Max Boot Turns the Page on Reagan

Years later, Reagan’s outsized memory continued to dominate the Republican Party, mesmerizing activists and candidates alike. But Reagan’s reign came to a dramatic end on November 8, 2016, with the election of Donald Trump. In this latest biography of the fortieth president, Max Boot—a renegade Republican gone left and best known for his hawkish foreign-policy writings—blames Trump’s rise on Reagan for creating “the conditions for Trump’s populist movement.” Yet Reagan promoted a more vigorous conservatism consistent with, not opposed to, its long-standing small-government tenets.

Boot’s Reagan is a mammoth effort that ably explores Reagan’s weaknesses and contradictions as well as his enormous impact on America and the world. Alas, this detailed volume is tainted by Boot’s own political journey—he has turned on Reagan as well as the right, and he levels personal as well as political attacks against his subject.

According to Boot, pragmatism was the key to Reagan’s success: “Reagan would never have gotten as far as he did if he were simply an idealist or a zealot. He had strongly held principles, but they were tempered by a keen sense of realpolitik.”

True—though it was his principles, and his convincing expression of them, that won him office. There may have been no better communicator to hold the presidency, and certainly none since television transformed American politics. Many people assumed Reagan’s rhetoric was his reality. Boot, however, describes a record that was surprisingly, even shockingly, pragmatic.

I discovered that early. Shortly after I joined the Reagan presidential campaign in August 1979, I was asked to compile “The Reagan Record” as California governor. I was not prepared to find government bigger, spending up, welfare payments increased, abortion liberalized, and much else seemingly inconsistent with Reagan’s oft-stated principles.

His presidency was similar. He cut tax rates and pushed tax reform but also accepted numerous tax hikes. Although he slowed the growth of domestic discretionary spending, outlays overall rose substantially, as did deficits. The differences between Republicans and Democrats back then were often surprisingly small. Social issues were never high on Reagan’s agenda. He sought to transform the judiciary but in practice was more concerned about criminal-justice issues than abortion.

And he charted a moderate course. Budget director David Stockman reported giving Reagan a survey asking whether he wanted to enact deep cuts or take modest nicks from a variety of government programs. The president mostly chose the latter.

He told the 1976 Republican convention that “I believe the Republican Party has a platform that [is] a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades.” But his policies, with only occasional exceptions, often resembled “pale pastel shades.”

Boot argues that Reagan’s pragmatic habits reflected the different environments in which “he received competing perspectives on major issues.” Although this may have had some influence, Reagan was surely always aware of opposing arguments, having begun his political life as a New Deal Democrat. His compromising ways may have reflected his personality, formed in response to his alcoholic father: Reagan wanted to please others and be liked in return. He didn’t enjoy personal conflict, in public or private.

Probably the most significant factor in his practicality was his having to deal with systematic opposition in his new role as president. With Democrats controlling the House of Representatives as well as the Senate during his last two years in office, his options were limited. Reagan also wanted increases in military outlays, which could only be won by agreeing to Democratic demands for higher spending elsewhere in the federal budget.

He was acutely aware of the limitations on his ability to force change. As governor of California, Reagan once explained, “I’m willing to take what I can get and go out and get some more next year.” Boot relates an episode when a presidential aide asked him why he didn’t do more to limit abortion: “There’s a limit to what you can do in politics,” Reagan responded.

Perhaps Reagan’s greatest service to the American people—and the world—was his working with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. Reagan began his presidency with a rhetorical and policy fusillade against the USSR. A closet peacenik who only sparingly used the U.S. military, Reagan was, however, horrified by the prospect of nuclear war, and increasingly he desired to talk to the regime he had spent decades vilifying. Ironically, Boot, an inveterate hawk who has rarely found a conflict he didn’t want Americans to fight, criticizes Reagan for having “greatly exaggerated” Soviet “military strength and geopolitical ambitions” and for blaming a raft of international problems on Moscow.

Boot gives Reagan credit for engaging Gorbachev but dismisses the impact of Reagan’s rhetoric, suggesting that even his famous call for Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall was counterproductive because it encouraged Kremlin hardliners. Yet Reagan’s soaring anticommunist pronouncements gave him the domestic credibility to relax policy toward the Soviet Union. Dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe praised Reagan’s willingness to challenge the moral foundations of the “Evil Empire.” Although Moscow’s fall was primarily Moscow’s fault, the USSR found itself locked in an economic, military, and philosophical contest intensified by Reagan’s policies, a conflict the Soviets could not win.

Reagan’s role was essential in at least two ways. First, in contrast to many in Washington, he quickly recognized that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader and changed his approach to the USSR. Second, as a lifelong and strident anticommunist, Reagan dismissed the gaggle of conservatives who called him an appeaser and worse. Obviously, Gorbachev too was indispensable. Perhaps the defining moment of the changing relationship came when Reagan visited Moscow a few months before leaving office and was asked if he still viewed the USSR as an evil empire: “No, I was talking about another time and another era,” he responded.

Boot’s most problematic claim is that Reagan’s policies and rhetoric were suffused with racist dog whistles and code words. A half century ago, many white people probably were tone deaf to the sometimes ugly undertones of public debate. Nevertheless, not every appeal addressing racial issues was racist.

Boot acknowledges that Reagan held no racial biases, though he downplays Reagan’s friendships with African Americans. In fact, Reagan sought to court minorities. During the 1980 campaign, I helped draft a speech to the Urban League making the case for freeing the economy and creating greater opportunity for the group’s members. Unfortunately, such efforts bore little political fruit, and the campaign unsurprisingly concentrated on winning votes elsewhere.

Boot complains that Reagan sought support from communities with illiberal views. Reagan “did not use the same racist rhetoric as George Wallace, but he consciously appealed to the same constituency” and “never truly disavowed [the John Birch Society] because he counted on its members’ support.” But Reagan observed that someone who voted for him “has bought my philosophy; I haven’t bought his.” Boot judges this “clever but not courageous.” But Reagan was right: Drawing those voters away from extremist politicians who espoused extremist policies was the best means to moderate their political participation.

Of course, the nature of the vote’s appeal matters. Boot charges that Reagan exploited “white bigotry for political gain.” This claim would seem to conflict with Boot’s admission that Reagan “had little guile and was congenitally incapable of deception.” Boot roots his criticism in Reagan’s support for “states’ rights,” which he views as inherently racist. Yet there are well-developed legal, constitutional, and historical arguments, backed by the Tenth Amendment, for limiting federal authority. That many white Southerners appealed to this principle to protect the odious practice of segregation doesn’t mean that other people have not employed it for other reasons. Ironically, these days both the political left and right regularly turn to “states’ rights” to shield preferred policies from federal interference.

Boot runs through a series of highly charged issues, each time blaming Reagan for rejecting his own position. School segregation created by housing patterns is a serious concern, but that does not make busing a “civil rights measure,” as Boot calls it, or an appropriate response. Indeed, high-profile advocates of the practice who sent their own children to largely white private schools—the late Senator Ted Kennedy comes to mind—inflamed community tensions. Even many Democrats, such as Senator Joe Biden, opposed busing.

Boot denounces Reagan for criticizing a “welfare queen” who abused public assistance, yet the scholar Paul Kengor has shown that mainstream publications, not Reagan, first labeled her that way. Boot also suggests that only racists could have opposed the Civil Rights Act, charging that “Reagan, shamefully, was more concerned about the impact of civil rights laws on white Southerners than about the impact of Jim Crow laws on Black Southerners.” Yet many opponents believed, in principle, that the federal government did not and should not possess the authority to mandate private association. The Voting Rights Act, meanwhile, has had arguably perverse consequences such as the concentration of minority voters in fewer legislative districts.

Reagan’s criticisms of Martin Luther King Jr. are disappointing, but they were common, shared by nearly two-thirds of Americans at the time of King’s assassination, including by many pastors whom King addressed with his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Boot even treats Reagan’s budget proposals, “with large tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the poor,” as a moral failing. He charges Reagan with propounding “economic policies that inflicted real hardship on millions of ordinary people while providing a windfall for the wealthy and exacerbating income inequality.” Boot argues that Reagan “did not truly understand the feelings of those hurt by his policies” and was “being callous about larger groups that remained an abstraction to him.”

This judgment illustrates Boot’s long ideological journey away from his time as the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed editor. There is an important difference between tax cuts, which return people’s money, and welfare outlays, which redistribute people’s money: No one has an entitlement to someone else’s earnings. Hence, welfare is a policy option, not a moral right. Boot assumes that government programs require little more than an appealing recipient. But genuine compassion, which traditionally meant suffering with others, is a virtue that entails much more than ostentatiously claiming to feel someone else’s pain while making other people open their wallets in response.

Perhaps the oddest and saddest aspect of Reagan’s life was personal, not political: The disjunction between his moving panegyrics to family and the troubles of his own family. It was obvious that he and Nancy were devoted to one another. But their children, although they occasionally joined their father’s campaign, were essentially outsiders. Reagan sought to bridge what at times seemed like a chasm with them, especially with his daughter Patti. He once handed me some pro-nuclear-freeze materials she had given him and asked me to analyze them. He wanted to connect with her, something that years later she would ruefully acknowledge rebuffing.

Ronald Reagan issued a clarion call to defend liberty that drew many people, including me, into politics. Reagan: His Life and Legend does a good job highlighting the often jarring difference between Reagan’s eloquent demands for principle and his practical compromises in politics. Yet four decades and more in Washington have caused me to better appreciate Reagan’s performance. He remained true to himself. Even Boot, despite his sniping, is able to see that Reagan “would always, in some sense, remain a ‘hayseed’ from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood and, later Sacramento and Washington.”