RONALD REAGAN is unquestionably the most important political figure in American politics since World War II. His successful quest for the presidency transformed the Republican party, invigorated the conservative movement, and worked the demise of “Great Society” liberalism. His strong stands during the Cold War helped defeat Soviet totalitarianism. His “Reaganomics” not only ended stagflation but launched two decades of unprecedented prosperity. So Steven F. Hayward has chosen an apt title for The Age of Reagan, his important new study of the man and his times. The newly published first volume is subtitled The Fall of the Old Liberal Order; the promised second volume will examine Reagan’s presidency. Hayward appreciates the felicitous combination of character, conviction, and ability to articulate them that lay at the heart of Reagan’s greatness, without slighting reasonable criticisms of Reagan weaknesses. He avoids the mistake of both Reagan’s admirers and Reagan’s detractors who see the root of the president’s conservatism in the old Republican right. What happened to Reagan ideologically during the 1950s presaged what would happen to many Truman liberals during the 1970s—it simply happened to him earlier. He saw “all by himself…liberalism’s ‘lack of a limiting principle’ that would prove its undoing.” And yet, Hayward points out, “Reagan’s rise depended more on circumstances than most other presidents,” for it required the ripening and deepening of the consequences of liberalism’s collapse. Thus, Hayward extends his analysis far beyond Reagan to cover the whole sweep of American politics between 1964 and 1980. Indeed, in some of the best parts of The Age of Reagan, Hayward captures the combination of hubris, naive idealism, and liberal guilt that animated and later ruined Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The Kennedy administration marked the beginning of what Hayward calls “the third wave of the progressive administrative state.” By the time that wave reached Johnson, it had become an absolute cult of expertise, producing the disaster of Vietnam, the failure of the War on Poverty, and the rise of broad government regulation aimed at massively changing American society. Hayward excels in analyzing the paradox of Richard Nixon’s astonishingly liberal administration. While employing conservative rhetoric, Nixon allowed spending and federal regulation to explode during his administration. Declaring that “we are all Keynesians now,” he imposed mandatory wage and price controls, anathema to conservatives and a huge economic mistake, as even Nixon himself later admitted. His favorite cabinet officer, Treasury secretary John Connally, brought more state direction to economic policy than even the most liberal peacetime Democratic administrations. “Any other president who compiled Nixon’s domestic and foreign record,” Hayward notes, “would be regarded as standing firmly within the progressive tradition.” Although not up to the standard of his chapters on Johnson and Nixon, Hayward’s treatment of Jimmy Carter reliably conveys the peculiar amalgam of liberalism, sanctimoniousness, ostentatious guilt, inexperience, and naiveté that made Carter such an ineffective and unappealing president. By exaggerating Carter’s fiscal conservatism, however, Hayward underestimates how much “new” liberalism dominated the Carter administration. Similarly, he does not address sufficiently the role of the courts in promoting and sustaining liberalism. The Carter administration succeeded more than any other, including Reagan’s, in imposing an ideological litmus test—the embrace of liberal judicial activism—in its selection of federal judges. When he comes to treat foreign policy, Hayward is justifiably scathing about Robert McNamara, whose managerial, technocratic theory of graduated response he rightly identifies as a prime cause of the Vietnam disaster. Yet The Age of Reagan sometimes becomes so engrossed in the details of the Vietnam War, especially the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Tet Offensive, that it neglects significant issues such as the Kennedy administration’s capitulation in Laos. The book also overstates its case against Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the war. Johnson had many shortcomings, but failure to explain the rationale of American intervention in Vietnam was not one of them. When Johnson took office, he inherited certain commitments and policy premises that generated powerful pressure to intensify American involvement in South Vietnam. Johnson’s reasoning flowed logically from the domino theory that not only he but also his predecessors since Truman largely and correctly accepted. By the time Nixon came to power, the “New Left” was firmly in place, and its critique of American foreign policy underlay the arguments of the vast majority of liberals after 1968, who urged a more conciliatory approach to America’s Communist adversaries than even Nixon and Kissinger would countenance as they undertook that peculiar project called “détente” that dominated American foreign policy through the 1970s. Hayward’s understandable admiration for Daniel Patrick Moynihan leads him astray in his analysis of the opposition to détente. Reagan’s views on the subject most closely paralleled not those of Moynihan but those of Senator Henry M. Jackson. (As Kissinger himself put it, “criticism of détente might have remained inchoate sniping but for the emergence of a formidable leader able to unite the two strands of opposition and direct them to concrete issues that lent themselves to legislative intervention in American foreign policy: Senator Henry M. Jackson.”) Thus the debate over détente began in earnest not in the late 1970s, but in 1972, when Jackson succeeded in attaching the Jackson Amendment to the SALT I Treaty and introduced the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974, linking the Soviet Union’s most-favored-nation status to permitting freedom of emigration. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lamented that “no single question did more to sour détente than the question of Jewish emigration that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment raised.” Constrained by his loyalty to Nixon and his focus on state issues while governor of California, Ronald Reagan did not emerge as a forceful and important critic of détente until 1975, although he had long opposed it privately. Still, Hayward is right in his larger point about Reagan’s opposition to détente and the political consequences of it. Reagan correctly considered the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, a malevolent Leninist entity with unlimited ambitions—and not the traditional imperial power that Nixon and Kissinger considered it or a peace-loving country driven to aggression by American belligerence that the liberals considered it. In contrast to deep pessimism about America’s prospects held by Nixon and Kissinger, Reagan exuded robust confidence in the ability of the United States to prevail in the struggle with Soviet totalitarianism. This first volume of The Age of Reagan concludes with an excellent account of the seminal presidential campaign of 1980. Hayward sees Reagan’s unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1976 as paving the way for his success in 1980. The experience made Reagan a better and more disciplined candidate. By 1980, the decline of American power seemed ominous, contrasting starkly with the spectacular growth of Soviet military capabilities and the steady expansion of Soviet global power. Double-digit inflation, interest rates in excess of 20 percent, gas lines, and slow growth menaced the prosperity Americans had come to take for granted. The hostage crisis and President Carter’s famous “malaise speech” chiding Americans for their “crisis of confidence” increased the widespread assumption that the United States had become impotent to resist brazen provocations abroad and solve its serious problems at home. Although the American people did not want Carter, they still had serious doubts about Reagan until a few days before the election. Hayward brings to life several of the noteworthy events of the 1980 campaign season: Reagan’s dramatic recovery in the New Hampshire primary after a stumble in the Iowa caucuses, the disaster averted at the Republican convention when proposals for a Reagan-Ford co-presidency nearly led to Ford’s choice as vice president, the gaffes that dogged Reagan during the first weeks of the general election, Carter’s mean-spirited and counterproductive efforts to depict Reagan as a bigot and a fanatic, the struggle within the Reagan camp to develop a credible economic plan, Reagan’s marvelous and Carter’s dismal performance in the October 28 debate that clinched the election. As Hayward argues compellingly, Reagan ran for president as his own man, not as a creature of his advisers. And he won because of who he was, what he stood for, and what he said. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan is an invaluable contribution to the small but growing body of serious work that finally gives Reagan his due. Readers not only will profit immensely from reading this first volume, but will long for the publication of the next.
