On not canonizing the gipper.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: On political books - Reagan: The Life - Book review

Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

Doubleday, 816 pp.

Efforts to elevate Ronald Reagan's reputation to Rooseveltlan heights continue. Time to stand athwart historians and yell "Stop!"

When I think of Ronald Reagan, I am reminded of a car salesman named Mo who once put me in a used Nissan. The car I wanted had a sticker price that seemed a little steep. Seeking to negotiate, I made an offer. Mo--who I should mention was irrepressibly pleasant and impossible to dislike--proved unwilling to budge at all. This surprised me, and I tried to haggle, but to no avail. I exercised my only leverage by thanking him for his time and leaving the dealership. We continued this dance by phone and in person for several days, with Mo sticking hard to his terms while coaxing me to buy. I confess that he began to get in my head. Who was this master negotiator? How did he keep moving me from my position while maintaining his own? He took a nominal amount off the sticker to cushion my ego and threw in some floor mats, but when I bought the car it was more or less on Mo's terms. I drove it off the lot utterly bested.

I came to realize that Mo was not in fact a king among dealmakers. He simply would not lower his price. Mo confounded me by having a simple goal and holding to it, in the process forcing me to negotiate against myself. I can imagine how Mikhail Gorbachev must have felt when he faced Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986. The president was determined to preserve his Strategic Defense Initiative, the planned antimissile shield that could theoretically stop an incoming Soviet weapon. No matter how many times Gorbachev pressed, Reagan would not relent. It did not matter that granting Gorbachev's request--limiting SDI to the laboratory setting for ten years--meant conceding nothing; in no conceivable universe would SDI be ready for active testing within that time frame. Reagan's firmness prevented a deal at Reykjavik, and the parties walked away embittered. But sure enough, they held another summit the following year. And Reagan eventually got his way.

Reagan's goals as president were as simple as Mo's, and like Mo he stuck to them relentlessly. According to H. W. Brands, the author of Reagan: The Life, Reagan's goals were "to shrink government at home and defeat communism abroad." He left more detailed matters--that is to say, all detailed matters--to subordinates, to the point where he himself could seem a little simple. (Reagan shocked Paul Volcker at their initial meeting by asking the chairman to explain the purpose of the Federal Reserve.) And yet simplicity can be a form of genius. Reagan viewed public affairs through a lens of right and wrong and refused to let details obstruct his clear-eyed view. In Brands's words, "Communists and their sympathizers were bad, anti-communists and their supporters were good." In this way the United States found itself in bed with Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, and apartheid South Africa. Who would imagine that such a basic, unimaginative thinker could win the Cold War?

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