Reagan's America: innocents at home.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

Wills is working here in themanner of a jazz musician who can improve brilliantly for hours on a simple, schmaltzy show tune; this book is really a series of riffs on various aspects of Ronald Reagan's life. Wills has done a certain amount of first-hand research, especially around the midwestern towns where Reagan spent his early years, and a great deal of library work. This doesn't amount to a Robert Caro-like feat of biographical legwork, but it's enough to get Willis's mind into high gear. The result is, along with Lou Cannon's 1982 biography, one of the two best books on Reagan to date.

It's hard to tell whether Wills isintellectually courageous or just undisciplined; anyway, he does not feel at all constrained from the kind of freewheeling speculation that can sometimes lead to piercing insight and sometimes to mere digression. He spends pages arguing that George Gipp never asked Knute Rockne to win one for the Gipper and that Jeanne Kirkpatrick didn't invent the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He goes into great detail about turn-of-the-century midwestern religious history and Hollywood makeup techniques of the thirties and argues, in one especially fascinating but not too relevant chapter, that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was an integral part of the New Deal. One has the feeling that Wills would be world champion at the kind of conversation that takes place after the dishes have been cleared away and the empty bottles have started to pile up.

Wills's last book, on the Kennedys,had a bitterly debunking tone. This book's is much sweeter. Even though Wills has minimal respect for Reagan as president, he can't help...