Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  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.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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.

  SOURCES

  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 ill
uminating 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.

  Of particular note is the memoir of Nancy Reagan, who exerted a powerful influence on her husband yet one that has often been misunderstood. Nancy Reagan cared little for politics per se; her interest lay almost completely in the fact that the love of her life was the most powerful politician in America. She had no policy agenda as such, aside from her war on drugs; her sole interest was in protecting and promoting her husband. She pursued this interest fiercely and, for the most part, effectively. And afterward she wrote one of the most candid and at times self-critical memoirs in recent American political history. Biographers of her husband are deeply in her debt.

  Reagan’s children wrote memoirs too. Those by Michael Reagan, Maureen Reagan, and Ron Reagan are the most revealing of family dynamics in the Reagan household. Patti Davis has written with sensitivity about her father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease during his final decade.

  The memoirs of some of Reagan’s foreign counterparts illuminate the effect the American president had on world affairs. The most important of these are by Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Reagan’s associates left collections of papers at the Reagan Library and elsewhere. The persons closest to Reagan and whose papers were available at the time of the research for this book include James Baker, with papers at the Reagan Library and Princeton University; William Casey, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Michael Deaver, at the Reagan Library; Edwin Meese, at the Reagan Library and the Hoover Institution; Donald Regan, at the Reagan Library and the Library of Congress; George Shultz, at the Reagan Library; and Caspar Weinberger, at the Library of Congress.

  Reagan’s associates and contemporaries have in many cases conveyed their impressions of Reagan and his actions in interviews. The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley has recorded and transcribed many such interviews. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has compiled a separate collection of interviews. Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober have gathered and edited scores of interviews to produce Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (1998). The present author has made use of all three collections and has conducted numerous interviews of his own.

  The secondary literature on Reagan and the Reagan years is large and growing fast. Nearly every author writing on American public life in the last third of the twentieth century deals with Reagan, as do many authors discussing the major events of international relations during this period. Of works dealing with Reagan specifically, several merit particular mention. Lou Cannon covered Reagan as a reporter from the beginning of Reagan’s political career to its close; his Governor Reagan and President Reagan remain the starting point for any understanding of Reagan’s role in public life. Steven F. Hayward has written at comparable length on Reagan, with a broader focus. Hayward’s two-volume The Age of Reagan is as fully history as biography; the first volume, which covers the years 1964 to 1980, sets the stage for the Reagan presidency, the subject of the second volume. Richard Reeves recounts the White House years with a journalist’s eye for detail in President Reagan; the book is especially good on the interplay of personalities in the administration. Edmund Morris enjoyed unprecedented access to Reagan as president, attending meetings in the White House and conducting lengthy interviews with the president and his associates. Morris’s Dutch disappointed and at times infuriated readers who expected a standard presidential biography rather than the impressionistic rendering Morris provided. Yet readers willing to invest the energy to sift the fact from the fiction can find illuminating material here. Sean Wilentz places Reagan at the center of The Age of Reagan, which assesses the conservative turn in American politics embodied and energized by the fortieth president.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. “TONIGHT”: New York Times, Oct. 27, 1964. Similar ads in Los Angeles Times and other papers.

  2. “Anytime you and I question”: Reagan campaign speech, Oct. 27, 1964, Reagan Library.

  3. “I have never aspired”: Washington Post, Nov. 26, 1964; Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 1964.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. “When I was eleven”: Reagan, An American Life (1990), 33.

  2. “The parades, the torches”: Reagan, Where’s the Rest of Me? (1965), 13.

  3. “Nelle tried so hard”: American Life, 34–35.

  4. “While my father was a cynic”: Ibid., 22–23, 30.

  5. “The Klan’s the Klan”: Anne Edwards, Early Reagan (1987), 53.

  6. “You’ll like it here”: American Life, 30.

  7. “I was forever the new kid”: Ibid., 23, 34.

  8. “Summoning my courage”: Ibid., 35.

  9. “He had a wry, mordant humor”: Rest of Me, 9.

  10. “That prodded me”: American Life, 41.

  11. “ ’Twas the night”: “Hallowe’en,” Nov. 6, 1925, in Reagan, in His Own Hand, edited by Kiron F. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (2001), 423–24.

  12. “Mark had”: “Yale Comes Through,” Nov. 17, 1927, in Reagan, in His Own Hand, 424–26.

  13. “For a teenager”: American Life, 41.

  14. “There’s something”: Ibid., 42–43.

  15. “I think the realization”: Ibid., 2
6.

  16. “The chief business of America”: David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge (2006), 4.

  17. “ ‘I would have been fine’ ”: Rest of Me, 21-22.

  18. “I had never seen Eureka College”: Ibid., 23.

  19. “Dutch?”: Edwards, Early Reagan, 87–88.

  20. “The head of Northwestern’s Drama Department”: Rest of Me, 44.

  21. “War-weary, young”: Ibid., 29.

  22. “I’d been told”: Ibid., 28–29.

  23. “I became the younger brother”: Neil Reagan interview, Bancroft Library.

  24. “Anytime I heard”: Edwards, Early Reagan, 101.

  25. “My principal academic ambition”: American Life, 53.

  26. “the A.E.F. suicide club”: “Killed in Action,” May 7, 1931, in Reagan, in His Own Hand, 430–32.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. “After we moved to Dixon”: American Life, 58–59.

  2. “Well, it’s a hell”: Rest of Me, 41.

  3. “By my senior year”: American Life, 59.

  4. “This is the big time”: Rest of Me, 46.

  5. “How the hell”: American Life, 64–66.

  6. “Well, Felix”: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008), 259.

  7. “His strong, gentle, confident voice”: American Life, 66.

  8. “I soon idolized FDR”: Ibid.

  9. “I was shocked”: Ibid., 68.

  10. “One summer’s day”: Ibid., 72–73.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. “Max”: American Life, 79–81; Reagan to Ron Cochran, May 12, 1980, in Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (2003), 29–31.

  2. “mortgage lifter”: Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Milner, Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story, with Jack Warner Jr. (1998), 81.