Nicholas Lemann: The diaries of Ronald Reagan
... Reagan’s reputation has risen steadily since he left office. Republican politicians’ constant, incantatory tributes t him—as at the first debate among the Party’s 2008 Presidential aspirants, held earlier this month at the Reaga Library—testify to his popularity. To judge from Brinkley’s selection, the domestic operations of government hardl ever crossed Reagan’s mind; the outstanding item on his résumé is the collapse of Soviet Communism in the years jus after he left office. Reagan’s fans give him credit for seeing all along that this was a possibility and then workin relentlessly and effectively to bring it about. Accordingly, they’re inclined to ascribe to him a deep, philosophicall grounded sense of the meaning of human liberty, which guided him at every step. John Patrick Diggins, whose book “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History” was published earlier this year, makes such a case: hi Reagan was shaped by Thomas Paine and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was comparable in Presidential greatness t Abraham Lincoln
The diaries don’t offer much warrant for this view. A better companion to the diaries is “The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism,” by an extravagant admirer of Reagan’s named Thomas W. Evans, also published earlier this year. By focussing on the decade or so when Reagan was a travelling spokesman for General Electric—a period that he began as a Democrat and ended as a Republican—Evans does a persuasive job of explaining where Reagan’s political views came from.
The person who hired Reagan at G.E. was a corporate vice-president, Lemuel Boulware, who has a big fan in Evans. “Although he wore horn-rimmed glasses and his brown hair was thinning, he exuded power,” Evans says of Boulware. “His face had a ruddy glow from weekends spent on the golf course in Westchester.” Reagan went to work for G.E. in 1954, a time when labor unions were much more powerful than they are now, and Boulware was a leader of an effort by alarmed corporate executives to counteract labor’s growing power. One idea of Boulware’s was that labor relations should not be confined to the bargaining table; instead, corporations should send their workers a non-stop message about the benefits of the capitalist system. This was Reagan’s mission—he was a spokesman whose audience was G.E.’s own employees as much as the outside world—and, in the course of countless hours spent fulfilling it (he was afraid to fly then, and travelled from plant to plant across the country by train), he developed an oft-repeated speech that, when Reagan participated in the Goldwater Presidential campaign in 1964, became “The Speech,” a soaring panegyric about the glories of American free enterprise and the threat of Communism, which was the basis of his political career. In Evans’s account, Boulware is the true father of Reaganism.
Evans has assembled a plausible list of other influences on Reagan. They are mostly forgotten purveyors of political and cultural Americana, rather than the great thinkers of Western civilization: Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, whose science-fiction fables for boys were favorite reading of the young Reagan; conservative popular economics writers like Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, and Lewis Haney; anti-Communists like John T. Flynn, Robert Strausz-Hupé, and Laurence Beilenson; and political operatives like F. Clifton White. It’s also possible to detect in Reagan’s speeches and writings echoes of the inspirational sermons that were ubiquitous in early-twentieth-century Middle America, like Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds,” and Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret.” And motifs from old movies consistently found their way into Reagan’s political talk, and maybe his thinking, too. Reagan’s mind was a battered, capacious old valise stuffed with material he accumulated over the decades....
Read entire article at New Yorker
The diaries don’t offer much warrant for this view. A better companion to the diaries is “The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism,” by an extravagant admirer of Reagan’s named Thomas W. Evans, also published earlier this year. By focussing on the decade or so when Reagan was a travelling spokesman for General Electric—a period that he began as a Democrat and ended as a Republican—Evans does a persuasive job of explaining where Reagan’s political views came from.
The person who hired Reagan at G.E. was a corporate vice-president, Lemuel Boulware, who has a big fan in Evans. “Although he wore horn-rimmed glasses and his brown hair was thinning, he exuded power,” Evans says of Boulware. “His face had a ruddy glow from weekends spent on the golf course in Westchester.” Reagan went to work for G.E. in 1954, a time when labor unions were much more powerful than they are now, and Boulware was a leader of an effort by alarmed corporate executives to counteract labor’s growing power. One idea of Boulware’s was that labor relations should not be confined to the bargaining table; instead, corporations should send their workers a non-stop message about the benefits of the capitalist system. This was Reagan’s mission—he was a spokesman whose audience was G.E.’s own employees as much as the outside world—and, in the course of countless hours spent fulfilling it (he was afraid to fly then, and travelled from plant to plant across the country by train), he developed an oft-repeated speech that, when Reagan participated in the Goldwater Presidential campaign in 1964, became “The Speech,” a soaring panegyric about the glories of American free enterprise and the threat of Communism, which was the basis of his political career. In Evans’s account, Boulware is the true father of Reaganism.
Evans has assembled a plausible list of other influences on Reagan. They are mostly forgotten purveyors of political and cultural Americana, rather than the great thinkers of Western civilization: Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, whose science-fiction fables for boys were favorite reading of the young Reagan; conservative popular economics writers like Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, and Lewis Haney; anti-Communists like John T. Flynn, Robert Strausz-Hupé, and Laurence Beilenson; and political operatives like F. Clifton White. It’s also possible to detect in Reagan’s speeches and writings echoes of the inspirational sermons that were ubiquitous in early-twentieth-century Middle America, like Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds,” and Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret.” And motifs from old movies consistently found their way into Reagan’s political talk, and maybe his thinking, too. Reagan’s mind was a battered, capacious old valise stuffed with material he accumulated over the decades....