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.

Book Review: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, by James Mann (2009)

Paperback cover of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, by James Mann, 2009. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor.)

Ronald Reagan delivering his "Tear Down This Wall!" speech, West Berlin, June 12, 1987. At the end of his speech, the Berlin Wall spontaneously collapsed.

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meeting for the first time in Geneva, November 1985.

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meeting in Moscow, 1988.

Ronald Reagan! Genial gladhander of the 1980’s, America’s great golden age! The only true conservative! The man with an anecdote for every occasion-and sometimes they were even true! Was he a wily genius who single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union? Or a stooge who was overly reliant on his advisors and just happened to be president at the right time? The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as it usually does. 

James Mann attempts to get closer to that truth in his 2009 book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War. The book examines Reagan’s foreign policy towards the Soviet Union. Mann split the book into four sections that examine Reagan’s relationship with former president Richard Nixon, Reagan’s friendship with author Suzanne Massie, Reagan’s 1987 speech in West Berlin, in which he demanded “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and Reagan’s summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. 

During his first term in office, Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” and said in a 1982 speech that “the march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” During his second term in office, Reagan held five summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, and on his 1988 visit to Moscow, when asked if he still thought the Soviet Union was “an evil empire,” he said, “I was talking about another time and another era.” How did this change happen? That’s one of the key questions that Mann attempts to answer.

While The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a fine book, and an interesting look at Reagan’s attitude towards the Soviet Union, Mann’s unorthodox organization ends up hampering the book. In the first section, about Reagan’s relationship with Richard Nixon, we go through Reagan’s presidency chronologically. Then with the next section, we’re back to 1984, and the first time Reagan met Suzanne Massie. Because we’re constantly jumping forwards and backwards in time, the book becomes more repetitive than it needs to be. I can understand why Mann organized the book this way; it makes sense to examine Reagan’s relationship with Nixon in one short essay, but I think a straight chronological approach would have helped the book overall.

The section on Nixon and Reagan is quite interesting. During Nixon’s presidency Reagan had opposed Nixon’s policy of détente towards the Soviet Union, but after the 1986 summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, when the two leaders came close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons, Nixon attacked Reagan’s policies towards the Soviet Union, essentially accusing him of becoming too soft on communism. Nixon and Henry Kissinger wrote a joint editorial in April 1987 attacking Reagan’s Russian policies, and later that same month Nixon secretly met with Reagan in the White House. The meeting did not go well, and Nixon refused to back off on his criticism of Reagan. 

For as much as the Republican party has deified Reagan since he left the White House in 1989, it’s very interesting to read about how many Republicans were angry about his policies towards the Soviet Union and Gorbachev during his second term in office. Conservative columnists like William F. Buckley, Jr., and George F. Will were both critical of any kind of arms limitation talks with the Soviets. 

Section two of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan takes a closer look at Reagan’s friendship with Suzanne Massie, the author of a 1980 book about Russia, Land of the Firebird. Massie wasn’t an academic historian, but she had made many trips to the Soviet Union, and her then-husband was Robert K. Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Peter the Great: His Life and World. Through contacts she had in Washington, D.C., Massie was able to meet with Reagan in January of 1984 to give him a report about life in the Soviet Union. For whatever reason, Reagan and Massie clicked, and she visited the White House many more times during Reagan’s second term. Massie carried back-channel messages between Reagan and the Soviet government, and she seems to have been an important influence on how he viewed the Russian people. Reagan dealt in the vernacular, in stories and anecdotes that would be easily relatable, and Massie was glad to supply him with her tales of life in Russia.

Reagan had a certain naiveté about the world, and the Soviet Union in particular. After Reagan had met with Soviet ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin, he was shocked at Dobrynin’s cosmopolitan sophistication, and he asked, “Is he really a Communist?” (p.85) Mann makes it clear that Reagan’s naiveté also extended to Mikhail Gorbachev. While most American politicians thought that Gorbachev was no different from the previous occupants of the Kremlin, Reagan seems to have intuited pretty quickly that Gorbachev was in fact a very different kind of Soviet leader.

Reagan’s Soviet counterparts during his first term in office were a trio of arteriosclerotic old men: Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Reagan made token overtures to each leader, but no serious discussions of a summit meeting occurred with any of the three Soviet leaders. Andropov and Chernenko were both very seriously ill during their entire tenures as Soviet leaders, so there was little prospect of a summit meeting occurring. Although Reagan was actually older than both Andropov and Chernenko, he continued to project a healthy vigor. 

Gorbachev realized that he needed an arms limitation treaty with the United States, in order to reduce the massive percentage of the Soviet budget that was going towards national defense. If Gorbachev hadn’t been so willing to strike a deal with Reagan, there might not have been the lessening of Cold War tensions that the world saw during Reagan’s second term. Reagan was extremely lucky that he was dealing with a Soviet leader who was more responsive to the West, and who was bent on reforming a Soviet system that was on the verge of collapse. 

Reagan also had excellent support from his very intelligent and capable Secretary of State, George Shultz. It was Shultz who worked out the nuts and bolts of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and it was Shultz who took Reagan's generalities and crafted specific policies from them. Shultz was an integral part of the lessening of Cold War tensions during Reagan's second term. Even though Shultz turned 95 in December of 2015, he is still an articulate defender of Reagan's place in history, as shown by this New York Times editorial.

Mann details all of the infighting in the Reagan administration concerning Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech, delivered on June 12, 1987, in West Berlin. While it’s now regarded as one of Reagan’s signature speeches, at the time, many members of the administration thought that the line should be toned down, as it might dissipate the goodwill that had been established between Reagan and Gorbachev. But Reagan was determined that the line should stay in the speech. Mann also chronicles the difficult dance that West Germany and East Germany were performing at the time, as German leaders on both sides were pressing for more economic agreements, much to the chagrin of their Western and Eastern allies. 

In the last section of the book, Mann examines Reagan’s summit meetings with Gorbachev. For whatever reason, Mann doesn’t cover the 1985 Geneva summit or the 1986 Reykjavik summit in detail, which is an opportunity missed. He does provide a more thorough look at the 1987 summit in Washington, D.C., and the 1988 summit in Moscow. Reagan delivered one of his best quips just before Gorbachev arrived in Washington, as a reporter asked him if he was worried about the younger Gorbachev upstaging him. Reagan responded, “I don’t resent his popularity or anything else. Good Lord, I co-starred with Errol Flynn once.” (p.266) 

One of the most interesting anecdotes concerned Reagan’s concern over a pair of cuff links he was going to give Gorbachev at the Washington summit. Reagan asked Colin Powell, then his national security advisor, “When do you think I ought to give him the cuff links?” Mann writes, “Powell tried to switch the conversation to what Gorbachev might say about Soviet SS-18 missiles, but Reagan talked about the cuff links again and again.” (p.267, both quotes) Cuff links! The leader of the free world was worried about the right time to give Gorbachev cuff links! Incredible! Does this show that Reagan was getting senile by focusing on trivial and unimportant details? Or does it show that Reagan knew that the personal connection between him and Gorbachev was just as important as the weighty issues they would be discussing?

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a good examination of a pivotal time in modern history, and an intriguing portrait of one of the most fascinating presidents in modern history, a man who was both outgoing and aloof at the same time.