Revising Ronald Reagan: was the 40th president a peace-loving moderate?

AuthorMcCarthy, Daniel
PositionRonald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History - Book review

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, by John Patrick Diggins, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 493 pages, $27.95

BY THE TIME of Ronald Reagan's death in June 2004, even Saddam Hussein felt a little nostalgic for the former leader. "I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president," the jailed dictator reportedly told one of his American guards. When word of the president's death reached the British pop star Morrissey, performing on stage in Dublin, the man who'd once sung the anti-Thatcher tune "Margaret on the Guillotine" delivered backhanded condolences of his own, telling the audience that George W. Bush, not Reagan, should have died.

Something more than revulsion toward Bush has been at work in other quarters, however, as a number of journalists and academics have begun to re-evaluate the Reagan record. The Atlantic Monthly last year provided a measure of the strange new respect Reagan commands with the chattering classes when it ranked him as the 17th most influential American who ever lived. Not bad for a man once dismissed by respectable opinion as (in the words of the Democratic eminence grise Clark Clifford) "an amiable dunce."

Reagan was no dunce, and contrary to what many liberals thought in the 1980s--and what many conservatives seem to think now--he was no superhawk either. Recent volumes of Reagan's speeches and correspondence, edited by Kiron Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson, have gone a long way toward dispelling the myth of his stupidity. Reagan's radio commentaries, written in his own hand, demonstrate his familiarity with the work of the Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig yon Mises. Meanwhile, Paul Lettow's 2005 book Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons makes a convincing case for a surprisingly dovish Reagan. John Patrick Diggins' new book goes a step further, arguing that Reagan was virtually a libertarian, a political romantic who stood for "freedom, peace, disarmament, self-reliance, earthly happiness, the dreams of the imagination and the desires of the heart."

With language like that, Diggins, a professor of history at the City University of New York, might sound like a right-wing Reagan hagiographer. He's not. Twenty years ago, when the term had more pragmatic connotations, Diggins might have been called a neoconservative; his heroes are center-left turned center-right figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Sidney Hook. Diggins was no fan of Gov. Reagan in the '60s or President Reagan in the '80s, and his newfound respect for Reagan does not come without reservations. But he writes that "my respect for the man grew from appreciating his boldness in dealing with the three miseries of the modern era," namely "a suicidal nuclear arms race ... an expanding welfare state that had made the poor helplessly dependent [and] a joyless religious inheritance that told people their kingdom was not of this world and they needed to be careful about pursuing happiness in case they came to enjoy it."

Diggins sets out to write an intellectual biography not just of Reagan but of his times, with special attention to the neocons who always urged the president to take a firmer line against the Soviet Union. The hawks in Reagan's...

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