Richard Reeves has a new book on the Reagan Presidency: "PRESIDENT REAGAN The Triumph of Imagination" (Buy.com $17.82). If you had read Reeves earlier book on Reagan from 1985 "The Reagan Detour", arguing that "the Reagan years would be a detour, necessary if sometimes nasty, in the long progression of American liberal democracy" you might be surprised that Reeves, along with the collective judgement of history is beginning to see the late President in a more favorable light.
Jon Meacham, Managing Editor of Newsweek, penned an exceptionally kind review, not just of the book, but the Reagan Presidency itself:
"The Great Communicator", by Jon Meacham, The Washington Post:It's heartening to hear mainstream media types like Meacham finally "get it" too and realize what many of us have been saying all along: Reagan was a great President and if the elites could escape their self constructed blue state bubble they would realize it too. No doubt readers also are picking up the similar myopia with which these blue state elites view President Bush.
He finally got it. In the end, after the tantrums, after hanging up on Nancy, after hearing about his own firing from a CNN report, Donald Regan at last came to see the truth about Ronald Reagan, the man he served as secretary of the treasury and chief of staff.
"What was the biggest problem in the White House when you were there?" the biographer Richard Reeves asked Regan.
"Everyone there thought he was smarter than the President," Regan replied.
"Including you?"
"Especially me."
That brief exchange tells us much about Reeves's illuminating new President Reagan and about a significant shift in elite opinion about our 40th president. Long dismissed and derided by the upper reaches of the press and by denizens of the blue-state bubble, the man who swept two national elections, helped bring down the Soviet Union and fundamentally changed the terms of the American debate over government is no longer being viewed as "an unwitting tool of a manipulative staff," in Reeves's phrase. In a way, Reeves took up "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau's challenge and went "In Search of Reagan's Brain." He found a formidable one.
President Reagan marks a surrender of sorts. The establishment has, for the moment at least, given in and decided that Reagan was a great historical figure after all.
...
In April 1986, at a Library of Congress symposium on the presidency, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger -- a man, Reeves points out, who had been "routinely attacked by Ronald Reagan over the years" for insufficient idealism in foreign policy -- said: "You ask yourself 'How did it ever occur to anybody that Reagan should be governor, much less President?' On the other hand, you have to say also that a man who dominated California for eight years, and now dominates the American political process for five and a half years, as he has, cannot be a trivial figure. It is perfectly possible history will judge Reagan as a most significant President."
It will indeed. Readers are in Reeves's debt for this entertaining, deeply reported and revealing portrait of a man destined to be in death what he was in life: a figure of enduring fascination.
In Chapter One, available online here we find more eerie parallels to the current President:
In one of his first presidential campaign memos, Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, told him:Sound familiar? And the people who played up such fears and disinformation were as WRONG about President Reagan as they are WRONG about President Bush.
We can expect Ronald Reagan to be pictured as a simplistic and untried lightweight (Dumb), a person who consciously misuses facts to overblow his own record (Deceptive) and, if president, one who would be too anxious to engage our country in a nuclear holocaust (Dangerous).
More from Chapter One:
The new President, unlike most of his predecessors, wanted to give his inaugural address from the back of the Capitol, facing west toward the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln -- and toward Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of many American heroes. He told Khachigian that a friend from California had written him a letter about a soldier buried there, a World War I battlefield courier named Martin Treptow, a boy from Wisconsin killed in action in France in 1917. Treptow had kept a diary, Reagan said, with this on the flyleaf: "My Pledge: America must win this war. Therefore I will work. I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone."
25 Years Ago Hope and Freedom are Reborn.
White House Photo
White House Photo
On that winter day, January 20, 1981, I was happy to be one of the many who turned out to see the ceremony from a distance on the mall. Eight years later when his successor George Bush '41' was sworn in, I was privileged to be a ticketholder to the event on the Capitol Grounds.
More Chapter One:
[on Inauguration Day] The former governor of California had left a wake-up call for eight o'clock, four hours before he would be sworn in as the fortieth President. At the appointed hour, Deaver knocked on the door. Reagan grunted and Deaver heard him roll over, so he knocked again, saying: "It's eight o'clock. You're going to be inaugurated as President in a few hours."Does that last paragraph sound familiar? I could go on and on, but read chapter one for yourself before you decide to buy the book. I can't finish this segment without sharing two great quotes concerning Reagan's strategy on winning the Cold War "We win, they lose!" and his outlook towards Soviet Leader Gorbachev: "When [he] stops trying to take over the world, then maybe we can do some business."
"Do I have to?" Reagan called back. Then he laughed.
...
Reagan's men circulated among reporters, making sure the ladies and gentlemen of the press understood the symbolism of facing westward: a new direction opened by a man of the West. But it was the Californian's words that marked the most radical departure from presidential tradition. And the words were Reagan's own. He wrote the final version of the speech out in longhand on a yellow legal pad -- waking once at 4 A.M. to write for twenty minutes -- changing the speechwriter's phrasing, changing "they" to "you," adding old favorites of his own, among them: "Those who say we are in a time when there are no heroes just don't know where to look." He followed that with his own ode to the common people: "You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates...producing food enough to feed all of us and the world beyond....You meet heroes across a counter."
He said nothing he had not said before in his years as spokesman and speechman for General Electric and then as governor of California and as the post-Goldwater icon of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. As he had during the campaign, he touched four simple themes: (1) reducing taxes and deficits, thus reducing the power and size of the federal government; (2) rebuilding the American military; (3) confronting communism around the world; (4) restoring American patriotism and pride.
...[From President Reagan's First Inaugural Address]:"We the people," this breed called Americans...special among the nations of the Earth....And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom.words of hope and destiny had elected him over a failing President. When Jimmy Carter said the nation faced "a crisis of confidence," Reagan said no, it was Jimmy Carter who had lost confidence, adding: "I find nothing wrong with the American people." Carter, the former governor of Georgia, was the last of a line of Democratic and liberal leaders and liberal commentators who consistently reminded Americans of what was wrong with them, citing milestones of failure, from the racism of the old South to the folly of the war in Vietnam and the lying of Watergate.
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