hardcore Democrat in the ‘30s and ‘40s to ultra-conservative Republican in the ‘50s and ‘60s is not an obvious theme in Boot’s massive tome. When reading the book, I struggled to find the passages indicating why Reagan underwent such a radical change in worldview. Also missing from Boot’s biography is a clear understanding of why Americans found Reagan appealing in the first place. My generation is too young to get it, but Reagan won elections with the disparity of the New York Yankees beating a team of Little Leaguers. Clearly Reason appealed to something, but what that was, I still have no idea.

The final real con of Reagan: His Life and Legend is the subtle Presentism. For unaware, Presentism is a logical fallacy whereby you unfairly judge something, usually a past event, by present day standards. It’s a fallacy because it unconsciously assumes that present-day attitudes are the best metric for judging something. This bias unfairly moves the goalposts by utilizing information a previous rhetorician simply did not have when making their arguments.

To use an extreme example, imagine if a modern scientist said we should discard everything Aristotle ever said or wrote because nothing he did conformed with the theory of evolution. That would obviously be ridiculous because Aristotle lacked the conceptual tools to even make an incorrect guess about what we now call evolution.

In Reagan: His Life and Legend, Boot praises or condemns Reagan by measuring him against issues that press current-day moral buttons. For example, President Reagan’s thoroughly white cabinet comes under harsh scrutiny in Boot’s work even though the issue of diversity in public life is far more salient now than it was back then. By frequently using present-day metrics to assess the historical impact on Reagan’s actions, there are times when the book forgets the attitudes and standards of its subject.

Conclusion

Reagan: His Life and Legend is an excellent and thorough biography which won’t appeal to rapid Reaganites nor to Reagan haters seeking validations to their many criticisms. That said, readers who can put their initial feelings aside will find this an educational read. I certainly learned a lot.

Is it the definitive biography on Ronald Reagan? My verdict is: yes, for now.

It successfully hacked away the mountains of editorials that previously prevented a true historian from doing their work on Ronald Reagan, but Boot might have unfairly hacked away at parts of Reagan’s character in the process.