Michiko Kakutani: Trying to Tell if Reagan Was a Leader or Was Led
In an effort to describe President Ronald Reagan, reporters and biographers have resorted to all sorts of metaphors and images. Garry Wills called him "the perfect Scout," a "Doctor Feelgood," "the demagogue as rabble-soother." Lou Cannon wrote that both conservatives and pragmatists in the Reagan White House treated him "as if he were a child monarch in need of constant protection" - "they paid homage to him, but gave him no respect." Others have described him as a visionary cowboy, a masterly illusionist, "an authentic phony," an "idiot savant," an "amiable dunce," an "ancient king" and the ultimate actor who confused "real life" with "reel life."
Reagan's official biographer, Edmund Morris, was so flummoxed by this man he described as both "a great president" and "an apparent airhead" that he abandoned his efforts to write a serious life of his subject, and instead produced "Dutch" (1999), an embarrassing hodgepodge of fact and fiction narrated by an imaginary alter ego.
Because Reagan has remained so elusive over the years, more symbol than human being, more mythic figure than flesh-and-blood politician, the reader turns in eager anticipation to Richard Reeves's new book, "President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination," the first major portrait of his presidency to be published since his death in 2004.
Mr. Reeves's earlier books on President John F. Kennedy and President Richard M. Nixon provided engrossing and illuminating studies of these two endlessly dissected politicians, simply by giving the reader minutely detailed accounts of what each president knew and when he knew it and what he actually did day to day, month by month. In this volume, Mr. Reeves applies the same technique to Reagan, but once again the Gipper eludes capture - perhaps because the details of so much policymaking in his White House were delegated, perhaps because so many of his appearances were tightly scripted.
Indeed, this book turns out to be a sorry disappointment: a plodding recitation of events that happened during Reagan's two terms, patched together from official government documents, earlier biographies, memoirs by former administration members, the president's own contemporaneous diaries and copious newspaper accounts. Most of Mr. Reeves's observations about Reagan are either poorly supported contrarian assertions or shop-worn clichés (i.e., that Reagan's words were frequently more bellicose than his actions, that he imagined "a gentle God-fearing and whitewashed American past that never was"). ...
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Reagan's official biographer, Edmund Morris, was so flummoxed by this man he described as both "a great president" and "an apparent airhead" that he abandoned his efforts to write a serious life of his subject, and instead produced "Dutch" (1999), an embarrassing hodgepodge of fact and fiction narrated by an imaginary alter ego.
Because Reagan has remained so elusive over the years, more symbol than human being, more mythic figure than flesh-and-blood politician, the reader turns in eager anticipation to Richard Reeves's new book, "President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination," the first major portrait of his presidency to be published since his death in 2004.
Mr. Reeves's earlier books on President John F. Kennedy and President Richard M. Nixon provided engrossing and illuminating studies of these two endlessly dissected politicians, simply by giving the reader minutely detailed accounts of what each president knew and when he knew it and what he actually did day to day, month by month. In this volume, Mr. Reeves applies the same technique to Reagan, but once again the Gipper eludes capture - perhaps because the details of so much policymaking in his White House were delegated, perhaps because so many of his appearances were tightly scripted.
Indeed, this book turns out to be a sorry disappointment: a plodding recitation of events that happened during Reagan's two terms, patched together from official government documents, earlier biographies, memoirs by former administration members, the president's own contemporaneous diaries and copious newspaper accounts. Most of Mr. Reeves's observations about Reagan are either poorly supported contrarian assertions or shop-worn clichés (i.e., that Reagan's words were frequently more bellicose than his actions, that he imagined "a gentle God-fearing and whitewashed American past that never was"). ...