Reagan: His Life and Legend

“Boot’s biography is not compelling, nor does it reveal the real Ronald Reagan.”

The publisher of Max Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan bills it as a “definitive biography” that is “as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.” The book, the publisher claims, reveals “the man behind the mythology.” Alas, Boot’s biography is not compelling, nor does it reveal the real Ronald Reagan. Instead, Boot’s book is a conventional liberal biography that all but accuses Reagan of being a stealth racist who climbed the greasy pole of politics by “catering to racists,” enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and who deserves little, if any, credit for winning the Cold War.

To be sure, Boot’s research is extensive; his work on the book began 11 years ago. He amasses a lot of facts about Reagan’s life and political career. He chronicles Reagan’s mid-western upbringing by an alcoholic father and deeply religious mother in small towns in Illinois. He notes Reagan’s phenomenal memory but middling academic record, his love of sports, and his early desire to be an actor. He mentions Reagan’s heroics as a lifeguard who was responsible for saving the lives of more than 70 people. Reagan the sportscaster in Iowa traveled to California where he rose to become a Hollywood star, though mostly acting in “B” movies.

Boot covers Reagan’s first marriage to Jayne Wyman, also a Hollywood star, that unhappily ended in divorce. Reagan served in the army during World War II, but on the home front making propaganda movies while other stars like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable fought in combat. After the war, Reagan joined and later headed the Screen Actors Guild, where he fought attempts by communists to infiltrate Hollywood.

Boot downplays the communist threat in Hollywood and in Washington in the late 1940s, instead accusing Reagan of taking part in the “Red Scare,” which later led to the horrors of McCarthyism. Here, Boot follows the conventional liberal line that the communist threat within the United States was exaggerated by “John Bircher” types, ignoring the pioneering work of James Burnham, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Eric Breindel, Herbert Romerstein, and the more recent work of Diana West, that showed the extent of communist infiltration of America in the 1940s. It was Nicholas von Hoffman, no right-winger, who in the mid 1990s after the release of the Venona intercepts, wrote that Senator Joe McCarthy for all of his flaws was closer to the truth about communist infiltration in the United States than his legion of critics on the ideological left.

Reagan was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but his politics shifted toward the right just as his movie career spiraled downward. His second marriage to Nancy Davis lasted. Reagan had two children with Jane Wyman (a daughter Maureen and an adopted son Michael), and would have two more with Nancy (a daughter Patti and a son Ron). Boot covers the familiar ground of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s deep love for each other, but their difficult relationships with all four children.

The advent of television saved Reagan’s acting career for a time and started his pathway to elective politics. Reagan was hired by General Electric to introduce and sometimes star in their GE Theater television programs. He also became a spokesperson for General Electric, traveling to their many plants around the country and making speeches to GE employees. Those speeches promoted conservative values and capitalist economics and warned about the dangers of socialism and communism.

Reagan strode onto the national political scene during the 1964 presidential election when he delivered a speech on behalf of GOP candidate Barry Goldwater. The speech impressed wealthy Republicans in Reagan’s home state of California, and soon Reagan was being touted as a rising political star.

Boot describes Reagan in his first campaign for governor of California as the “white backlash candidate.” He characterizes Reagan’s opposition to welfare and a fair housing act as a “dog whistle to white bigots.” In every Reagan campaign, according to Boot, Reagan appealed to bigots while claiming he was not a racist. Boot writes that Reagan “pioneered the white-backlash playbook” that Richard Nixon effectively used as his “Southern strategy” in the 1968 presidential campaign.

Reagan, according to Boot, used a similar strategy in his unsuccessful run for the GOP presidential nomination against incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Boot calls Reagan’s appeals to “law and order” and federalism as “seemingly neutral language” that catered to bigots. So, too, writes Boot, was Reagan’s opposition to the Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson. Boot repeatedly equates the opposition to welfare programs of the Great Society as anti-Black, ignoring the fact that those very same Great Society programs helped to undermine Black families and produced generations of welfare dependents among Blacks and whites.

But the greatest weakness of Boot’s book is his refusal to give Reagan appropriate credit for winning the Cold War. Here, he accuses Reagan of exaggerating the Soviet military threat, endangering the peace by his hardline anti-Soviet policies and rhetoric during his first term as president, and being fortunate that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had “humane instincts” in seeking to end the Cold War. Boot does give Reagan some credit for cooperating with Gorbachev in ending the Cold War, but for Boot Gorbachev deserves the most credit by far.

Boot writes that Reagan’s military buildup, promotion of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), economic warfare, aid to anti-Soviet and anti-communist forces in Poland, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet empire. In fact, Boot claims that these hawkish moves by Reagan delayed the end of the Cold War. He dismisses the importance of key national security directives wherein Reagan proposed to exploit Soviet weaknesses and undermine Soviet control of their satellite empire. He makes light of Reagan’s remarkable prescient speeches early in his first term where he envisioned the fall of the Soviet Union.

Fortunately, other writers, including Paul Kengor, Peter Schweizer, John Patrick Diggins, and John Lehman, to name just a few, have carefully documented Reagan’s strategy to bring down the Soviet empire.

Max Boot’s judgments about foreign policy have been open to question ever since his relentless cheerleading for George W. Bush’s endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the larger global war on terror. And he is currently a big supporter of the continued fueling of the devastating war in Ukraine—a war that could very easily expand into an even more dangerous global conflict if we follow Boot’s advice. Given this track record, it is a wonder that anyone would give credence to his judgments about who is responsible for winning the Cold War.