Looking at Reagan Through the Lens of Trump
Reagan: His Life and Legend, by Max Boot, Liveright, 836 pages, $45
Max Boot believes “the biographer’s job is to find the compromises and expose the shibboleths and then to report on them dispassionately, not to cover them up or exaggerate their importance, so that readers can make up their own minds.” In Reagan: His Life and Legend, the first comprehensive biography of President Ronald Reagan since Donald Trump entered the White House, the historian and Washington Post columnist mostly succeeds at that. But understanding Reagan through the lens of Trump does at times lead the author astray.
Boot maintains a neutral and dispassionate tone for most of the book, and he captures Reagan’s willingness to work with those he disagreed with ideologically. “Reagan’s pragmatism,” Boot writes, “resulted in budget deals, trade deals, welfare reform, tax legislation, immigration reform, and, most significant of all, the first US-Soviet treaty to abolish, not just limit, an entire class of nuclear weapons.” For Boot, Reagan was a prudent conservative whose willingness to compromise made him a successful statesman.
What Boot calls prudence, hardline conservatives at the time saw as abandoning his principles. The most important example of this was the president’s dealings with the USSR. Reagan was both an anticommunist and a nuclear abolitionist, and those two impulses clashed throughout his time in office. Initially, his anticommunist rhetoric often got in the way of meaningful reproachment with the East Bloc: He had always been willing to work with Soviet leaders, but his public pronouncements made it difficult for them to trust him. But after bringing on George Schultz as secretary of state, and after a series of events in 1983 brought the two sides to the brink of nuclear disaster, Reagan deliberately emphasized his willingness to reduce nuclear weapons.
Happily, he had a willing partner in Moscow: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also wanted to establish better relations. Were it not for Gorbachev, Boot argues, the Soviet Union would likely still exist today. Gorbachev wanted to deescalate tensions and reform the communist system, and his domestic policies reduced corruption and allowed more market activity and political freedom. With his eventual announcement that the USSR would not use force to keep Eastern Europe within the fold, he ensured the Cold War’s end.
Boot rejects the notions that Reagan had a grand strategy to win the Cold War, that Reagan’s military buildup forced the Soviets to negotiate, and that the president’s prophetic words urging Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall led to the wall’s collapse. Instead, he suggests that Reagan’s most important role in propelling the superpowers toward peace was to work with his Soviet counterpart to decrease tensions and give Gorbachev leeway to implement his reforms. As Boot puts it, “Reagan did not initiate the changes sweeping the Soviet Union, but he was shrewd enough to support them.” He adds that “few other leaders have shown as much boldness or flexibility in changing with the times” and that Reagan “was willing to aba
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