New bio gets past Reagan the icon
Transformational politician still an enigma
WASHINGTON – For a president who served two terms, altered the nation’s political trajectory, moved toward ending the Cold War and became a partisan icon, Ronald Wilson Reagan remains, remarkably, something of an enigma.
How could a politician who succeeded in putting his party and the nation on a more conservative course at times seem even to his own aides incurious and disengaged?
Why would a person capable of connecting so effectively with audiences through both the expanse of arenas and the intimacy of television allow almost no one beyond wife Nancy get truly close to him?
Reagan has flummoxed some renowned presidential biographers, including Pulitzer-Prize winning Edmund Morris. After gaining inside access at the Reagan White House, Morris produced a perplexing, disappointing book that cast a fictional version of himself as a character in Reagan’s life.
Perhaps it makes sense that a less conventional writer, and one with a grounding in the entertainment world that launched Reagan, would be more successful in capturing just who the nation’s 40th president was.
Bob Spitz, whose previous biographical subjects include Bob Dylan, Julia Child and The Beatles, has writ-
ten a solid, sweeping narration of Reagan’s life, sympathetic but not sycophantic.
In “Reagan: An American Journey” (Penguin Press, 880 pp., ★★★g), Spitz starts at the beginning, with Reagan’s formative years as the second son of an alcoholic father who sold shoes in tiny Midwestern towns. Reagan’s charm, his optimism and his self-confidence somehow propelled him from there to a respectable career in Hollywood and, ultimately, to the Oval Office.
Notably, the book’s cover doesn’t portray Reagan in a familiar pose as president, wearing a dark suit and seated in front of an American flag. Instead, the photo is from his days before politics, a young man with movie-star looks in a short-sleeve pullover shirt, leaning against a fence and squinting into the sun. With a quizzical expression on his face, he carries the suggestion of possibilities ahead.
There are a some sloppy mistakes and misjudgments in the book. Jimmy Carter never used the word “malaise” in his famous speech. Reagan didn’t “adroitly sidestep” the issue of AIDS; he deliberately ignored a deadly health crisis that erupted on his watch. And the press didn’t get “wind” of Nancy Rea- gan’s reliance on astrology “at some point”; that disclosure was a deliberate act of revenge in the memoir of the chief of staff she had targeted, Donald Regan.
Still, the account of Nancy Reagan’s relentless campaign to oust Regan is deliciously detailed.
It took time for Regan, despite his past credentials as a Marine and Merrill Lynch CEO and secretary of the Treasury, to realize just how outmatched he was.
The portrait of the first lady is particularly sophisticated. The president’s (male) aides saw her as meddling and manipulative, someone to be managed. Nancy Reagan could be petty and vain. But her political judgment proved to be shrewd. Ronald Reagan was never an empty suit, the “just an actor” that his detractors depicted. But it is hard to imagine that he would have risen to the most powerful office in the world absent her by his side and protecting his back.
“Reagan: An American Journey” is honest about the president’s shortcomings, including the tunnel vision and inattention that contributed to the IranContra scandal that nearly undid his presidency. Spitz notes the suspicion by some that Reagan began missing a step while still in office, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.
In one of the most poignant episodes in the book, the author describes Reagan, immediately after being told of the diagnosis, sitting down and writing a two-page letter to “My Fellow Americans” to tell them about it. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he wrote.
An epic American life, indeed. Susan Page, USA TODAY’s Washington Bureau chief, covered the Reagan White House for Newsday.