President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime

Rating:
Summary: A liberal looks at Reagan
Review: "Since the turn of the century, no president save FDR defined a decade as strikingly as Ronald Reagan defined the 1980s." This is Lou Cannon's remarkable conclusion to this authoritative Reagan biography. In recent years, Ronald Reagan's stock among historians has soared, and this book shows it. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, first published in 1991, is a largely critical work punctuated by generous (and recently re-written) introductory and concluding sections.

Reagan fans may not agree with all of Cannon's conclusions. I certainly didn't. For one thing, Cannon virtually ignores Reagan's role in ending the Cold War. At some level, Cannon's omissions here could not be helped. The most compelling voices on this question are those of former Soviet officials who testified to the genuine reckoning the USSR was faced with when it realized it simply could not compete with SDI or Reagan-era U.S. military advances. And these voices were only heard after the book's initial publication.

The economy is another arena where Reagan's reputation now looks better than ever before. The critics called the 1980s a "decade of greed" and our economic future was uncertain when that label was last hurled a decade ago. The subsequent prosperity we experienced only confirmed that Reagan, with the help of the monetarist policies of the Federal Reserve, did indeed launch a lasting new era when he brought to an end the days of stagflation when one out of every three years brought a recession. Democrats also have less room to criticize Reagan after presiding over a prosperous decade where consumer debt, income inequality and corporate profits grew just as much, if not more, than in the 1980s.

Even when Cannon's tone is downbeat, his admiration of Reagan's talents and abilities is sincere. He doesn't make the mistake of underestimating the Gipper -- deriding him as some did as an "amiable dunce." Instead, he draws compellingly on the theory of "multiple intelligences" to suggest that Reagan had an exceedingly gifted intellect in expressing himself and in connecting with people -- something his academic critics could never fully appreciate.

Some day, someone will write a Reagan biography that takes into full account the full historical import of a Reagan legacy that is still unfolding. Until that day, Cannon's work will rank as the defining study of Reagan presidency.

Rating:
Summary: Our Last "Major" President?
Review: A fine "tell-it-like-it-is" description of the Reagan Presidency, which may be the last "major" presidency in terms of global and domestic impact. Over the past ten years in the post-Cold War world, we have begun to see a diminishing of the American presideny and an ascendancy of congressional now that there is no longer an external "threat". Lou Cannon gives us an excellent view of a presidency that will seem even more fascinating over time to future historians.

Rating:
Summary: Forget Morris...this is the way a Reagan Biography should be
Review: After being severely disappointed by the work Morris spent a decade working on--I re-read this book. It is very well written, and unbiased account of the Reagan Presidency and Reagan the man. Lou Cannon didn't need to insert himself into the story to make this book work. History will point to this as the definitive Reagan Presidency biography and Morris may be relegated the ash-heap of poor authorship. As a journalist who covered Reagan as governor of California and as President, Cannon has some interesting insights on a complex Presidency.

Rating:
Summary: And such things happened in America's land
Review: By the dismal end of the Carter presidency in January of 1981, a sort of feedback loop (which certain French philosophers would dress in rich and strange clothes) had entered American political and economic discourse. What the French called "semiotics", the names of expectations and fears played as large a role in politics as did real needs. The gasoline crisis was not only a physical shortage but also the fear of not enough.

These symbolic needs entered political calculation, and the presidency of Reagan was the first to meet them head on. Of course, in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who Lou Cannon compares to Reagan, favorably) had anticipated this in "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

However, FDR, after this comforting reassurance which foreshadowed Reagan, then set himself to real tasks. FDR's activism, which so disturbed Hoover and the Republicans, went beyond comforting reassurances as to the fundamental stability of the system which was and is a Republican specialty. On FDR's watch, something was done.

Reagan's Republican presidency deliberately manipulated the symbolic night-terrors of Americans while neglecting real tasks, and this was put simply by a student of mine. A middle-aged gentleman, he said simply that you never saw homeless children in America before the 1980s and as another middle-aged gentleman I can concur.

Throughout Reagan's presidency, there was a curious illusion. The Chief Executive actually believed that under the real safety net that he and his advisers were deconstructing (not by cutting programs, but instead by sending budgets to Congress with insufficient funds, a form of check kiting) there was another, fantasy net constructed by FDR for their parent's generation and, in a sort of dream-like logic, untouched by their shenanigans.

This dreamlike denial persists. Authorities on health insurance proclaim that somehow, people in need of medical care can find it, somewhere. While this is true in major cities like Chicago, in rural places many patients have simply nothing to do but sicken and die.

Lou Cannon does not mention Governor Mario Cuomo's speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention which in an almost Jesuitical fashion carefully identified how the first half of the Reagan presidency was destroying individual people's lives. Cuomo, like Marianne Moore, spoke scholastically of imaginary gardens with real toads in them: his speech was unreported, perhaps not even comprehended.

Lou Cannon wants, like many Beltway liberals over the last twenty years, to have his cake and eat it too. Access to power, which Mr Cannon needs to pursue his career as author and journalist, demands ideological consent and therefore Cannon's overall thesis is incoherent.

It is that Reagan gave us back our American soul while his Presidency was riven by corrruption (not Reagan's, but other's), while his advisers violated longstanding law and policy and in some cases conducted themselves like buffoons. How is it possible that Reagan "gave us back our American soul" when as Cannon admits his administration combined some violations of the law with bumbling incompetence?

To Cannon's credit, his account of the Iran Contra mess makes clear a central fact that has been confused. It is that while Reagan was not aware of the diversion of funds to the contras, a violation of the intent of Congress, he was aware of the general idea...which went against a policy supported by conservatives.

This policy was to not negotiate with "terrorists." The supreme achievement of the Teflon presidency was to obscure this important point. While on the semiotic plane America was hanging tough and crowds at the 1984 Olympics were chanting USA, their ideological brethern were not only negotiating with direct sponsors of Islamic terrorist groups, they were being taken, as Lou Cannon shows, for a ride.

Psycho-history might help us to understand how men could behave in this conflicted fashion, but Cannon does fail to explore a psycho-historical pathway evident in the character of Don Regan, Reagan's homonymic Treasury chief and later Chief of Staff.

Regan's father had participated in a policeman's strike and had been fired by Calvin Coolidge in a way that directly foreshadowed Ronald Reagan's firing of the PATCO strikers in 1981. Cannon describes Regan's luck in the immediate post-war era, where 15 years of FDR had opened up opportunities to our parent's generation: Regan became a millionaire Wall Streeter before entering government service.

But Cannon does not explore Regan's "anger issues" over the sort of men who'd surrounded Cal Coolidge and ensured in his father's day that Irishmen did not get a square deal, especially if they stepped out of line. Regan's rather destructive tenure as Chief of Staff, which coincided with Iran/Contra, as well as Oliver North's antics, make it clear that the chemistry of the Reagan presidency was one in which "Reagan democrats" like Regan took unconscious revenge for their father's destruction.

Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan liked Regan, comparing him to a sort of tough guy out of a 1930s gangster film. But Cannon's mere narrative makes it clear that men like Regan and North nearly brought down the president and the new, Republican era, by cynically authorising policies (notably Iran-Contra) which not only contradicted the will of the (then Democratic) Congress but even the principles (such as not negotiating with terrorists) on which the new era was built.

Here there was a sort of belief that things like general principles are "just words", a popular belief in much of American life. Reagan used this belief successfully in negotiating the end of the Cold War, for as Lou Cannon shows Reagan distrusted treaties of all sorts including the elaborate structure started under Carter. This is psycho-historical, in that it is the reaction of the wounded tough guy whose betrayals started with his father's failure in the Depression to provide for his family. FDR, from a gentlemanly world of promises easy to keep, sailed off to Yalta with a sublime self-assurance: whereas Lou Cannon's Reagan had a certain naivety as well (resulting from his California good fortune) Reagan was surrounded by wounded men who thought themselves immune to "gentlemen's agreements"...but who were snookered by Hezbollah all the same. International treaties do indeed play a role in keeping the peace, and ultimately cynicism itself is a form of naivety.

Ollie North thought that his backroom deals were far better, say, than a Mideast conference at which all players might deal, only to find that the hostage-takers met their word as gentlemen (for they released some hostages) but cleverly enough, realized that Ollie had forgot to ask them from taking other hostages. At the end of the day, this is the sort of deep thinking on tap at Foggy Bottom that Reagan's advisers treated with such contempt, and it probably would have saved some lives.

Cannon's narrative also makes it clear that two members of the older gentlemanly set (who personified the sort of man who oversaw, and betrayed, men like Regan and North in the Depression, the war, and in Vietnam) saved the country and its presidency. These were two Princetonians, and former members of the United States Marine Corps, George Schultz and James Baker. Their performance put at end to a sort of spell first cast by Henry Kissinger on our dealings: the illusion that one can even attain nefarious ends by being dishonest.

Schultz and Baker saved Reagan because they simply did not have the problems with anger that caused Regan to alienate Nancy Reagan and fail to oversee Iran-Contra. They had instead a sort of old-fashioned self-assurance that is, or used to be, on tap at Princeton and Harvard and which when coupled with warrior virtue can't be beat for attaining the country's sometimes nefarious ends.

But the good lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of a passionate intensity. From North to Baker there was no sense of bushido. Even Baker and Schultz were primarily concerned with removing themselves from messy involvement with the seamier side of the presidency. There were, as Cannon notes, no resignations on principle.

Which raises a moral puzzle addressed in a recent novel, Mr White's Confession. What is the responsibility of the well-intentioned man?

Immanuel Kant states, at the very beginning of Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, that the only thing we can know to be good is purity of the will. It is clear from the facts, and Cannon's biography, that Ronald Reagan had good intentions which undercut right-wing commitments to vernacular Machiavellianism. In a way, Reagan was a liberal of the FDR era who wanted to save FDR's reforms...notably Social Security. Reagan had grown up in relative poverty which he'd not forgotten. And one interpretation of his Presidency is that he did his best to save rather than destroy the basics of the 1950 liberal consensus in which he'd spent his rather sunny midlife.

Bumper stickers in California, up to the late 1980s, still stated with a Reagan-like innocence, "Don't

Rating:
Summary: Close and (Un)Comfortable
Review: Cannon has had the longest and closest association with Reagan of any press/media. He sees the man warts and all. Reagan had strengths and weaknesses, all of which Cannon freely discusses. GOP or Demo, love him or hate him, you'll learn more about what makes Reagan tick in this book than anywhere else.

Rating:
Summary: Lou Cannon doesn't know as much as he thinks.
Review: Cannon missed most of the points that could be made about Reagan and his presidency. This book was undoubtedly read by dozens.

Rating:
Summary: The best, most readable account of Reagan's Presidency.
Review: Canon was the most authoritative columnist and reporter on the Reagan Administration while it played before us. This biography of his presidency will hold up particularly as we get farther away from the events and our own prejudices about this accomplished politician who was praised as a savior and scorned as a dunce. Canon dispels the notion of Reagan as a Johnny-come-lately to politics. Very different from Richard Nixon who remembered every political event of his life or a policy wonk like Bill Clinton, Reagan knew the people he had to lead. In one of the best insights, Canon points out that when Reagan converted from liberal Democrat to Conservative Republican, he kept his outgoing personna and thus did not threaten traditiional Democrats who were willing to listen to his message. Canon enables us to understand why he got as far as he did as President, his surprising turn as a peacemaker in cold war politics, and his failure in the intrigue of Iran Contra

Rating:
Summary: The definitive Reagan Presidential account...
Review: Finally, a book that tells the Reagan Presidential story as it should be told...I've always suspected that Reagan's term was successful more due to the outstanding appointees/staff that he had through most of his 8 years in office (McFarlane, Poindexter, North notwithstanding) than with his own leadership skills...I can very definetly see Reagan asleep at a Cabinet meeting or getting over-run with bad decisions from the afore mentioned individuals, and have trouble en-visioning him being the great world leader that he's always made out to be. I think that people like Shultz and Weinberger and Carlucci and Powell were the drivers for this administration and Reagan generally sat back and watched and this book steers you in that direction more than any I've read. You should read all the popular accounts of the Reagan administration, but I'll bet this book tells the real story and kudos to Cannon for having the nerve to write it.

Rating:
Summary: Great & unbiased !!
Review: I had this book since beginning of 2002 and was always postponing to read it due to its size; after I started it went smoothly. I think this is a very balanced look at Reagan !

Rating:
Summary: So bad, I had to put it down.
Review: I picked up this book hoping to find, at the very least, a balanced and fair look at the greatest President since FDR. What I found was a story with too much conjecture and rife with ambiguity.

This is not your typical biography, no real chronology to speak of, and many of themes continually overlap from chapter to chapter. Lou Cannon does a good job describing the events of the Reagan Presidency, his staff, and overall events of the day. But he hides his disdain for this President with a thin mask.

Lou Cannon characterizes President Reagan as an man who acted his way through the Presidency, sleeping in meetings, clueless about the issues, out of touch with his staff and the American people, and using a horrible management style (delegation to subordinates, which works for every other institution and business organization on the planet) that ruined the Presidency. Funny, I remember a huge economic boom in the mid-80's, a Soviet Union that fell apart, and a strong America leading the world. I hope Reagan didn't sleep through that!

The theme throughout the book is simple: Reagan was a kindly old actor, over his head, who leaned on his staff members, and told jokes for 8 years to get by.

I truly cannot believe it, and neither should you. After 300 pages of this theme constantly beating me over the head, I put down the book. I will probably pick it up and finish it, because I can't stand leaving a book go un-read, but if you are looking for a fair and balanced description of the Reagan Presidency, this is NOT your book.

-James