Reagan: The Life (111 page)

Yet the anecdotes were crucial. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of
humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked
him
. Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular.

Also vital to Reagan’s success was his ability to get other people to do his dirty work for him. He was accounted a terrible manager, unwilling to fire people, unable to keep track of what was being done in his name. If he had been the chief executive of a large corporation, these would have been damning failures. But in a president they can be essential to success. Whatever
William Casey was up to in the months before the 1980 election, none of it touched Reagan. Reagan likely gave Casey no encouragement to stall the hostages’ release. But he didn’t have to. He knew what kind of person Casey was and what Casey was capable of doing.

In the matter of Iran-contra, Reagan understood full well the connection between the arms deliveries and the release of the hostages. His diary makes this quite clear. But he distanced himself from the details, leaving them to
John Poindexter and
Oliver North. Poindexter didn’t inform Reagan what North was doing, because every signal he got from Reagan told him the president didn’t want to know. By remaining in the dark, Reagan eventually managed to convince himself that the dealings were something other than arms for hostages. His outrage at the accusations of bargaining with terrorists was emotionally sincere, if logically incredible. As for the contra connection, Reagan didn’t know about the diversion of funds, again because he didn’t want to know. He set the moral tone of the administration, which placed the survival of the contras above nearly everything else, including the repeatedly legislated will of Congress. He left it to his subordinates to figure out how to keep the contras alive. He let Poindexter and North work out the details, and he let them take the fall when the scandal broke. Even if his memory hadn’t failed by the time the Walsh investigation got to him, there was little chance of his being prosecuted. There were no fingerprints and no smoking gun.

A related talent was Reagan’s ability to say one thing and do something else. In an individual this is hypocrisy; in a president it is realism. Reagan’s political philosophy was adamant conservatism. He valued freedom over equality, the individual over the group, the private sector over the public sphere. In every speech he gave, he preached the conservative gospel. But Reagan’s political practice was flexible pragmatism. He opposed
abortion, but as California governor he relaxed the state’s
abortion laws. He favored lower taxes, but he accepted tax increases when necessary to achieve the best bargain with Congress. He believed communism to be evil, but he forged an alliance with the leader of the most powerful communist country in the world.

Reagan’s pragmatism was a reflection of his ambition. Throughout his life and career he had constantly sought larger stages; when he reached the largest stage in American politics, the presidency, he sought the still larger stage of history. He wanted to make a mark, not merely to make a statement. He understood that the purpose of politics is to govern, not to preserve ideological purity. He pursued the ends of
Barry Goldwater by the means of Franklin Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt and other successful presidents, he realized that progress comes in pieces. If he got four-fifths of his ask in a negotiation, he took it and ran. He knew he could return for the rest.

Reagan’s timing—some called it his luck—was no less essential to his success than his ability. In historical terms, his life and career couldn’t have been timed more effectively. The century after Reagan’s birth was an American era in world affairs. The United States came of age as Reagan came of age. He lived through World War I, with its false step toward American global leadership; he survived the
Great Depression and experienced the annealing it afforded the American character. He went to Hollywood’s version of war as the United States went to war against Japan and Germany. He became aware of the communist threat in the film industry as America discovered the communist threat in the world at large. His political career blossomed as the struggle against communism matured, and his career culminated as the Cold War reached its climax.

Timing in human affairs is often a matter of coincidence, the overlapping of lives and moments. Reagan’s moment in power overlapped with the moments of two men who were crucial to his success.
Paul Volcker was
Jimmy Carter’s gift to Reagan; it was Volcker who squeezed the inflationary expectations out of the economy and put it on the path to solid growth. And he did so at just the right time for Reagan. If Volcker had taken charge of the Fed two years earlier, the economy might have improved sufficiently that Carter and not Reagan would have been elected in 1980. If Volcker had arrived two years later, the recession that routed the Republicans in the 1982 elections could have swept Reagan from office in 1984.

In a similar way,
Mikhail Gorbachev was Moscow’s gift to Reagan. Reagan had tried without success to engage Brezhnev, Andropov, and
Chernenko in arms talks; only the emergence of Gorbachev provided him with a counterpart willing and able to negotiate seriously. Perhaps the demise of the Soviet Union was predestined; the system there had been broken for years. Yet the timing of the demise depended on someone willing to acknowledge the undeniable. Had Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko collectively lived but a few years longer, Reagan would never have found his partner. To one of his successors would have gone the distinction of pushing the Soviet Union to the edge.

Presidential reputations, however, reflect what did happen, not what might have happened.
Herbert Hoover might have been a great president if not for that nasty depression. In Reagan’s case, of the two goals he set for himself—shrinking government and defeating communism—he accomplished half of the first and all of the second. He cut taxes and
regulations but failed to cut spending; the result was the economic recovery but also the doubling of the federal debt. He defeated communism definitively, with the help of Gorbachev and George Bush. By the early 1990s communism was a dead letter in world affairs. The Communist Party still ran China, but it was communist in name only. Residual communist regimes in
Cuba, Vietnam, and
North Korea didn’t matter to anyone except their own suffering people.

“I
KNOW IN
my heart that man is good,” Reagan had said at the dedication of his library. “That what is right will always eventually triumph.” These lines of the Reagan creed were etched over his grave at the Reagan Library.

But the closing words of his poignant farewell to the American people were the ones that were better remembered, that captured the belief that made him irresistible to so many. The shadow of forgetfulness was growing long across his path, yet his optimism and faith in his country remained undiminished as he wrote, “
I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

The author would like to thank the many people without whom this book would not have been possible. Duke Blackwood, Mike Duggan, Jennifer Mandel, and Ray Wilson made research at the Reagan Library a pleasure. The archivists and librarians at the Library of Congress, the Seeley Mudd Library at Princeton University, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin were thorough professionals. My colleagues and students at the University of Texas at Austin have allowed me to test ideas on them, as have audiences who have heard me speak about Ronald Reagan these last several years. Jonathan Hunt took time from his own research to track down some elusive sources.

Kris Puopolo at Doubleday has been a model editor, prodding and applauding at just the right moments. Dan Meyer made the production process as smooth as it could be. Bill Thomas has supported my work for years, and continues to do so.

Special thanks to those individuals who personally conveyed to me their experiences and knowledge of Reagan and his presidency. These include Ron Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George Shultz, James Baker, Edwin Meese, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Robert Gates, Jack Matlock, Ken Adelman, Bobby Ray Inman, Phil Gramm, Henry Nau, Gilbert Robinson, Harrison Schmitt, Hans Mark, Ben Barnes, Greg Leo, Lawrence Freedman, Gary Sick, Douglas Brinkley, and Larry Temple.

The most important source of information on Ronald Reagan is Reagan himself: his speeches, diaries, letters, and memoirs. Reagan spoke a great deal in his lifetime, and he wrote much more of what he said than is commonly appreciated. He started speaking while an actor in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s; he kept speaking as spokesman for General Electric in the 1950s and 1960s; he spoke as governor of California in the 1960s and 1970s; he spoke as a candidate for president in the late 1970s and then as president in the 1980s. At first he wrote his speeches unaided, but even after he acquired assistants, he put his pencil to every draft, making sure that what came out of his mouth was what was in his head and heart. The unfriendly critique of Reagan is that he was merely an actor, mouthing lines written by others. The truth is more nearly the opposite: few presidents paid closer personal attention to what went into their speeches than Reagan. And the speeches of few presidents shed more light on the presidential mind than Reagan’s. Reagan’s speeches—delivered in person, over radio, and on television—are an important source for the present book. Portions or all of some early speeches were printed in contemporary newspapers; after he became a national figure in the 1960s, an increasing number aired on radio or television. Few of his radio speeches survive in audio form, but hundreds of radio scripts from the 1970s, most in his own handwriting, are preserved at the Reagan Library. A great many have been published in
Reagan, in His Own Hand
, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson. After Reagan entered the White House, essentially every word he spoke publicly was recorded and transcribed; these are most readily available through the Public Papers of the Presidents, a part of the digital American Presidency Project.

Reagan kept a diary while president. The purpose was to facilitate the writing of his presidential memoir, and in fact selections from the diary were published in that memoir. Yet as often occurs with diaries, the entries took on a life of their own. Reagan often forgot the audience over his shoulder and revealed himself in ways he wouldn’t have to the public. The diaries have been preserved at the Reagan Library; they have been published almost in their entirety as
The Reagan Diaries
, edited by Douglas Brinkley.

Reagan was a letter writer of the old school. Even as governor and president, he eschewed dictation when feasible, preferring pen and paper. He wrote to friends and acquaintances but also to people he didn’t know who had written to him regarding some aspect of public policy. These letters are the personal counterpart to his public speeches; occasionally, he said more in letters than he felt he could say in public, but as a rule they demonstrate the remarkable consistency between the public Reagan and the private man. An illuminating selection of the letters is
Reagan: A Life in Letters
, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson.

Reagan wrote two memoirs. The first,
Where’s the Rest of Me?
, was a campaign biography published during his run for governor in 1965. Written for a California audience during the liberal 1960s, it deals, sometimes cheekily, with his childhood and youth and especially his years in Hollywood. His second memoir,
An American Life
, published in the more conservative 1990s, falls sedately into the genre of presidential memoirs. Both books are reasonably accurate regarding the events they portray, but they are more valuable as reflections of how those events appeared to Reagan.

Reagan’s presidency produced scores of millions of pages of memos, papers, meeting notes, proposals, reports, agendas, itineraries, and the like. The principal repository for these is the Reagan Library, where a substantial portion of the whole has been processed and declassified but much remains under seal of one sort or another. Yet the available and steadily growing documentation allows an ever fuller, if still interim, assessment of Reagan’s presidency.

In the digital age, virtual archives are an essential tool for any historian or biographer. The American Presidency Project, mentioned above, is one such archive. Others of note for foreign policy are the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project. Both employ researchers who painstakingly pry open refractory archives, using the
Freedom of Information Act and similar instruments, and they make the results of their labors available to other researchers. More focused is the Reagan Files, created and curated by Jason Saltoun-Ebin, which provides a window on recent declassification of national security documents from the Reagan years. The Gorbachev Foundation Archive affords access to records relating to Reagan’s adversary and eventual partner in superpower diplomacy. The digital archive of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation does the same for Reagan’s favorite prime minister.

As governor and as president, Reagan attracted many talented, strong-minded men and women to his administrations. They didn’t always agree, and after they left office, several tried to settle old scores in print. The result is an embarrassment of memoir riches—embarrassing in extent to the historian and biographer, embarrassing at times personally to the various authors. Most of Reagan’s senior cabinet secretaries and White House staff told their stories: Alexander Haig, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan, James Baker, Edwin Meese, Michael Deaver, Robert McFarlane. Several others with less central roles in the Reagan administration, including Martin Anderson, Robert Gates, Peggy Noonan, and Larry Speakes, have also recounted their experiences. Precisely because these individuals often disagreed strongly, their dueling perspectives highlight the contours of the Reagan presidency in a way the memoirs of a more congenial group might not have.