Book Review: President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon (1991, revised edition 2000)

 

Cover of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, first published in 1991, this revised edition was published in 2000. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Journalist Lou Cannon, with a photo of him and Ronald Reagan in the background.

Ronald Reagan was one of the most significant Presidents of the 20^th century. Reagan’s electoral victories of 1980 and 1984 fulfilled the Republican dream of having a true conservative in the White House. Reagan has remained enormously popular with Republicans ever since. Journalist Lou Cannon covered Reagan from the very beginning of his political career, after Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966. Cannon was well-prepared to write the definitive biography of Ronald Reagan, and it’s hard to imagine anyone topping President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, first published in 1991 and updated in 2000. (Cannon covered Reagan’s California years in 2003’s Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power.)

Ronald Reagan the man remained an enigma to many of the people around him. Was he simple? Complex? Complexly simple? Cannon digs into Reagan’s personality in detail, and various chapters of President Reagan deal with Reagan’s humor, his intelligence, and other aspects of his personality.

The stereotype about Reagan is that he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the block. Cannon spends a good deal of time dissecting Reagan’s intelligence. He writes: “What I knew was that he understood all manner of things that suggested powers of analysis without possessing any visible analytic ability.” (p.111) What finally made things click for Cannon was psychologist Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences. Briefly, Gardner suggested that rather than using an IQ test as a measure of intelligence, there are many different types of intelligence. Gardner’s work hasn’t always been well-received by the psychological community, but I think there’s something to it. Gardner told Cannon that Reagan ranked high in interpersonal intelligence, but low in logical-mathematical intelligence. Gardner emphasized Reagan’s reliance on stories and anecdotes as a prism through which he viewed the world. Gardner’s analysis makes sense—Reagan was superb at charming people and being well-liked. Seemingly everyone who ever met Ronald Reagan has good things to say about him personally. Reagan was good with people, but he was not the smartest person in the room, the way that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are. I’d put George W. Bush in the same category as Reagan—not a genius by any means, but skillful at personal relationships. I think both Bush and Reagan were much smarter than the media made them out to be.

In my readings about Reagan, he strikes me as an odd mix of intuitive intelligence and a shocking lack of curiosity. During a 1983 summit, Chief of Staff James Baker asked Reagan why he hadn’t opened his briefing book. Reagan’s answer? “Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night.” (p.37) Well, we always knew he was a fan of the movies.

Ultimately, Reagan found it hard to separate fact from fiction. He was fond of telling a story about a World War II pilot sacrificing himself to stay with his wounded machine gunner as the crippled craft nose dived towards the ground. But was the story true? Nope. Reagan said the pilot was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. A reporter went through all 434 Medal of Honor winners from World War II and couldn’t find any that matched Reagan’s story. That’s because Reagan’s story came from Reader’s Digest. (p.38-39)

Reagan also stretched the truth when he made it sound as though he had filmed Nazi death camps as Europe was liberated at the end of World War II. Reagan in fact did no such thing. He never left the United States during World War II. Reagan served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps and helped make propaganda films for the military. Important work perhaps, but not the same as filming Nazi death camps. Even more bizarrely, Reagan made these to claims to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and renowned Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. (p.428-431) Reagan also claimed that he had saved a copy of the death camp film for himself and then showed it to people when they doubted the truth of the Holocaust.

The larger point about Reagan’s stretching of the truth with these stories is that he had a sometimes tenuous grasp on reality, and he was seemingly able to convince himself of just about anything. Consider, for example, Reagan’s infamous statement about Iran-contra: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me that it’s not.” (p.580) It doesn’t really matter what your heart tells you if the facts and the evidence don’t match it.

I’d be fascinated to know what conservatives think of Cannon’s book, since it seems to me a thorough debunking of the myth of Reagan’s greatness. Ultimately, Reagan comes across as an extremely poor manager of people, despite his formidable charm and charisma. Could Reagan give great speeches? Sure, absolutely! The ceremonial aspect of the Presidency was one that Reagan whole-heartedly embraced and thrived in. (He was an actor, after all.) But the actual nuts and bolts of governance? That was much harder for Reagan.

As Cannon writes, “The limits of Reagan’s management style became more fully evident in the second term, when his detachment encouraged Chief of Staff Donald Regan to function as a surrogate president and the National Security Council staff to serve as a secret government.” (p.150)

Much of the second half of President Reagan is about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which NSC staff, with Reagan’s approval, secretly traded arms to Iran, hopeful that American hostages would then be released. Long story short, it proved to be a disaster. Some hostages were released, but then other Americans were captured. Supposedly the NSC staff were dealing with “Iranian moderates,” who would then hopefully become our friends. That didn’t happen. The profits from the arms for hostages deals were then used to fund the Contra rebels fighting the socialist government in Nicaragua. Needless to say, when all of this became public knowledge, it created a huge scandal and tarnished Reagan’s image.

Iran-Contra also highlighted Reagan’s weaknesses as a manager of his staff. Cannon writes: “On balance, Reagan was a strong man, but an extraordinarily weak manager. He restored public confidence in the presidency without mastering the difficult art of wielding presidential power.” (p.296) I agree with Cannon—by being so passive, Reagan surrendered a lot of power to his advisers for no good reason. Reagan was rarely decisive in his actions, and he rarely put forth his own initiatives or policy ideas.

Throughout Reagan’s presidency, his cabinet was sharply divided between Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz, who were usually on opposite sides of issues. (George Shultz just celebrated his 100^th birthday on December 13^th, and he marked the occasion by publishing an Op-Ed in The Washington Post titled “The 10 Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Trust Over My 100 Years.”) Reagan tried to play conciliator in the disagreements between Weinberger and Shultz and take a middle path, but that just made things worse. At some point, Reagan simply should have chosen either Weinberger or Shultz and had the other man resign. (If it were up to me, I would have kept Shultz.) Weinberger and Shultz both opposed the arms for hostages trades with Iran that Reagan approved, but they were cut out of the decision-making process early on because of their opposition, and because of their mutual antagonism, they were unable to unify and work together to stop a foolish plan before it was implemented.

I think what will ultimately be seen as Ronald Reagan’s greatest accomplishment is the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War, and the INF Treaty of 1987, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Despite his image in the popular media as a warmonger, Reagan was a peacenik when it came to nuclear weapons, and he long advocated for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Reagan’s meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev are always fascinating to read about. Gorbachev was willing to deal with the West, in part because sky-high defense spending was bleeding the Soviet economy dry. Reagan and Gorbachev came agonizingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons during their 1986 summit at Reykjavik. I’ve always thought of the Reykjavik Summit as an agonizing failure, in part because of Reagan’s stubborn insistence that he wouldn’t scrap the SDI missile defense system. But if the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to eliminate their nuclear weapons, what would the other nuclear powers have done? Would the other nuclear powers have agreed to eliminate their nuclear weapons as well? Ultimately, Reykjavik paved the way for the INF Treaty, an important step in the lessening of tensions in the Cold War.

George Shultz was a vital part of the negotiations for the INF Treaty, and in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, he reveals that he earned the trust of Soviet leaders when he saluted the fallen Russian soldiers of World War II at a wreath-laying ceremony in Stalingrad in 1973. Another important figure in the INF Treaty was Colin Powell, who was then National Security Advisor. In my review of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, I found it fascinating that Reagan was focused on when he should give Gorbachev a pair of cuff links. Powell kept trying to return the subject to Soviet missiles, but Reagan was stubbornly focused on the cuff links. Was this a sign that Reagan was mentally slipping? Or an indication of his interpersonal intelligence, that he knew the personal relationship he had with Gorbachev was as important as the weighty matters they were discussing? Thanks to Cannon’s book, I now know that the cufflinks were ultimately unimportant. Gorbachev did not seem impressed by them, perhaps because, as Colin Powell told Cannon, “I had been trying to tell Reagan that the Russians don’t wear French cuffs.” (p.696) All that time spent worrying about the cuff links for nothing!

Ronald Reagan was an interesting man, and although I disagree with most of his policies, I have no doubt that if I had met him in person I would have been charmed by his charisma. I’d be able to bring up that I went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where Reagan lived for a year or so during his childhood. No doubt that would have set him off on a series of stories about growing up in Illinois. President Reagan is the definitive book on Ronald Reagan’s presidency, although I’m sure it will not be the final word, as writers continue to analyze his place in history.