With a new script in hand, Reagan was ready. An alarmed aide recalled how Shultz prepared Reagan for a meeting with the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, by giving him stage directions for what to do “in this scene.” Still, Reagan hit his marks. He greeted Gorbachev with openness, and, astonishingly, the two set out to eliminate their countries’ nuclear arsenals.
They might have succeeded, too, had Reagan’s fantasies not intruded. His political career was defined by three great delusions: that Communists were close to seizing the United States, that cutting taxes would increase government revenues, and that satellite weapons (particle beams, lasers) could stop all nuclear missiles. At a summit in Iceland in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev nearly agreed to a ten-year plan for total nuclear disarmament, but Reagan wouldn’t abide limits on U.S. outer-space defenses.
“Almost no government officials” believed such defenses would be feasible “in any realistic time-frame,” Boot writes. Yet Reagan had faith in them, insisted on them, and scotched the deal with Gorbachev over them. (A year later, he agreed to arms reductions.) Today, the United States and Russia collectively possess more than ten thousand nuclear warheads. And, despite Trump’s promises to build “a great Iron Dome over our country,” satellite defenses against nuclear attacks remain unviable.
Although he didn’t stick the landing, Reagan’s coöperation with Communists was nonetheless extraordinary. He had relinquished “the dogmas of a lifetime,” Boot writes. “Few other leaders have shown as much boldness or flexibility in changing with the times.” It’s hard not to notice that the virtues Boot lauds in Reagan are the ones he’s cultivated in himself. This biography carries a pointed message for conservatives: Reagan achieved greatness by abandoning his ideology. He could listen, Boot argues, and he could change.
Adaptability can be an admirable quality. Did Reagan possess it, though? “He was, yes, pragmatic like any successful politician,” Rick Perlstein writes in “The Invisible Bridge” (2014). But when Reagan bowed to reality—repeatedly raising taxes to make up for budgetary shortfalls—he rarely learned from it. His “habit of parsing the world into black-and-white” didn’t lessen with experience, Perlstein observes. “In some ways, it even deepened.” In 1987, far into his diplomacy with the Soviets, Reagan reassured an ultraconservative supporter: “I’m still the R.R. I was, and the evil empire is still just that.”
One wonders how much Reagan was adapting, and how much he was deferring. The White House included people who sought peace with Moscow. It included those who favored balanced budgets, too. Reagan agreed with them, as he agreed with most people near him. But there were few voices in his orbit when it came to, say, defending social services. There was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—Samuel Pierce, Reagan’s sole Black Cabinet member—but he seemed uninspired, and, on one occasion, Reagan mistook him for a city mayor. Most of the Administration’s top hundred officials had been selected by Reagan’s wealthy backers, and more than a quarter had net worths in the millions. No one was bringing writers to the Oval Office to paint the President word pictures about economic insecurity.
The Administration was at its most blinkered in Central America and the Caribbean. The President had strong instincts here; he saw the region’s Marxist movements as menacing the United States. Speaking of El Salvador to Canada’s Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, Reagan predicted that, “if we’re not firm here, these fellows are going to wind up challenging us in Brownsville, Texas.” Mulroney was flabbergasted. “Ron, there’s not a chance these guys can challenge you anywhere,” he told the President. But Reagan was “mesmerized” by the Communist threat to the south, Boot writes.
Unfortunately, many under him were also mesmerized. When Reagan fulminated against the Soviet Union, his aides, fearing nuclear war, challenged him. When he fulminated against Central American and Caribbean states, he was pushing on an open door. “Just give me the word and I’ll turn that fucking island into a parking lot,” Secretary of State Al Haig offered, regarding Cuba. Latin America’s strategic insignificance made it a playground where hard-line anti-Communists in the Administration could do what they liked, the historian Greg Grandin argues in “Empire’s Workshop” (2006).
Reagan saw the bloodiest Latin American battlefields as crucibles of freedom. The White House provided military aid to Guatemala as it carried out, against left-wing and Indigenous Guatemalans, “the worst slaughter in Latin America’s history,” Grandin writes. Reagan protested that Guatemala’s dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, had a “bum rap”; he was “totally committed to democracy.” The Administration also shunted millions to the Contras, guerrillas who killed tens of thousands in their terror campaign against Nicaragua’s Socialist government. They were, Reagan felt, the “moral equal of our Founding Fathers.” Perhaps from Moscow Reagan looked like a pragmatist, but from Managua he looked unhinged.
In 1983, Grenada’s Marxist government sought to build an airfield with a nine-thousand-foot runway. It requested U.S. aid and, when none came, turned to Cuba. Reagan was alarmed: “Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?” In fact, it was intended for tourists; Grenada required a runway that long to land U.S.-built Boeing 747s. But Reagan saw a conspiracy afoot to make the Caribbean a “Red Lake.” After an internal coup, Reagan—guided by his advisers—ordered an invasion. Its ostensible aim was to rescue some U.S. medical students, though the students didn’t see any need. Dozens died (Navy pilots bombed a psychiatric hospital), and the United States occupied the country. The U.N. General Assembly voted to “deeply” deplore this “flagrant violation of international law” by 108–9. “The Americans are worse than the Soviets,” Margaret Thatcher seethed.
The White House finally faced consequences for its Latin American adventures in 1986, when it was caught using funds from an illegal weapons trade with Iran to provide illegal aid to the Contras. Investigations were launched, officials indicted, and “the entire government seemed to grind to a halt,” Nancy Reagan remembered. Still, the President’s air of obliviousness shielded him. Although he had indeed sought to fund the Contras, the scandal bewildered him. “I don’t think the President, to his dying day, understood,” Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci said. Holding Reagan accountable felt like a category error, like trying to convict a squirrel of trespassing.
Iran-Contra did nothing to dim his certitudes. After his Presidency, Reagan reflected on the Grenada invasion. He believed that he had acted as an instrument of God. He quoted a U.S. pilot who noted that Grenada produced nutmeg, an ingredient in eggnog. The “Russians were trying to steal Christmas,” the pilot insisted. “We stopped them.”
At the start of this century, it seemed that Reagan’s legacy to conservatism would be his wide-eyed faith in freedom, the “magic of the marketplace,” and American innocence. Today’s G.O.P., however, is more cynical, more interested in fighting trade wars than spreading capitalism. The Reaganite values that most endure are the reactionary ones: his hostility toward civil rights, feminism, and the welfare state.
Boot has given up on defending Reagan’s values. Hence his last-ditch defense of Reagan as a pragmatist. Reagan’s two tendencies—he had wild ideas but went with the flow—match the warring Republican factions today: the MAGA firebrands and the establishment conservatives. Boot sides with the establishment and so likes the pliable Reagan best. “I’d rather get eighty per cent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying,” Reagan said. One suspects that Boot would have preferred Reagan at sixty per cent.
In the eyes of the MAGA set, Boot has been co-opted by the Beltway élite. His critics cackled recently when his wife, Sue Mi Terry, was indicted for serving a foreign country as an unregistered agent. Terry allegedly took pay from South Korea, including in the form of expensive handbags, to push its positions, including in an article written with Boot. She also stands accused of passing along “nonpublic” governmental information and introducing South Korean spies to U.S. officials over drinks. (Terry’s attorney has said that she “strongly denies” the allegations.) Even if the charges are true, they’re closer to well-lubricated networking than cloak-and-dagger spycraft. But this is precisely the sort of slippery insider business that makes everyone hate Washington.
Boot is more alert to the pathologies of ideology than to those of the establishment. He lauds Reagan for taking cues from clear-eyed officials. He has less to say about the contexts, like Latin America, in which officials acquiesced to, or even amplified, the President’s excesses.
This is the prospect we face today. Trump’s first term was, in Boot’s sense, Reaganesque, in that Trump’s aides sometimes managed to thwart or redirect his ambitions. Trump promised to build the wall and lock her up, yet he did neither. A second Trump term might not be so halting. Republicans have constructed a world around Trump’s delusions, in which Mexicans are bloodthirsty invaders, Democrats are Communists, and the 2020 election was stolen. With enough willing officials in place, these will become not the idiosyncratic beliefs of the President but the agreed-on facts of the government.
Asked about one of Reagan’s persistent lies, his press secretary Larry Speakes shrugged: “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.” This might be Reagan’s most lasting contribution to politics. Presidents had lied before, some egregiously. Reagan, however, fabricated an alternate reality. The country no longer expected truth from the world’s most powerful individual. It no longer expected comprehension, even. Reagan’s job was making myths. The problems came when people believed them. ♦
