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Rating:  -
Reeves is a master of letting the camera lens tell a story. This is a book for those who appreciate nuance and perspective. There are endless examples of President Reagan's strategic brilliance, his consistent principles and the masterful way he changed the world. Along the way, we learn, in very illuminating examples, how dead wrong, elitist and narrow-minded Reagan's critics were. Many of Reagan's critics are the same people who now condemn President Bush. Reeves reports what happened in a very interesting way and lets the reader reach his/her own conclusion. Highly recommended for anyone wanting an inside look into one of our greatest Presidents.
Rating:  -
Presidential biographer Richard Reeves continues placing academic scholarship before political partisanship in this biography of Ronald Reagan. His latest presidential study examines how Ronald Reagan became ensconced as one of the greatest presidents of the 20th Century ---even while pointedly attacking and dismantling the New Deal itself---one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's crowning achievements----and FDR being that Century's other great president.
Reagan was able to achieve this contradiction through understanding how messages are effectively articulated. Because the specific message therefore mattered less than how the message was delivered, it was possible for the B-movie actor to rise into the White House. In 1985's "Back to the Future", a 1955 Doc Emmett Brown expresses shock that Ronald Reagan became president in the 1980's because this character had believed the voters would place more emphasis on presidential substance as opposed to image. Yet, from the historic Kennedy-Nixon debates onward, the television era emphasizes style of all politicians as essential to their achieving the office and policies.
Reeves, a self-described liberal, insists that Reagan did have ideas of his own. Instead of seeing a fresh future, Reagan's America saw a very idealized and `safe' past. All problems would be solved and order restored if only we could go back to `the way things were'. A kinder-gentler extension of Nixon's pioneering `southern strategy', this perspective relied on universal `feel good' images and intentionally shied away from earlier harsh `law and order motifs' promoting racial division and disharmony. Demonstrating just how masterful Reagan was with images, the head of American government succeeded with some measure of convincing people that the government itself is bad and the private sector offers real solutions to problems.
This repositioning of American politics was so successful that we Democrats found ourselves portrayed as 'big government liberals'-and consequently stigmatized. Thinking of themselves as individual taxpayers instead of citizens for a common good, the American public came to distrust the very same ethos which rescued the country from both the Great Depression and won World War II. Bill Clinton would become the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter only after assuring voters he was a `new Democrat' who shared this limited economic policy-essentially having toappropriate portions of Reagan.
Despite Reagan's `cold-war warrior' reputation, he and Mikhail Gorbachev actually enjoyed a symbiotic partnership. Growing up in the last decade of the cold war, I found this portion of the book especially intriguing. The superficially peaceful collapse of communism had (like so many things in politics) a sophisticated reality. Both leaders intentionally used each other to cover up numerous policy failings and salvage political reputations as they were leaving office during the period. Reagan needed to `end communism' in order to bolster his otherwise thin resume of accomplishments dotted with serious policy failures---including the unfolding Iran-Contra scandal. However, Reeves stresses that Reagan was not completely spared attacks on this strategy---and some of it came from a rather unlikely source.
Contrasting with the left who had opposed his economic and social policies, the harshest criticism now came from fellow conservatives---certain that America lost the Cold War. After all of the swaggering and military build-up that he previously had promoted, how could Reagan simply let the USSR go about its own business? Why was he not going in and ending communism? How ironic that many of those same critics are now at the forefront to ensconce Reagan's name and image on every conceivable institution imaginable.
This book is far from being the definitive Reagan biography (I am of the school which says biographies are always revised) but it is an interesting read.
Rating: -
Unlike any other presidential historian, Richard Reeves understands the emotional core of the story of the Oval Office: it is an action story, filled with epic conflict, constant tragedy, and sporadic comedy, populated by a fascinating constellation of supporting characters.
At the center of Reeves' drama is an American Giant, Ronald Reagan, revealed not through the comic-book idolatrous haze of conservative hero-worshippers or the empty cliches of liberal Reagan-haters, but through the unfolding, day-to-day action inside Reagan's White House. Reeves handles Reagan's strengths, weaknesses, complexities and contradictions without a shred of ideological bias and creates a rich portrait of a great, flawed man who understood like FDR and JFK that the first job of a president is to make Americans believe they are capable of doing great things.
Ironically, Reagan's greatest historical achievement was that he ignored the bad advice of his neo-con advisers, led by Richard Perle, and personally engineered radical, sweeping arms control breakthroughs with his junior partner Gorbachev. When the door was closed, Reagan was literally pushing not only for deep nuclear cuts, but total abolition of nuclear weapons!
At the time, Reagan was condemned by conservatives for Munich-like appeasement. Today, it's clear he was a visionary who should be revered by both the left and the right as The Most Radical Anti-Nuclear Leader of the Nuclear Age.
My only complaint with this book is that Reeves relies a bit much on recycling contemporaneous press coverage. All in all, a great read and a definitive companion piece to Lou Cannon's monumental Reagan books.
Rating:  -
The subtitle of this book is important. By "imagination" Richard Reeves means the combination of idealistic vision, dogged determination and sheer likeability that made Ronald Reagan so popular despite his obvious intellectual limitations and his capacity for mixing fact and fiction in public statements.
Reeves sums up the man: He "knew how to be President" and he also understood that his most important job was to lead the nation, not just to manage the government.
Reeves admits up front that he does not share Reagan's right-leaning political philosophy and tries to give him the benefit of the doubt when he can. Nonetheless, the portrait that emerges is one of a man with a limited grasp of the intricacies of world affairs and increasingly out of touch with important events that were swirling around him. He was "a man who knew what he believed" --- even when what he believed was palpably wrong. The public aura of adulation that grew up around him was sustained, says Reeves, by fiercely protective aides who told him what to say, protected him from adversaries and stage-managed his public appearances.
One major theme that emerges from these pages --- and the reader may fear that it applies to many another recent President --- is the huge difference between what the public is told and the reality of their government's private actions. We read of top-level officials dishing out facts and figures that they know to be false, of covert actions undertaken and then denied, of quotes made up out of whole cloth by press secretaries. Am I the only reader naïve enough to find all this discouraging?
This book is devoted entirely to the eight years of Reagan's Presidency. It is thoroughly researched and engagingly written. All the big moments of Reagan's tenure are there: Iran-Contra, the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev, Bitburg, "Star Wars," the assassination attempt of 1981.
Reagan is portrayed as a man driven by a few simplistic ideas --- America as a land specially favored by God, government as the problem rather than the solution, anyone who disagreed with him as at best deluded and at worst evil. There is a colorful gallery of villains --- Alexander Haig, arrogant and power-mad; Oliver North, duplicitous and self-righteous; Donald Regan, the officious treasury secretary and (later) chief of staff; hapless conspirators like John Poindexter and Robert MacFarlane. And yes, the strong influence exerted on Reagan by his iron-willed wife is given full play.
Reagan's inability to focus on what was going on around him, according to Reeves, reached alarming proportions toward the end of his second term and kept his aides scurrying, first to help him function and then to keep his condition from becoming public. There is a rich lode of anecdotes, some of them relayed by former Reagan staffers who wrote books after leaving their jobs: Reagan falling asleep during a meeting with the Pope, his wife hurling a vulgar epithet at the press, five-year-old Chelsea Clinton writing to urge Reagan not to visit the Bitburg cemetery ("Dear Mr. President: I have seen The Sound of Music. The Nazis don't look like nice people...").
Try though he does, on balance Richard Reeves does not paint a favorable picture of Ronald Reagan. His book is not a hatchet job by any means, but it steadily undermines the aura of sainthood that admirers have created around Reagan. Reeves's very last sentence seems to sum up his own attitude by quoting a fellow journalist watching the elaborate funeral ceremonies that followed Reagan's death in 2004: "God, this is impressive --- but the man they're talking about is not the President I covered every day."
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
Rating:  -
The Washington Post review of Reeves' Reagan suggests that the author looks at selective days in the President's life from a point of fly-on-the-wall omniscience. Reeves in fact seems to always be looking for a fly or flaw in the ointment, and his omniscience is that of the New York Times, for which he worked.
Five flaccid or failed presidencies before Reagan's had seemed to prove that the office was dangerous and devouring, that nobody in the modern era could succeed and survive as president. Two decades of presidential failure mirrored national decline. America and its leaders, on top of the world for brief shining moments after WWII, were either pitiful helpless giants or were merely pitiful and helpless. Then Reagan happened. Like FDR in 1933, Reagan survived, succeeded, and prevailed. Like FDR in 1936, Reagan's bold persistent experimentations with new relations between government and governed were rewarded with overwhelming vindication in 1984. To Reeves, Reagan's reelection and what it meant seem not to matter. Reagan's electoral triumph gets a grudging paragraph from Reeves, and his lead-up to November 1984 is a set-piece swoon for Walter Mondale, Reagan's opponent. Then Reeves moves briskly to the story he really wants to tell, a New-York-Times-eye-view of Iran-contra. Reeves looks at Reagan's triumph and sees a continuation of the long line of presidential failure.
Here are the little tricks that give Reeves' game away: Liberal criticisms of Reagan by Times guys, Tip O'Neill, Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings are carefully quoted. Then, for fairness and balance, conservative criticisms of Reagan are carefully quoted too. Reeves rolls out George Will or Margaret Thatcher or Barry Goldwater or Peggy Noonan on those occasions when they say something that makes Reagan look bad. Almost without exception their contribution to the fairness and balance of Reeves' Reagan is pejorative. Same for fly-on-the-wall flip-offs from administration insiders such as Stockman, Deaver, Haig, or Don Regan. Reeves drags his conservative characters on stage only when he can use them to bash conservatism, and his only raves for Ron (after his excellent discussion of the president's near death experience in 1981) are muted back-hand compliments, usually in footnotes, from French socialist Mitterand and from Soviet arms negotiators.
Reeves is not blatant in his dishonesty (although he claims that Reagan often was), but he has cherrypicked intel to produce a paid political announcement for the prosecution. It's not a lie, but it's not the truth. It's what we see in the New York Times: All the slanted news that's printed to fit the Northeast liberal consensus that dominated America's Big Media before Reagan got his horse's nose under the tent.
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