Reagan in Retrospect

What Would Reagan Do?

That is the question many conservatives have been asking recently. In a sign of the times, that phrase even has its own page on Facebook with over 3,800 fans. It is a reaction to the unpopularity of the presidency of George W. Bush and the widespread feeling that both his administration and the formerly Republican-led Congress had betrayed the conservative ideals of the Reagan Revolution.

It is also a natural question because we have been riding a recent wave of Reagan revivalism among historians and journalists. The publication of Reagan’s diaries, letters, speeches, and radio commentaries has shown not a disengaged, dimwitted actor working off a script, but a man deeply engaged in the issues of his time. Books by nonconservatives such as John Patrick Diggins, Sean Wilentz, and James Mann have also given Reagan his due. In the most recent presidential leadership survey of historians by C-SPAN, Reagan ranks tenth, just ahead of Lyndon Johnson and just behind Woodrow Wilson.

Now comes the second volume of Steven F. Hayward’s portrait of Ronald Reagan. Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has modeled his book after Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Roosevelt, which helped cement FDR and the New Deal’s reputation. Schlesinger made no bones about his liberalism. His hero was Franklin D. Roosevelt; Hayward is an unabashed conservative whose hero is Ronald Reagan. But he aims for a more balanced treatment than Schlesinger. In doing so, Hayward has produced a long, but lively, romp through Reagan’s two presidential terms.

Hayward has a knack for understanding and interpreting Reagan the politician better than most who write about him, with the possible exception of Lou Cannon. Reagan’s personality, though, still remains a bit of an enigma. This book is not about psychoanalysis. It is about politics, pure and simple. That is Hayward’s greatest strength as a researcher and writer, and he wisely plays to it, although this approach is not without its problems. He has an ability to re-create the political debates of the time by relentlessly mining newspapers and magazines. The Age of Reagan will transport readers back to the contentious political fights of the 1980s.

Hayward reminds us that the 1980 election was actually a lot closer than people think. Despite an electoral college landslide, Reagan won only slightly more than 50 percent of the vote (in a three-way race) and much of his margin of victory was gained by late-breaking votes in the election’s final days. Those who complain about the ugly tone of recent politics, or the tough criticism of Barack Obama, would do well to read Hayward’s recounting of the bitter accusations hurled against Reagan. Just one example: The Nation warned after Reagan’s inauguration that America had “embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.” Reagan’s liberal opponents also threw around words like “Hitler,” “fascism,” and “Ku Klux Klan.”

Still, the question arises: Do we need another Reagan biography now? Hayward’s book is not based on any new research, although he does make use of the recently published Reagan diaries. One gets the sense that when Hayward began the project over a decade ago, he felt it necessary to put out a full-throated defense of Reagan from liberal critics who would seek to diminish his legacy. He even calls Reagan the “Rodney Dangerfield of modern American presidents.” Reagan may deserve a bit more credit than he is currently getting from historians, but one can hardly say that he has been getting no respect.

There is a general consensus that Reagan’s was an important and consequential presidency. Even Barack Obama agrees, stating during the presidential campaign, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

This makes Hayward’s claim for a revisionist account of the Reagan years sound a bit off-key. “Revisionism” is a fighting word among historians: It implies a complete reversal in previous interpretations of the subject or, worse, a massaging of evidence to support a political agenda. To Hayward’s credit, his book does neither of these things.

One way in which he seeks to differentiate his study from others is that he finds a “seamless quality to Reagan’s domestic policy outlook and his Cold War grand strategy.” That’s an important insight into the conservative mind. To Reagan and other conservatives, the fight against the Soviet Union was a battle against totalitarianism, and the battle against the liberal welfare state was a fight against a soft form of totalitarianism, an increase in state power that would sap America’s economic strength. Conservatives like Reagan saw the Soviet Union and the welfare state, each in its own way, as threats to individual freedom.

Since much of the recent Reagan revival has been based on his foreign policy, Hayward tries to give equal weight to Reagan’s domestic agenda. In the end, though, the best sections of The Age of Reagan are still about foreign affairs, and the book is especially strong on Iran-Contra, arms control, and the Geneva and Reykjavik summits. Here Hayward presents a man engaged in the issues, who sees Mikhail Gorbachev as a new kind of leader, but who still holds onto the Strategic Defense Initiative and refuses to make vast concessions to a country he knows is weak and getting weaker. At the time, even many Republicans saw the summits as less than successful; but in retrospect, it is hard not to see that Reagan was playing the stronger hand, and he played it fairly well.

Hayward also argues that Reagan’s foreign policy during the Cold War was one of peace. In the recent reassessment of Reagan, many historians have divided his foreign policy into the “bad Reagan” of the Evil Empire speech and the “good Reagan” of the Gorbachev era. Instead, Hayward makes clear that Reagan was guided by a simple strategy throughout both his terms: “We win, they lose.” The strategy for getting there might have changed, but the goal remained the same-although Hayward also portrays Reagan in his first term seeking conciliatory openings with Gorbachev’s predecessors, including a somewhat maudlin missive to Leonid Brezhnev.

The Age of Reagan has its weaknesses. You don’t have to be a cranky academic historian to want better citations. Too often I went to the back of the book to find the source of some quote missing from the endnotes. Another thing missing from the narrative is the savings-and-loan scandal. Hayward alerts his readers to the omission in an author’s note, justifying the move by saying that the episode was “a diffuse and bipartisan fiasco.” That is just not a good enough excuse for ignoring a significant event with relevance to our own recent financial crisis.

A broader problem has to do with the title. As good as the book is on the politics and policies of the Reagan administration, it tells us little about what life was like in “the age of Reagan.” Hayward gives us a good old-fashioned political history-the kind still frowned upon in academia-but to really pull it off you have to be able to meld that story with larger social, cultural, and economic trends.

This is important because social and cultural issues were an essential part of Reagan’s political appeal, and here his legacy is most ambiguous. The excesses of the 1960s and ’70s were curbed, but many of the social trends of those times became mainstream in the 1980s, including feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism, as well as the gay rights movement, which gained strength during the AIDS crisis.

Reagan hoped to unite a badly divided country; but instead the 1980s saw a continuing fragmentation of the nation’s culture. Market segmentation sliced and diced the American public along the lines of class, ethnicity, and race. Evangelical Christianity continued its resurgence among some Americans while at the same time secularism continued its march. Reagan wanted to restore the prestige of the presidency and Americans’ pride in their country, but we have not come close to restoring pre-Watergate levels of trust in government, business, or any other large American institution (with the possible exception of the military).

The Reagan Revolution was also a victim of some of its successes. Its economic policies helped create a larger, more socially liberal, upper-middle class that trends Democratic, while globalization, free trade, and deindustrialization have hurt socially conservative Reagan Democrats.

These trends neither diminish nor add to Reagan’s historical legacy. Instead, they provide texture that helps explain a pivotal decade and presidency, a texture that is somewhat lacking here. Even still, Steven Hayward’s book forces us to ask a few questions: What kind of president was Ronald Reagan? Was his presidency, as suggested in the subtitle, a conservative “counterrevolution”? And is it useful for today’s conservatives to be asking themselves what Reagan would do?

On the first question, Reagan’s presidency in some ways resembles The Age of Reagan. Both are impressive, but incomplete, achievements. Reagan helped shift the center of American politics a few, very important degrees to the right, and he helped build a more conservative Republican party. He helped rebuild the military, was unafraid to use American power in a post-Vietnam world, and successfully managed the end of the Cold War (although his policy toward the Middle East was much less successful). His economic policies helped to usher in a quarter-century of economic growth, interrupted by only two minor recessions. And though he could not cut the size of government, he managed to curb the growth of spending to a manageable proportion of the GDP.

Hayward notes that Reagan was more successful in his Cold War foreign policy than in rolling back the welfare state largely because the latter was a more difficult task. There was simply very little public enthusiasm for even moderate cuts in the federal government. The Reagan years highlighted an American psyche at war with itself: The American public wants low taxes, but it does not want to give up any government benefits and has shown little support for cuts in government spending at any level. That budget deficits would follow should come as no surprise.

In what is perhaps his wisest sentence, Hayward writes, “The Reagan experience should also be a meditation on the limitations of politics.” Americans wanted the excesses of liberalism moderated, which they largely got, but the benefits of the welfare state had become too ingrained for conservatives to do much more than slow its growth. Add to this the fact that conservatives, temperamentally, do not make very good revolutionaries, and it becomes difficult to call the Reagan years a counterrevolution.

If anything, Republicans have more than come to terms with big government. Reagan brought us a new cabinet department (Veterans Affairs), George H.W. Bush brought us the Americans with Disabilities Act, and George W. Bush brought us the Department of Homeland Security, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and the No Child Left Behind Act. Even in today’s health care debate, Republicans have become the loudest voices against cuts in Medicare.

All of this makes asking what Reagan would do a tricky question. Ronald Reagan, like all politicians, was a creature of the unique economic, social, and political issues of his era. If conservatives want to engage in some Reagan nostalgia, they should remember the words of Lou Cannon, as quoted by Hayward: Reagan, Cannon wrote, “spoke to the future with the accents of the past.” As conservatives continue to find their footing in the Obama years, they should take those words to heart.

With each passing year, Reagan further recedes from memory. College students today have no personal memory of the Reagan years. Steven Hayward, with a natural feel for both the politics of the era and the conservative mind, helps bring Reagan and his ideas alive. This is not the last word on the Reagan years, but as historians continue to tease out the complexities of one of the most significant presidencies of the 20th century, they will be wise to consult The Age of Reagan.

Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author, most recently, of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island and the coeditor of Living in the Eighties, a collection of essays on the Reagan years.