Reconsidering Reagan

Plus, oblivion and our national rupture

Who said the following about Ronald Wilson Reagan?

He is “totally lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable. All this – both the substance and human conflict – is above and beyond him. He has not enough of either knowledge or decisiveness to cut through the contradictory advice that is being offered to him.”

The person who wrote this in his diary was not a liberal critic who thought the fortieth president was an airhead. It was Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian who joined the National Security Council. The diary entry is cited on pp. 498-499 of Max Boot’s new biography Reagan: His Life and Legend.

Pipes had noticed “that the president rarely spoke and seldom listened attentively” during a discussion of how to respond to Polish leader Jaruzelski’s decision, under immense Kremlin pressure, to declare martial law on Dec. 13, 1981, Boot writes.

Who was Margaret Thatcher referring to when, after her first visit to the Reagan White House in Feb. 1981, she turned to her foreign secretary (Peter Carrington) and said, “Peter, there’s nothing there.”?

It was President Reagan, who had made inane comments about South Africa in Thatcher’s presence, leading another of her aides to remark that “Reagan ‘didn’t know anything’ about the subject under discussion,” Boot writes (p. 536).

Yet, despite his flimsy grasp of policy and astonishing lack of knowledge, Pipes observed in his diary that “Reagan understood remarkably well – intuitively rather than intellectually – the big issues.” (p. 499).

Fantasy and reality

Max Boot’s cradle-to-grave biography is an incisive, unsparing study of the most consequential U.S. president of the second half of the twentieth century. The author was my guest on Friday’s episode of History As It Happens.

The Age of Reagan is over, but his legacy endures – and not entirely for the better. Boot aptly covers all the major achievements and failures of Reagan’s eight years in power that are the subject of countless books already. The author’s strength is demonstrating how a man with such limitations – an atrocious personnel manager uninterested in policy details and often unaware of what his cabinet was up to – became an effective national leader.

There is a general amnesia surrounding, for example, the negative consequences of Reaganomics, which worsened income inequality, and the dishonorable scandals that plagued his administration, namely Iran-Contra. It is therefore hardly surprising that the tax cuts + deregulation playbook is still treated as gospel by some Republicans – deficits and debt be damned. The various scandals didn’t seem to stick to Reagan’s reputation, either, although dozens of administration officials were indicted and convicted. The Savings and Loan crisis, which was enabled by the banking deregulation Reagan signed into law (in the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982), presaged the subprime mortgage crash a generation later.

Reagan could be dangerously deferential to his aides while stubbornly embracing fantasies about the benefits of tax cuts or Soviet plots to conquer the world. He obsessed over Soviet or Cuban “infiltration” of Central America, where his administration would support vicious right-wing juntas and death squads in the name of fighting communism. Boot draws a line from Reagan’s habit of delegating authority to the crimes of Iran-Contra. The president was aware of the arms-for-hostages deal despite his denials. He lied to the American people on national television: “We did not – repeat – did not – trade weapons or anything else for hostages.”

Yet Reagan’s claim that he was unaware the profits from the illegal weapons transfers were being sent to the Nicaraguan Contras (at war with the socialist Sandinista government) was believable – because the chief executive was so disengaged. As Boot notes, however, “independent counsel Lawrence Walsh concluded that Reagan had known about the diversion of funds, as claimed by Oliver North, but he could never prove it.” (p. 677).

It is worth reflecting on the lessons of Iran-Contra in our age of relentless Trumpian corruption and incompetence alongside a Supreme Court that says the president enjoys immunity from criminal inquiry for “official acts.”

As Malcolm Byrne concluded in his 2014 study Iran-Contra, the inconclusive end of Lawrence Walsh’s criminal probe…

“…allowed senior Reagan officials essentially to receive a pass for their actions. The president and vice president escaped with little more than a temporary dent in their poll numbers… These developments raise the question of whether the affair further degraded public confidence in the ability of the political system to hold high-level officials accountable. More disconcertingly, the congressional and independent counsel processes failed to create a disincentive for future administrations against ill-conceived exercises of presidential power.” (p. 338).

Where Reagan sought to implement his foreign policy doctrine “legally,” no country was small enough to convince him that it posed no threat to U.S. hegemony in Central and South America or the Caribbean. The 1983 invasion of Grenada was premised on this fantasy view of reality. But the victory over Grenada’s puny Marxist regime served another Reaganist purpose – one for which he was admired by Americans who remembered the humiliations of the 1960s and 70s – to boost national morale.

Still, despite these many missteps, President Reagan did not govern as an immovable ideologue. In Boot’s engaging narrative, he was a pragmatist who loathed nuclear weapons and who successfully deescalated the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev, an act of detente that infuriated American conservatives who believed their man in the White House was being duped. On this score, Reagan was right and they were wrong.

The dark origins of Reagan’s conservatism

My conversation with Max Boot focused less on Reagan’s presidency than his complicated personality and the origins of his conservative ideology. The most eye-opening chapters of the biography deal with Reagan’s conversion from New Deal liberal to right-wing ideologue starting in the 1940s.

As his acting career fell apart after the Second World War, Reagan grew increasingly susceptible to anti-government demagoguery and anti-Communist conspiracy theories. He became an informant for the FBI as it investigated the phantom problem of Communism in the motion picture industry. He bristled at the high tax rates he paid on his substantial income as a movie star and then as a national television host on General Electric Theater. The John Birch Society was a fraternity of fanatics, but Reagan believed much of what its members had to say. Moreover, Reagan exhibited hostility toward civil rights while denying he harbored an ounce of bigotry toward Black Americans. He wanted it both ways – and many Americans were willing to give it to him.

“This is one of the central mysteries I wanted to uncover in this book. How did this New Deal Democrat who voted for FDR four times and really worshiped FDR, how did he become such a far-right conservative by the early 1960s? And what makes it hard to uncover is the way Reagan described his transformation is completely inaccurate. He often said ‘I didn’t desert my party. My party deserted me.’ to suggest that the Democrats had suddenly veered to the left in the 1950s, which was not the case at all,” Boot said.

For example, Boot went on,

“In 1960 John F. Kennedy actually ran to Richard Nixon’s right on defense policy and was firmly committed to combating communism. So this was not an accurate description of [Reagan’s] own evolution… I trace the evolution beginning in World War II where as a highly paid actor he was very unhappy about paying ninety percent rates of income taxation, and then after the war, he blamed the federal government for breaking up the studio monopoly and basically hurting his own career. As his movie career waned, he got involved in the hothouse politics of Hollywood during the McCarthy Era, where he became convinced that he was combating a communist plot to take over Hollywood. As I wrote in the book, this was largely a figment of his own imagination… He was very credulous about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.”

When Reagan went to work for GE in the 1950s, he imbibed the company’s free market ideology, which he in turn shared with the workforce on tours of factories, as “an inoculation against union troubles,” said Boot. “He would take the train from L.A. to New York and he would read these tracts the GE executives would push upon their employees – right-wing, conspiratorial tracts.”

Soon Reagan was espousing the Bircher view that the Democratic Party was waving the banner of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. In his 1961 radio address, he warned that legislative proposals for Medicare were a form of statism that would destroy American freedom. This was bonkers, of course.

To deflect accusations of racism, Reagan would repeat a fanciful story from his youth. When California’s former governor ran for president in 1976, his past opposition to the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting Rights (1965) Acts was well known. Rather than move toward the mainstream, Reagan compounded his race problem by embracing the notorious segregationist Jesse Helms – “I know the Senator very well and certainly approve of his philosophy.”

Yet Reagan could not understand his detractors because he had crusaded to end segregation in baseball when called ball games on the radio in the 1930s! “There is zero evidence he ever spoke up about it,” Boot said. But Reagan was no George Wallace. He raised his children to treat all people with respect regardless of race, and in 1982 he signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act. In Boot’s view, keeping with his lifelong mindset of blocking out unpleasant realities, Reagan was simply oblivious to much of the ugly discrimination inflicted upon African Americans.

I highly recommend Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend.

Please listen to our podcast first, though.

Remembering oblivion

The most thought-provoking op-ed I’ve read in 2024 was by the scholar and author Linda Kinstler.

Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion was published in The New York Times in June. I knew it would remain a timely piece throughout the election year, and following Trump’s victory I finally welcomed Kinstler on the podcast. She was my guest on Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens.

The federal court system did not resolve the rupture caused by the Jan. 6 riot. Americans, incredibly, remain divided along partisan lines over whether the person most responsible for this disgraceful attack on our democracy should be held accountable. In the meantime, hundreds of ordinary people who marauded through the U.S. Capitol have been convicted or pleaded guilty. Some have received lengthy prison sentences. Is it possible to put this episode behind us? Should we? If so, how?

In Kinstler’s view, there is a way to properly memorialize the actions of the mob without having their crimes hang like an albatross on the body politic. It is an act of oblivion.

“I became fascinated with the idea of oblivion as a technique of what we would essentially call transitional justice today, as a way of acknowledging something that has gone so wrong in a society, that has profoundly riven the bonds between citizens and rulers, and between subjects themselves” said Kinstler, referring to ancient acts of oblivion that were designed to bury past wrongs rather than seek revenge through the law or even vigilante violence.

As Kinstler wrote in The Times,

“There were moral as well as practical reasons for this: The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs. In those times of profound division, hatred, and ill will, politicians remembered the power of the act of oblivion, an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence.”

Among the issues we discuss in the podcast: the tension between memory and history; acts of oblivion after the American Revolution and Civil War; why forgiveness is not necessary for oblivion to succeed; whether Biden should pardon low-level Jan. 6 rioters; and her family history, which served as the inspiration for her book Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.

What’s next?

Coming up in next Tuesday’s episode, historian David Silverman on the evolution of Thanksgiving – the way we celebrate it and the mythic memories that helped Thanksgiving become a quintessential American holiday.

Next Friday, historian Daniel Bessner, co-host of the popular American Prestige podcast, will discuss the crisis of liberalism. What do we mean by liberalism? I promise not to bring up fascism.