If you’re a deceased former president in need of a definitive biography, the best thing to be is irrelevant. Think of Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson, once fearsome commanders in chief who, at the time of their deaths, had little hold over their party. When, in time, great biographers set their sights on them—David McCullough on Truman, Robert Caro on Johnson—surviving aides and intimates could share revealing documents and frank reflections, confident they were discussing an ever more distant past. Essential, enduring books ensued.
For a long time, books about Ronald Reagan were doomed to an opposite fate. Reagan’s June 2004 state funeral, presided over by George W. Bush in the midst of his re-election campaign, felt less like a farewell than a feast day for the modern Republican Party’s patron saint. Remember the embarrassing Republican primaries of the early 21st century when candidates would compete to be the true tax-hating, freedom-loving, big-government-slaying reincarnation of Ronnie?
A lot of the writing on Reagan in that period resembled his beloved jelly beans: saccharine and insubstantial. The necessary ingredients for a good biographical subject—imperfection, humanity—are hard to come by when that subject still has political juice.
Then came Donald Trump, who seized Reagan’s party and made it his own personality cult. The G.O.P.’s Trumpist adventure, catastrophic in countless ways, has had at least one happy consequence: it has finally pushed Reagan out of the arena and into the realm of clear-eyed history.
Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend is a worthy, impressive example of what a new era in Reagan biography might hold. Boot’s book, the product of a decade’s careful research, presents the fascinatingly contradictory reality of Reagan: an emotionally vacant father and friend who could effortlessly form an intimate bond with millions of people he’d never meet; an incurious and often comically disengaged occupant of the Oval Office whose presidency was, without question, one of the 20th century’s most successful.
Remember the embarrassing Republican primaries of the early 21st century when candidates would compete to be the true tax-hating, freedom-loving, big-government-slaying reincarnation of Ronnie?
In the early chapters, Boot, a foreign-policy specialist who writes a column for The Washington Post, gamely dives into Reagan’s early life and Hollywood career. Even if familiar, the beats here are necessary, particularly the pages on Reagan’s difficult childhood caught between his pious mother, Nelle, and his alcoholic father, Jack. The adult Reagan, Boot writes, had a “devotion to emotional rather than literal truth,” a habit carried over from a childhood where reality was too painful to acknowledge.
As a young man, he found his way to Hollywood and the studio system, where truth, literal or otherwise, was always in short supply. He did well at Warner Bros., a B-movie actor who seemed on his way to being an A-list star until public tastes shifted after World War II. The reversal in fortunes helped Reagan form a deep pragmatism in matters of his own self-interest, a trait that would prove invaluable in his later political career.
His marriage to the actress Jane Wyman worked better in Louella Parsons’s gossip column than in real life, but Reagan bought into the P.R. campaign with his whole heart. Even when a restless Wyman told the press the marriage was over, Reagan refused to relinquish the fantasy. “I know she loves me,” he wrote to the head of his fan club, “even though she thinks she doesn’t.” His second marriage, to Nancy Davis, worked beautifully, not least because of Nancy’s unique ability to gaze admiringly at her husband while giving the rest of the world a realist’s cold glare.
Boot’s account excels by embracing rather than eliding the paradoxes of Reagan’s political career. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was drawn to the conspiracy theories and paranoia of the far right, yet as governor of California “he governed more on the merits of the issues rather than ideology or politics.”
He came to the White House preaching revolution and labeling the federal government “the problem.” Yet the most productive members of his administration were Establishment pragmatists who viewed the effective management of government as their highest responsibility. His “theory of the Cold War” was “We win, they lose.” Yet his actual Cold War successes owed as much to coaxing, even accommodating diplomacy.
His political instincts and his eternal sunniness helped, too. Almost never in Boot’s account of the White House years will readers see Reagan express anger or even annoyance. (One memorable exception comes when he is forced to sit through three minutes of credits at the close of a White House screening of E.T. “When I was an actor, our end credits were maybe fifteen seconds long,” he complained to Steven Spielberg afterward. Reagan’s “presidential performance,” Boot writes, was “therapeutic for a nation battered by the traumas and the loss of confidence of the 1970s.”
Could another Reagan rise in answer to our own traumatized, underconfident age? Perhaps, if the G.O.P. somehow finds its way back to the values Reagan actually practiced: pragmatism, optimism, and generosity of spirit. The division in Boot’s subtitle—His Life and Legend—is telling. Whenever the Trump fever finally passes, Republicans will have to find a new way forward. The Reagan of legend will be of little help to them. On their path back to sanity, the important lessons will come from the Reagan of real life.
Jonathan Darman is the author of Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America and Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President
