This is the first biography of a US president I’ve read. Despite being interested in history, I’ve never been especially drawn to books that use heads of state as lenses for understanding the past; these projects often have abundant sources, but they risk binding themselves too closely to their subject’s point of view. In the US, there’s an additional tendency to situate and reconcile (if not revere) presidents within American civic religion. Skepticism toward the subject casts shadows on the project, which can alienate readers. In combination, these aspects don’t usually result in something I enjoy reading. However, I really enjoyed Wills’s Bomb Power, and decided I would trust him again. Wills is a classically trained historian, but his career is interesting (he began as a protege of William F. Buckley Jr., and wrote for National Review). But Andrew, life’s short: why read about Reagan? Today, it’s a bit of a meme to plot series of economic data which begin to diverge or decline after Reagan’s presidency. Everyone knows these plots discard complexity to make their point, but the insight that Reagan’s presidency was an inflection point is inescapable. Second, it’s hard to avoid observing certain similarities between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. I think these similarities aren’t superficial, and that the seeds of Trump’s conquest of the Republican party are visible in Reagan’s prior success. This claim is easy to state, but needs exploration. If your intuition is similar to mine, I think you’ll find Wills’s book a good read.
In Reagan’s America, Wills follows Reagan and his family history, but a focus of the book is the unraveling various myths that we (and Reagan himself) are used to retelling. As a politician, Reagan is known for his glorification of the free market and the individual, and disdain for the belief that the government can deliver anything valuable to its subjects. The image of self-sufficiency obviously has wide appeal, but in chapters 9 and 10 Wills critiques its viability by fitting Reagan’s family history into western expansion. In particular, he illustrates how Jack Reagan’s arrival in Tampico IL (Ronald’s birthplace) was made possible by the massacre of Sauk people in 1832, and via an extensive federal efforts to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi river (p. 105):
Since the founding of the nation, the dream of threading the continent with canals had been considered an urgent national task. The immediate model for such a project, England’s extensive canal system, had been based on private enterprise; but there was never any question of waiting for the accumulation of capital in private hands that this would entail in America. The state of New York financed the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, and the federal government itself became a partner in building the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, proposed in 1808 a national ten-year plan for interconnected roads and canals. By 1835, when the railroads had laid barely 800 miles of track, there were already 2,000 miles of canals.
In summary, Wills reminds us that US development in a comparatively short timespan happened because of government intervention and military force, and wasn’t magically summoned via the courage of settlers. Reagan’s roots stem from the prosperity made possible by state resources, and his father was rescued and kept employed during the Great Depression due to the WPA. Chapter 10, titled “Individualism”, also does good work in disentangling fictional archetypes and imagery of the wild west (both adored and portrayed by Reagan as an actor) from its realities of interdependence, federal protection, and gun control. In chapter 34, Wills completes the analysis with Reagan’s chosen home of California, discussing its origins (seized as war spoils) and development (contingent upon federal support).
While family history and biographical details establish the facts of Reagan’s life, Wills is not overly occupied with chronology. Wills is interested in the “great communicator”, the first US president emerging from show business. Reagan’s professions (sports announcer/writer, actor, and spokesman) all shaped useful instincts for a politician, which the middle of the book details. Reagan compensated for his weaknesses in statecraft and management through delegation, and played to his strengths: reading his audience, comforting their sensibilities, and responding to its needs. While Reagan was not a “do-nothing” president, Wills argues that Reagan should be seen more as a spokesperson for a specific vision of America, something closer in sensibilities to an ad-executive than a commanding general. Some of this has an echo in Donald Trump, who seems to prefer the more ceremonial aspects of the presidency and also lacks an interest for the actual details of governance.
Ultimately, I think Wills’s picture is persuasive. He paints Reagan as a man who deeply believed in the ideas that he was asked to speak about, even if they’re contradictory when examined closely. Much like Hollywood’s images and archetypes of the wild west, a major part of Reagan’s appeal lies in how he embodied and enabled collective self-deceptions about the American past. The practice of acting is conjuring personas and emotions in order to give life to something that does not exist (or no longer exists) outside the performance, in order to deliver an image and experience to an audience. Reagan’s success was recognizing how applicable this was to the office of the US presidency. By the time he reached national prominence, he was selling an uncomplicated picture (“government is the problem, not the solution”), casting any perceived societal failures or misfortunes as traceable to state overreach. The imbibing of Reagan’s performance is a “great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute” (p. 420).
Reagan’s America was published in early 1987, and I think the writing in its final two chapters shows remarkable clarity for its time. Wills uses the routine experience of air travel and the production of tylenol as illustrative examples of the extraordinary discipline and coordination required to sustain our capitalist society. Yet we celebrate the willpower and mystique of the individual in spite of its incompatibility with the material facts of our ways of life. The tragedy of Reagan is that he provided a friendly, compact, and smooth way for Americans to avoid reckoning with our interdependence, and by extension, what we owe to each other. Perhaps Reagan is merely symptomatic of a public fearing self-reflection, but our society has been sickened by deferring such questions. This resulted in the installation of an administration that hated its responsibilities, and quickly set to looting its offices. Thirty-plus years later, we see further deferral as farce: Donald Trump’s presidencies have been a vehicle for consequential numbers of Americans to deceive themselves again, this time with immigrants being cast as a preferred reason for lost national greatness. We’ve exchanged Reagan’s sunniness for bald viciousness, but the results have been along the same trajectory.
As with my experience reading Bomb Power, Wills has written an illuminating book without recommending a future course to its readers. It’s not clear if or how we can overcome the problem of self-deception that affects American culture. White Americans are most likely to be drawn to exculpatory illusions about the country’s past, but, as Trump’s reelection demonstrates, they’re not singularly vulnerable. Continued erosion of public trust, accelerated by Reagan’s ideology and its legacy, feeds a vicious cycle that makes alternatives difficult to visualize. Regardless, America doesn’t seem to recognize itself unless it sees a confident face in the mirror (p. 15). It’s not impossible to imagine future messagers with this quality who genuinely engage with the realities of our country’s past. However, we’ll need to learn from disappointments like those of Barack Obama’s presidency, whose candidacy in 2008 also enabled certain self-deceptions (especially re: America’s progress towards racial equality; the campaign may have benefited, but I think this was largely involuntary). In any case, I think I’ll leave things here. Reagan’s America is a thought-provoking book, full of stories and insights too numerous for me to summarize in a reasonable number of words. If you’ve been skeptical of presidential biographies (like me), I think Wills is worth a try.