Reagan left his mark on the Republican Party, and on the presidency

Biographer Max Boot charts the course of a politician who was famously affable and pragmatic, but who also resorted to racist dog whistles and played loose with facts. 

Forty years have passed since Ronald Reagan, the dominant figure of 20th-century American conservatism, waged his final campaign for the presidency. Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984 affirmed his stature as a political force, and his legacy continues to resonate as Americans navigate another important election year.

With that in mind, “Reagan,” Max Boot’s new biography of the 40th president, couldn’t be more timely. Timing was obviously much on his mind as Boot, a historian, foreign policy analyst, Washington Post columnist, and former Christian Science Monitor staffer, worked on this ambitious account of Reagan’s life. Reagan occupied the White House from 1981 to 1989, and a dwindling number of his administration’s key figures are still around. Boot managed to interview quite a few, and “Reagan” could very well be the last biography of its kind to draw on so many personal conversations with key primary sources.

In his introduction, Boot laments that while much has been written about Reagan, “there is still no definitive biography.” Given the scope of his research, which also uses extensive archival material, the author clearly wanted to leave no stone unturned.

Is “Reagan” definitive? Perhaps that ideal will remain elusive, since Reagan, who died at 93 in 2004, was famously hard to define. He had almost no close friends, and his only abiding confidant, apparently, was his wife, Nancy. “One of his closest aides, Michael K. Deaver, confessed, ‘At times Ronald Reagan has been very much a puzzle to me,’ while his longtime secretary, Helene von Damm, wrote that ‘he was fundamentally a very difficult man to know,’” Boot tells readers.

Reagan’s inscrutability most memorably confounded biographer Edmund Morris, who was so stumped in trying to discern the former president’s character that he threw up his hands and wrote “Dutch,” a 1999 project that ditched conventional biography and probed his subject through speculative fiction. For a more straightforward exposition of Reagan’s times, Richard Reeves’ “President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination,” remains hard to beat. In focusing more narrowly on the president’s White House years, Reeves yielded a swift read. “Reagan: The Life,” a 2015 biography by H.W. Brands, is especially useful for its insights into the president’s domestic policies.

Perhaps not surprisingly given Boot’s experience in foreign policy, he’s especially astute at unpacking Reagan’s diplomacy. Although the president was widely celebrated for working in tandem with Pope John Paul II to help bring down the Soviet empire, Boot argues that the relationship was more nuanced, with the leaders sometimes sharing goals but also having significant differences about how they should be advanced.

Reagan’s partnership with fellow conservative and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, often depicted as one of unbridled mutual admiration, comes in for a reappraisal, too. Thatcher was more cerebral and sometimes sighed at Reagan’s loose command of policy details. “Yet even though Thatcher remained doubtful about Reagan’s intellect,” Boot writes, “she always appreciated his political instincts because they tallied so closely with her own on most issues.”

Boot proves equally eager to refine popular notions about Reagan’s relationship with U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. Public collegiality between the staunch Republican and diehard Democrat is often evoked as a shining example of less partisan times. “A legend has developed that Reagan and O’Neill were friends,” Boot notes. While not really chums – O’Neill would later describe Reagan as the worst president he had known – the two knew how to compromise.

The first quote in “Reagan” comes from James A. Baker III, who served as Reagan’s chief of staff. “He was a true conservative, but, boy, was he pragmatic when it came to governing,” Baker says of his former boss. Reagan, Boot points out, had been a deal maker all his life – with Hollywood studio bosses during his movie career, lawmakers during his time as governor of California, and, during his presidency, with members of Congress and world leaders.

That kind of give-and-take seems rare in national life at the moment, but Boot touches on other aspects of Reagan’s leadership that are anything but salutary. Reagan sent out “an unmistakable dog whistle to white bigots while insisting that he was no racist,” Boot writes, particularly in his 1966 campaign for governor of California, and later in office.

The president also loved anecdotes, continuing to repeat them even when confronted by evidence of their falsehood. “Reagan had a disturbingly cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy that, arguably, helped to inure the Republican Party to ‘fake news,’” the author laments.

If his pronouncements could sometimes be fanciful, Reagan’s background in the movie industry kept him alert to the theatrical aspects of leadership. As one of his speechwriters, Peggy Noonan, put it, “what always struck me was his friendly grace, his enjoyment of the moment and of other people and his intuitive understanding of the presidential style.”

As he shouldered one of the most eventful presidencies in history, Reagan found his Hollywood experience invaluable. “There have been times in this office,” he admitted, “when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”