Honey, I forgot to duck

Afew days​ after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold Warrior. His rhetorical assaults on the ‘evil empire’, coupled with a relentless military build-up, had pushed the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race, destabilised its economy and accelerated its collapse. The pivotal moment in this narrative was Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, issued in Berlin in June 1987: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ One could hardly imagine a tale more flattering to Americans’ nationalist narcissism, or more fitting to the unipolar moment when Madeleine Albright anointed the United States as ‘the indispensable nation’. Among politicians and pundits, the story that Reagan led the US to victory in the Cold War has flourished for nearly forty years.

Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend decisively discredits that narrative with abundant evidence and convincing argument. This may come as a surprise to anyone who knows Boot’s ideological inclinations. For several decades he has been a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of peace’. He complained continually about Americans’ reluctance to embrace their imperial responsibilities and shed blood abroad. Like other stenographers for the national security state, he was appalled by Trump’s election in 2016, and gripped by the (unwarranted) fear that the new president might begin a retreat from empire in his effort to put ‘America first’. With a book-length flurry of self-ennoblement, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018), Boot gave up on the Republican Party and discovered white male privilege – as well as the fact that he was a beneficiary of it. He was preparing for his new political identity as a liberal neoconservative, a ‘centrist’ capable of denouncing racism and misogyny while still advocating unceasingly for imperial adventures. Before long he had found an appropriate niche on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Writing Reagan’s biography must have been an ideological challenge as Boot recoiled from what he called ‘the right’ towards what was becoming the centre. Boot could no longer serve up undiluted adulation, as he might have done in his salad days as a young Russian émigré and devotee of the National Review. As an established biographer from within the Washington consensus, he had to distance himself from Reagan’s views on race, campus radicals, and even the Soviet Union. He also had to explore the managerial morass that was Reagan’s White House. Once he began poking through the archives, he uncovered widespread symptoms of mismanagement: incompetent cronies appointed to high office, festering feuds left unattended, snap judgments, formulaic thinking, and long periods when Reagan himself was simply too tired, distracted or old to be mentally available. Subject to granular examination by a scrupulous biographer (and Boot is one), the life of Reagan – even and perhaps especially while he was president – could hardly be called inspiring. But the legend of Reagan could. As Boot makes clear, from his subtitle onwards, he is at least as engrossed by Reagan’s legend as he is by his life.

The legend of Reagan was partly a consequence of his preternatural charm. ‘It was a joy to watch him in action,’ one White House staffer told Nancy Reagan, ‘and there was almost no one who did not succumb to his magic.’ The magic could also be exercised at a distance. When Reagan’s funeral procession passed through Washington, his son Ron recalled seeing an onlooker holding a sign: ‘Now there was a president.’ Except for Reagan’s idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it is impossible to imagine this kind of spontaneous tribute to any other American president in the last century.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend also stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts – to the point that fiction replaced factuality altogether. Boot finds an interpretative frame for this process in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film from 1962 about a successful politician who has built his career on the false claim that he once killed a dangerous outlaw. When the editor of a local newspaper learns the truth, he decides not to print it. ‘This is the West, sir,’ he explains. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ Hollywood had ‘precisely the same “fiction over fact” ethos’, Boot writes, ‘and it would be a hallmark of Reagan’s life as well’.

Reagan identified so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular Guy, a mediocre football player, could supplant the star and become a legend in his own head. As Reagan told the Hollywood writer Gladys Hall in 1942, he did not ‘believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.’ A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and Washington: this was the core of the Reagan legend.

Throughout his career, Reagan spent much of his mental life in the America constructed by Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, where you could always tell the good guys from the bad guys, the snobs from the regular fellas, where decent, attractive people turned out to be resourceful and resilient as well. This was his most compelling reality, and even while it prevented him from engaging with empirical evidence, it also strengthened whatever claim he had on greatness – if we accept Boot’s argument. He spends hundreds of pages detailing the blunders and missteps of Reagan’s administration, yet he keeps returning to Reagan’s one enduring accomplishment: he ‘made America feel good about itself again’, as the Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney put it. But what exactly was it about Reagan that made Americans feel good?

According to the conventional wisdom then and now, it was all about overcoming the dreaded ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ (dreaded, at least, by the foreign policy establishment): the reluctance to use force abroad after the devastating loss in Vietnam. Reagan laundered what military interventionists call ‘American ideals and values’ in the wringer-washer on the back porch (where it usually was in Frank Capra’s films) and they came out cleansed of any taint of humiliation. We could hold our heads high again. We could reconsecrate the marriage of virtue and power. (The first-person plural was easily conflated with ‘the nation’ and ‘the country’.) By early 1985, after a rough start, the Reagan medicine was already working: ‘The country had regained its confidence and swagger,’ Boot writes, ‘thanks in part to the policies and pageantry orchestrated by the genial former actor who had made the job of being president look deceptively easy.’ Boot’s choice of ‘swagger’ gives the game away; the regeneration on offer was military. This was a return to a familiar exceptionalist idiom – ‘We’re number one’ – but there were new developments as well. Rarely, if ever, had supposedly serious journalists referred to American allies and antagonists as good guys and bad guys. Now they chattered away in that idiom like eight-year-old boys.

Reagan’s revival of the American spirit cleared the decks for further armed interventions abroad. For the likes of Boot, this was a true spiritual renewal. No need, in his view, to reflect on its catastrophic long-term effect: the resurrection of a bipartisan, exceptionalist mission within the US political class to ‘promote democracy’ across the globe. It is only a short step from Reagan to Biden, the decrepit old codger yearning to be a war president as he conjures up menacing adversaries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea. But it is a significant step. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of unipolar US hegemony, arguments for military intervention have become even more diffuse, more detached from conditions on the ground, than they were during the Cold War. Any sort of popular unrest in a foreign country can be manufactured or manipulated by the US intelligence agencies and eventually used to justify intervention in the name of ‘democracy’. The results are nearly always calamitous.

None​ of this concerns Boot. He is a thorough biographer, but his capacity for serious thought is undone by his attachment to a neoconservative creed. Trying to justify praise for Reagan, adrift in a murky sea of abstraction and sentimentality, he casts about for appropriate conceptual forms and seizes on the old reliable: reification. Abstractions become human entities with needs. When Reagan began his presidency, his biographer assumes, the nation (the country, the American people) all needed the same thing: to stand tall again, to feel proud to be citizens of the greatest country in the world – sentiments that in US political culture could only be achieved through imperial adventure and military dominance, or the simulation of it. Reagan, in effect, created the cultural conditions that enabled neoconservative militarism to become respectable and ultimately almost universal among the Washington elite. They also enabled Boot to become a successful Washington pundit, singing the praises of war and its tonic effects on the body politic.

Despite his imprisonment in Washington convention, Boot is fully able to evaluate the claims that Reagan ‘beat communism’ and ‘won’ the Cold War. He recognises the fundamental tension in Reagan (and in his administration) between pragmatism and moralism. Reagan’s ‘entire life’, Boot writes, was ‘a series of deals’: with the Democratic leaders Jesse Unruh in Sacramento and Tip O’Neill in Washington, with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Helsinki. ‘He was a true conservative,’ his White House chief of staff Jim Baker said, ‘but boy was he pragmatic when it came to governing.’ Yet for Reagan, ‘pragmatism was always sheathed in the armour of moral certitude,’ Boot says. ‘His superpower was the ability to reorder the world in his mind as he wished it to be – not necessarily as it was.’ While the fiction-over-fact mode helped make him a legendary figure, it didn’t always make for good policy.

In the Reagan administration, clarity of thought was a rare commodity. The president’s political ideals were a muddle of Reader’s Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But even as he blundered about Central America determined to uncover and stamp out Soviet influence, Reagan adapted to changing circumstances in the Soviet Union – particularly the emergence of Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Communist Party. This was at a moment when transatlantic fears of nuclear war were on the rise and Reagan himself was stoking them with his denunciations of the Soviet Union and his plan (inherited from Carter) to install mid-range cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.

As Boot shows, the idea that Reagan ‘beat communism’ depended on the assumption that his arms build-up drove Gorbachev to reform the Soviet system in order to avoid bankruptcy and compete more effectively with the US in an arms race. On the contrary, Gorbachev’s transformation of the USSR was not a product of any crisis induced by Reagan, but ‘a product of his own humane instincts’. The clearest evidence of this was Gorbachev’s encouragement of democratic dissidence among Eastern Europeans as well as Russians in his speech to the UN on 7 December 1988. Boot rightly credits Gorbachev with ending the Cold War and dismisses Reagan’s demand that he ‘tear down this wall’ as a publicity stunt which provoked Kremlin hardliners rather than paving a path to peace.

Yet there was one humane instinct that Reagan did share with Gorbachev: a horror of nuclear war combined with a hope for a world without nuclear weapons. This truly did push Reagan to help end the Cold War, by joining Gorbachev in confronting the threat to the world posed by US-Soviet rivalry. Here, too, Reagan’s cinematic imagination was key. In November 1983, ABC aired the made-for-TV movie The Day After, which powerfully evoked the impact of a nuclear strike on Kansas City, Missouri, and nearby Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan watched it twice, and it left him ‘greatly depressed’. We have ‘to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war’, he wrote in his diary. A movie representation of nuclear catastrophe was far more compelling to Reagan than an intelligence report could ever be.

While Boot mostly ignores The Day After, he does show that a common nuclear pacifist outlook united the Soviet and American leaders and kept them returning to the conference table, despite disagreements. The major tension involved Reagan’s insistence that the US be allowed to pursue development of the Strategic Defence Initiative, a missile defence system better known (derisively) as Star Wars. When talking about it, ‘his eyes would light up with that sparkle normally reserved only for riding horses and chopping wood,’ a White House aide reported. Reagan clung to the belief that SDI could create an impermeable shield which would protect Americans from nuclear attack – a view no serious scientist shared. The Russians had experimented with missile defence systems and judged them too vulnerable to electronic scrambling. Gorbachev and his colleagues in the Kremlin weren’t afraid that SDI would work, but that American faith in missile defence technology would embolden US leaders to embrace a first-strike strategy, secure in their delusion that they would be protected from retaliation. SDI, in short, recklessly destabilised the balance of terror.

Reagan’s attachment to a fantastic, impenetrable nuclear shield was of a piece with his claim that the commercial airstrip under construction on the tiny island of Grenada was intended to service the Red Army. Both stories reflected his preference for satisfyingly simple, even cartoonish representations of reality rather than the annoying complexities introduced by conflicting evidence. Despite his horror of nuclear war, Reagan’s stubborn commitment to a techno-fantasy blocked the best opportunity to end the nuclear arms race we have ever had. The two leading nuclear powers agreed on every detail required for complete disarmament, except one.

Watching Reagan deploy fictions so unselfconsciously that they became truths to himself as well as to his audience, we begin to glimpse the epistemological significance of his intellectual vacuity. Ronald Reagan the actor, casting himself in a series of starring roles, becomes a leitmotif in this chronicle, as Boot repeatedly highlights the theatrical professional’s capacity to infuse artifice with authenticity, and ignorance with authority. Dozens of Reagan’s public assertions, dating back to his Hollywood days if not earlier, could be characterised as literally false; but usually he seemed so convinced by what he was saying that it is hard to call him a liar (and Boot barely does). Reagan’s belief in his own utterances was often a direct result of his ignorance of or indifference to the complexity of the situation he was describing. Boot documents his detachment from detail and its damaging consequences – his tacit approval, for example, of the trading of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and money, which was then secretly and illegally transferred to the Contra rebels in Central America. As governor of California and as president, Reagan shamelessly played on the cultural and racial prejudices of his supporters, falsely accusing student protesters of violence and ‘welfare queens’ of fraud. Boot records innumerable such falsehoods and deplores Reagan’s exploitation of his supporters’ bigotry for electoral gain. He also explores major policy failures: the Iran-Contra Affair; the loss of 241 Marines to a suicide bombing in Beirut after the president had ‘sent the Marines on a perilous, ill-defined peacekeeping mission with scant hope of success’; the promise of balanced budgets while running up record deficits (mostly on military spending); the refusal to confront apartheid in South Africa or Aids in his own backyard. Yet all these failures have melted into the mist of collective memory, while in Boot’s view ‘Reagan’s achievements – helping to end the Cold War and reviving the nation’s spirits along with the economy – loom larger than ever.’ Setting aside the ambiguous claims about the Cold War and the economy, the heart of the matter remains ‘reviving the nation’s spirits’.

Since one clear expression of those revived spirits was the ‘swagger’ that comes with military victory, the Economist’s editorial impulse becomes more apparent: they were printing the legend. Reagan may not have been actually ‘The Man Who Beat Communism’, but the idea was consistent with his legend, and with what ‘the nation’ (or its political class) needed: not a leader who transcended conflict and pointed a path to peace, as Reagan did (however incompletely) with Gorbachev, but a winner who routed the bad guys. Reagan’s capacity to freshen the stale language of moral triumph was rooted in his hardscrabble Midwestern boyhood, and his successful escape from it to a world where people sat spellbound in the dark, watching an America that didn’t really exist.

Ronald Reagan​ was born in Tampico, Illinois in 1911 in the middle of a blizzard. He called himself ‘Dutch’ from early on: ‘I never thought “Ronald” was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy.’ His father, Jack, was a retail salesman in various lines, a hopeless drunk who bounced from one job to another, dragging his family with him from town to town; his mother, Nelle, took in sewing and prayed for her husband’s sobriety with a prairie Protestant church called the Disciples of Christ. In 1911, Boot writes, young Ronald’s way of life was already ‘fast disappearing’. Yet even as a boy, Boot writes, ‘ever the quintessential American, he always looked to the future with hope and optimism rather than dwelling on the past.’

Boot does not suspect that there might have been something self-consciously willed about that optimism – a way Dutch could protect himself against the anxiety that he and his brother must have felt as they huddled in bed listening to their parents’ screaming matches when Jack came home after a three-day bender. ‘My brother and I would hear some pretty fiery arguments through the walls of our house,’ Reagan recalled in his autobiography. His anodyne language, which says nothing about what the boys felt, reveals Reagan’s powerful impulse to keep personal conflict at bay. Ron remembered that his father would put his head down and fiddle with his mashed potatoes when he or his sister, Patti, clashed with their mother at the dinner table. Reagan himself, as governor and president, would remain serene amid the rancorous rivalries of his subordinates; smoothing things over with bland assurances was a way to keep darker feelings at bay and put intimacy out of reach. Family and friends who tried to connect with his inner life found that, in effect, there was no there there.

Reagan’s wilful optimism resonated with America’s vernacular religion – positive thinking – but also with his mother’s religious outlook. Like other Disciples of Christ, she combined a conservative personal morality with Social Gospel concern for the less fortunate and faith in a benign life to come. True to this tradition, Reagan as a young man believed in heaven but not hell. ‘Nelle never saw anything evil in another human being, and Ronnie is the same way,’ Nancy wrote. Reagan’s tirades against the ‘evil empire’ were directed at the Soviet system and not at Russian leaders – a sharp contrast to the Putin fetish that animates contemporary Russophobia.

In 1920, when Dutch was nearly ten, the Reagan family moved to Dixon, where he came of age, and which became his ideal of a ‘good clean town’. At eleven, he formally joined the Disciples of Christ and ‘emerged from childhood with a moralistic outlook on the world, tending to view political disputes as battles between good and evil,’ Boot says. He made a smooth transition to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution ninety miles south of Dixon, with Social Gospel roots. ‘Dutch would go from success to success, untroubled by the taint of failure,’ Boot writes. He was ‘a cocky SOB, a loud talker’, a classmate said. And when he talked, people listened. At the beginning of his senior year, he was one of several student speakers urging a strike against budget cuts. ‘For the first time in my life, I felt my words reach out and grab an audience, and it was exhilarating,’ Reagan remembered. ‘When I’d say something, they’d roar after every sentence, sometimes every word, and after a while it was as if the audience and I were one.’

Graduating from Eureka in 1932 as the Depression deepened, Reagan landed on his feet in Davenport, Iowa, as a radio sportscaster. He moved to Des Moines, reporting on baseball games. Eventually he proposed covering the Chicago Cubs in spring training on Santa Catalina Island off the South California coast, an enticing alternative to late winter in Iowa. He was given the assignment, and got his break when he heard a girl from Des Moines singing with a big band at the Biltmore in LA. They met for drinks and she agreed to put him in touch with her agent – after insisting he take off his glasses for the meeting.

That was only the beginning of his transformation. Tall, handsome and personable, he quickly secured an offer from Warner Brothers to join its stable of actors as a contract player. He was renamed Ronald, refitted with a new haircut and new suits with thinner shoulder pads. (The thick ones made his head look too small.) Before long he was playing major roles in sentimental melodramas like Knute Rockne, All American and noirish crime dramas like Kings Row – and attracting the attention of the actress Jane Wyman, whom he married in January 1940. When the war came, Warner Brothers kept Reagan out of uniform for as long as possible and arranged preferential treatment for him even after his deferments ran out. His noncombatant status provided new opportunities for turning fiction into fact.

One supposedly factual story Reagan never tired of telling in later years involved a B-17 bomber limping back towards base after delivering its payload over Europe. The crew all managed to bail successfully, except for the pilot and the ball-turret gunner, who was trapped at his post and crying out piteously. ‘Never mind son, we’ll ride it down together,’ said the pilot, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour. Reagan’s voice would break as he recounted this incident, and by the time he reached the medal of honour moment he could barely hold back the tears. But if the pilot and the gunner both died, who was left to tell the tale? In fact, Boot suggests, the story was another product of Reagan’s cinematic imagination, probably lifted from the film Wing and a Prayer (1944): ‘Seeing the war on black and white film’ – rather than in person – ‘reinforced his Manichean, black and white view of the world.’

The coming of the Cold War had much the same effect. During the Second World War, Reagan had drifted away from a Rooseveltian tolerance for America’s Soviet ally to a rigid anti-communist stance. When the upstart Conference of Studio Unions joined the postwar strike wave in 1945-46, Reagan was appointed to a committee of the Screen Actors Guild to investigate. He concluded that the strike was part of ‘the communist putsch for control of motion pictures’. J. Edgar Hoover had been ramping up his pursuit of communist subversives, increasingly with the collaboration of the House Un-American Activities Committee; Reagan took the FBI’s warnings at face value and began seeing Reds everywhere. He remained equally credulous even as late as the 1980s.

Reagan’s heartfelt warnings against communist infiltration of the film industry propelled him to the presidency of the SAG. From that platform, he enlisted in the witch hunt – naming names, wrecking careers, ruining lives. He claimed to have accused no individuals in public, but he certainly did so in private. For years, he minimised the importance of the blacklist or denied its existence, even as he assisted in implementing it. Under his leadership, the guild implicitly legitimated the dragnet of persecution by refusing to protest against it. He never expressed any regret; instead, he presented himself as the ‘one-man battalion’ that had stopped the communist takeover of Hollywood.

Meanwhile, Jane Wyman was growing impatient with Reagan’s political obsessions and long-winded soliloquies, which provoked her to call out: ‘Hey “diarrhoea of the mouth”, shut up!’ When she filed for divorce, Reagan was baffled: he believed in the fairytale accounts of their marriage spun by the Hollywood press. ‘There were a lot of gaps in his emotional intelligence,’ his son Ron remarked wryly. Reagan’s post-divorce life was priapic and lonely, a proliferation of anonymous, meaningless sexual encounters. But thanks to the anti-communist hysteria gripping Hollywood, he met Nancy Davis. She was a Chicago socialite and graduate of Smith College who had come to Hollywood in search of stardom but also – more important – a husband. Falsely accused of communist sympathies, she sought exoneration from SAG and took a shine to its president. He was attractive and charming and had a substantial presence in Hollywood. According to Boot, Nancy’s mother had taught her the importance of achieving family stability ‘by slavishly catering to and ceaselessly promoting her husband’. She practised this on their first date, when she showed far more interest in Reagan’s monologues than Wyman ever had. By the time he was president she had the performance down cold. Whenever he gave a speech, the journalist Lou Cannon observed, ‘Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth.’

In the couple’s early years together, Nancy had few opportunities to display such rapt attention. As the studio system collapsed and the free market came to the movies, Reagan’s career began to plummet. Soon he had descended to doing schtick for Las Vegas entertainers, and ultimately playing second fiddle to a gang of performing chimpanzees. He rescued himself by leaving film for the rising new medium, television. As the host of General Electric Theatre his job wasn’t just to welcome the TV audience but also to travel around the US promoting General Electric products and interests. Here he found his métier. ‘It was pretty hard to heckle Ron, because he is so obviously such a damned nice guy,’ one of his colleagues said. He also seemed well informed, even though he carried his knowledge lightly. ‘All of Reagan’s reading of Reader’s Digest and other publications seemed to have paid off,’ Boot observes. ‘The run of the mill actor turned out to be a superlative public speaker.’

Reagan’s new job required much travel and long absences from home, where family relations were tense. According to their daughter Patti, Nancy began hitting her on a ‘weekly, sometimes daily basis’; was constantly hiring and firing maids, gardeners and nannies; and was jittery and apprehensive despite frequently downing sedatives. Patti and Ron Jr were restless and miserable: where was Papa? Out becoming a public figure or, when he was home, ‘a genial but aloof figure who was often emotionally absent even when he was physically present’, as Boot puts it. ‘We were happy,’ the paterfamilias recalled. ‘Just look at the home movies.’

As General Electric’s spokesman, Reagan was well positioned to absorb and help spread the coalescing worldview of the Republican right. His mentor on labour issues, the virulently anti-union GE president Ralph Cordiner, was close at hand. On other matters, Reagan could augment the familiar wisdom of the Reader’s Digest with the harder-edged ideology of the National Review, founded by the wunderkind William F. Buckley in 1955. The new right-wing consensus involved a shift from isolationism to militant interventionism, whose advocates were ‘even willing to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union to liberate the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe’, Boot notes, without acknowledging that contemporary supporters of ‘total victory’ in Ukraine (himself included) are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Reagan assumed that JFK was a closet Marxist, in keeping with the hard-right rhetoric of the day. Eventually, in order to negotiate with Gorbachev, he would have to put aside this kind of reflexive paranoia. But for several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity he craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe fruit’. The phrase was an invented quote from Lenin. Well into his presidency, Reagan was addicted to using quotations from prominent communists and socialists, nearly all of which he had made up. Reagan’s ‘disturbingly cavalier attitude toward factual accuracy’, Boot claims, ‘helped to inure the Republican Party to “fake news”’. But he doesn’t mention that the press and the Democrats became inured to fake news too, particularly when it was manufactured by the national security state.

When Reagan’s ratings fell, GE dropped him. But he had already become a rising star on the Republican right, and solidified his position in 1964 by stumping vigorously in California for Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Several times a day, Reagan gave the same speech he had been making for years. The substance was reactionary boilerplate: casting off the shackles of government regulation, rolling back the Soviet Union, freeing the enslaved populations of Eastern Europe.

Goldwater was saying the same things, but he came across as a humourless ideologue and terrified the electorate, joking clumsily about lobbing a nuke into the men’s room of the Kremlin. Reagan, with his lemon-twist smile and effortless sincerity, domesticated the right-wing agenda and made it seem as comforting and inspiring as Mr Smith Goes to Washington. His audience was mainly affluent Republicans who could laugh at the line that 17 million Americans went to bed hungry every night because ‘they were all on a diet.’ Eventually his donors in California persuaded the Republican National Committee to buy airtime for the speech that became known as ‘A Time for Choosing’. The choice was between traditional American self-reliance and remote control by ‘a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol’. The speech was a sensation. Even moderates began to take reactionary ideas seriously. A telegenic demagogue was born.

Reagan​ knew he had a hit show on his hands and lost no time in preparing a run for governor of California. Nancy began assembling a new social network of rich friends – the Bloomingdales, the Annenbergs and their chums – who became the core of Reagan’s circle of informal advisers in Sacramento and later in Washington. Meanwhile he focused decent folks’ rage at bedraggled anti-war protesters and restless, dangerous Black people. Racially charged language – ‘Our city streets are jungle paths after dark’ – became a staple of Reagan’s political rhetoric, anticipating his remarks about ‘welfare queens’ years later. It was all very simple – the good guys versus the bad guys, the welfare recipients, dangerous criminals and subversive beatniks versus put-upon middle-class whites – and it was a winning formula. Reagan easily defeated the colourless liberal Pat Brown, whom he accused of coddling the Black Panthers and the Berkeley protesters.

Yet once he became governor Reagan revealed his pragmatic side, partly by surrounding himself with moderate advisers and keeping the Birchers at bay. He opened access to abortion (on ‘mental health’ grounds), allowed conjugal visits for prison inmates, and even compiled a solid record of environmental preservation. But when it came to exploiting the backlash against Black and student protesters, he rarely held back. He described Martin Luther King’s assassination as ‘a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws to obey’. When asked what it would take to restore order on campus, Reagan announced: ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.’ His popularity soared.

After two terms as governor, and with Nixon leaving the White House in disgrace, Reagan was ready to run for the presidency. He fell short of the nomination in 1976, but another chance came along quickly. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was an invitingly vulnerable opponent. The country was awash in protracted stagflation, oil shortages and media-made humiliation at the hands of the Iranian militants who took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran. In the eyes of the Washington establishment, the peanut farmer president seemed ill equipped to confront these challenges. In the autumn of 1979, Carter delivered a thoughtful speech that proved his downfall. His theme was that the country needed to accept limits on consumption amid environmental crisis and dwindling natural resources. He ‘seemed to be blaming the American people for the country’s problems,’ Boot writes, ‘and he sounded pessimistic’.

This was Reagan’s opening, his opportunity to restore ‘confidence and swagger’ to a country – or a political class – still suffering from the effects of Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 – ‘Why not victory over communism rather than mere containment of it? We can lick those bastards!’ – was now being asserted by a likely president. This militarist interventionism, in an updated version, would become the dominant worldview of the bipartisan Washington establishment. Reagan’s domestication of Goldwater’s ravings meant a transition to a kind of postmodern militarism – addicted to savage wars of peace, minimally staffed, light on its feet, leveraged to hell and back. Regardless of how few Americans now wear the uniform, the most important ‘national spirit’ for many remains the martial one.

Reagan’s emotional appeal had a much wider basis, however, than the promise of martial regeneration. Among other sentiments, it was built on white people’s racism, which Reagan cynically manipulated. ‘I believe in states’ rights,’ he declared in Mississippi during the 1980 campaign – an obvious dog whistle that journalists chose to overlook. The tall, conventionally handsome man with the well-padded shoulders exuded an irresistible aura and trounced the slope-shouldered pessimistic incumbent. Boot summarises the conventional wisdom: ‘With the country mired in malaise, his indictment of Jimmy Carter’s stewardship resonated – as did his promises to “make America great again” by cutting taxes, boosting defence spending, and standing up to the Soviets.’ The dream of making America great again did not originate with Trump, or with Reagan. It is rooted in the Protestant rhetorical currents that have shaped American public culture from the beginning. The righteous community, as it strains to remain righteous, constantly fears that it is falling short, that it is failing to maintain the heroic standards set by its predecessors. Since it is a subjective feeling often manufactured by government and media elites, it is difficult to say how genuine and widespread the feeling of greatness is or was. But there is no question that Reagan met a popular need to feel it.

Reagan embraced the ceremonial side of his job, which gave him the opportunity to indulge in presidential psy-ops. When he visited the Pentagon to award the Medal of Honour to a Green Beret hero, he read the citation personally, which presidents never did. General Colin Powell was impressed. ‘The military services had been restored to a place of honour,’ he recalled. Reagan was orchestrating national symbols to play the role of national therapist. But what really secured his legendary status, Boot believes, was the failed attempt on his life by John Hinckley in March 1981. Reagan came closer to dying than anyone in the general public realised at the time, but his grace under pressure transformed him ‘from a politician into a legend’. It isn’t exactly clear what constituted Reagan’s grace, beyond his reported remark to Nancy: ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’ But, in any case, he experienced a spike in approval ratings and became what the pollster Stuart Spencer called ‘a martyred surviving hero’.

Reagan did have something to offer the ideologues. He refused to negotiate with striking air traffic controllers and ultimately crushed their union. This legitimated the government’s right to hire replacement workers (i.e. scabs) and gave Reagan himself ‘a huge infusion of presidential credibility’, according to the Washington journalist Meg Greenfield. Pragmatism and right-wing ideology, in this instance, came together. Foreign policy was more complicated. The Soviets hoped that Reagan would depart from the human rights moralism of Carter and become a dealmaker in the Nixon mode – and eventually he would. But meanwhile he embarked on a military build-up disproportionate to any Soviet threat and resorted often to apocalyptic rhetoric, telling West Point cadets that they were ‘holding back an evil force that would extinguish the light we’ve been tending for six thousand years’. Yet in the first months of his administration he sent a handwritten note to Brezhnev saying he hoped they could begin talks towards a ‘lasting peace’. His secretary of state, Alexander Haig, insisted that his department be allowed to append a formal letter denouncing a Soviet arms build-up. Only the confrontational part of the message was clear in Moscow. The Cold War rift widened.

While Reagan advocated an approach towards the Soviets combining pressure and persuasion, for much of 1983 the pressure intensified: American B-52s flew over the North Pole; Nato played nuclear war games near the East German border. Even so, he grew convinced that the US could not keep pressuring the Soviets without risking a third world war – a risk brought home to him by The Day After. With the express purpose of beginning to negotiate nuclear disarmament, he replaced Richard Pipes on the National Security Council with Jack Matlock, a career diplomat with a deep knowledge of Russian history and culture. Matlock wrote most of the speech Reagan gave on 16 January 1984, a dramatic announcement that the US and USSR shared an urgent interest in reducing nuclear stockpiles and ultimately aiming for their abolition. Reagan himself wrote the sentimental conclusion, an imaginary dialogue between a Russian and an American couple, Ivan and Anya and Jim and Sally: just ordinary folks who discover they actually have much in common. Mr Smith had come to Washington.

As Reagan set out on his re-election campaign in 1984, the task seemed almost too easy. He had already made good on the promises of his first campaign, cutting taxes and domestic spending, increasing the military budget. The impact of those policies was already becoming apparent in the growth of racial and class inequality. By the end of the decade, the incarcerated population would double (thanks largely to a draconian ‘war on drugs’ disproportionately targeted at Black people), and while the incomes of the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans rose by 75 per cent, for the bottom 90 per cent the increase was just 7 per cent. The middle class was shrinking as income was redistributed upwards. But none of that mattered in 1984. As one of Reagan’s campaign managers, Lee Atwater, reminded his colleagues, ‘we should remember that President Reagan was elected to make America great again.’ The longing to recover lost greatness was as powerful in 1984 as it would be in 2024, and Reagan knew how to appeal to it – especially when up against yet another colourless liberal in Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale.

The only complication arose during the first debate, when Reagan, as his national campaign director reported, ‘came across as old, tired, and a bit befuddled. He groped for words, lost his train of thought, and mangled his closing soliloquy.’ At one point, Reagan even admitted: ‘I’m all confused now.’ ‘He was lost,’ Mondale recalled. ‘It was actually a little frightening.’ The journalists on hand were astoundingly unfazed by Reagan’s performance, which the president himself pronounced ‘awful’. But there was no talk of inadequate medication or cognitive decline in those days, and Reagan made a big comeback in the second debate. When asked about ‘the age issue’, he joked: ‘I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’ The press, as always, was enthralled. Reagan walked the election.

His subsequent administration was characterised by his progressive mental decline and detachment from policy details, which became evident in his efforts to distance himself from any approval or even knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. What saved his second term from anticlimax was his successful collaboration with Gorbachev. Despite Reagan’s attachment to SDI, the two men began work on a series of bilateral treaties that slowed the development of new weapons for more than twenty years. They also issued a final joint communiqué after their meeting in Geneva: ‘Nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought.’

Reagan’s​ overall legacy is more problematic. Along with his pal Margaret Thatcher, he played a central role in implementing a corrosive neoliberal agenda that privatised much of the public sector and dismantled the welfare state. We have yet to recover from the damage done, as societies on both sides of the Atlantic grow more unequal and governments less responsive to people’s actual needs. In foreign affairs, apart from his co-operation with Gorbachev, Reagan’s impact has been subtler than in domestic policy but ultimately just as disastrous. Contemporary American policymakers’ obsession with ‘democracy promotion’ first surfaced in the Reagan years, with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy ‘to promote freedom around the world’ (Boot’s words) by working with both political parties, labour unions and the US Chamber of Commerce to underwrite democracy movements abroad. What Boot does not mention, but what everyone knew at the time, was that the NED was intended to do overtly what the CIA had previously done covertly: to undermine foreign governments that the agency had determined were threats to American interests. The appearance of openness gave a spurious legitimacy to election interference and other psy-ops that had previously been kept out of sight. Even before the end of the Cold War, Reagan administration officials were supplementing obsessive anti-communism with what Boot calls a more ‘nuanced’ view of foreign policy. George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams advocated ‘democracy promotion’ to challenge non-communist as well as communist dictatorships. The New York Times applauded. This widening emphasis marked the start of a shift from Nixon and Kissinger’s realpolitik to what became George W. Bush’s ‘freedom agenda’ – a mission to oppose whatever the US government identified as tyranny, wherever it appeared.

Reagan: His Life and Legend reveals much about the former president, but also about its author’s transformation from palaeoconservative to liberal neoconservative. Consider this pronouncement, from a recent Boot op-ed: ‘The world’s leading illiberal powers recognise their congruence of interests and are drawing closer together to tear down the rules-based international order. The world’s democracies need to be at least as staunch in staring down the threat from the “alignment of evil”.’ Boot borrows this phrase from an Israeli intellectual, a supposedly more precise augmentation of Bush’s ‘axis of evil’. ‘Alignment’ is a bureaucratic, Democratic word, straight from the Brookings Institution and the political science department. But the Manichean focus on evil remains, as the dying empire searches the globe for adversaries to confront. The messianic mission survives.