On the day Ronald Reagan\u00a0assumed the presidency, the United States faced challenges as daunting as any in its history.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s globally dominant economy was like an all-but-beaten prizefighter, a giant on wobbly legs, eyes glassed over, swaying toward collapse. The legs were unemployment and inflation. Economists from the super-confident neo-Keynesian consensus of the \u201960s and early \u201970s believed that by stepping with one, then the other, they could keep the economy in overall balance.<\/p>\n
Except that by 1980 both unemployment and inflation were in a supposedly impossible simultaneous advance. On Inauguration Day 1981, inflation was approaching the 20th century\u2019s peacetime high while unemployment neared its post-World War II record. No one could agree on how to prevent a catastrophic fall.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, overseas, the West looked close to throwing in the Cold War towel. The long twilight struggle was global in scope, but from start to finish the prize was Europe. And with the United States in a geopolitical funk since retreating from Vietnam, by Inauguration Day 1981, the Soviets were bent on disassembling the Atlantic Alliance.<\/p>\n
In the mid to late 1970s, they had stationed SS-20 intermediate-range missiles in their Warsaw Pact satellites. SS-20s allowed a nuclear attack on Western Europe from non-Soviet territories using missiles that could not reach the United States. Few believed that the U.S. would respond with home-based missiles, triggering a doomsday Soviet-U.S. exchange. NATO resolved to deploy 1,100-mile-range Pershing II missiles in Europe. Stationed at bases in West Germany, the Pershings were intended to ease European concerns about the reliability of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.<\/p>\n
Immediately, Soviet propaganda and a fifth column of anti-nuclear activists mobilized, particularly in Germany. In 1978, Soviet-instigated denunciations and demonstrations had intimidated the Carter administration into canceling deployment of the neutron bomb. As Reagan entered office, the Kremlin hoped to make the U.S. back off Pershing deployment, too, effectively establishing a Soviet veto over future NATO weapons systems.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, after installing client regimes in Yemen, Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique, the Soviets looked poised to grab control of the chokepoints in the Middle East\u2019s European oil trade. In Central America, similar moves in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala were opening doors south toward the Panama Canal and north into the already unstable southern provinces of Mexico. A destabilized Mexico could force the U.S. to withdraw troops from Europe and elsewhere to protect its southern border.<\/p>\n
Henry Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0has written that longtime Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would study the world map for an hour daily, meditating on global strategy. Perhaps this brilliant multi-continental application of military, fifth-column and economic pressures was the result. Whatever its source, on Inauguration Day 1981, it was moving Western Europe toward what strategist Walter Laqueur called \u201cFinlandization\u201d\u2014a \u201cstate of affairs in which, under the cloak of maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union, the sovereignty of a country becomes reduced.\u201d The Soviets had commenced their Cold War endgame.<\/p>\n Little of this alarming context comes through in \u201cReagan: The Life,\u201d H.W. Brands\u2019s biography of the president who assumed office on Jan. 20, 1981. In his concluding chapter Mr. Brands compares Ronald Reagan favorably to Franklin Roosevelt. \u201cWhat Roosevelt had been to the first half of the twentieth century,\u201d he writes, \u201cReagan was to the second half.\u201d Indeed, \u201cin certain respects, Reagan\u2019s accomplishment was greater,\u201d for both at home and abroad he faced more challenging political obstacles.<\/p>\n But Mr. Brands\u2019s admiration is for a shallow, unreflective man who could convince himself and the American people of most anything and who was lucky enough to be on the scene when the American economy took flight and the Soviet Union began to implode, in each case helped along only when he moved his policies toward those of his predecessor,\u00a0Jimmy Carter<\/a>.\u00a0Relying on Mr. Brands, a reader would have trouble guessing the character of the challenges Reagan confronted or what Reagan did to defeat them.<\/p>\n Much has been written about how Reagan brought the Evil Empire to its knees. He rejected prior policies of d\u00e9tente and containment, replacing them with an approach that he summarized as \u201cWe win; they lose.\u201d His grand strategy was as multi-faceted as that of the Soviets, combining economic pressures, support of Poland\u2019s Solidarity movement and Third World anti-Soviet freedom fighters, an arms buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and moral suasion.<\/p>\n For example, Reagan\u2019s much admired \u201cThese are the boys of Pointe du Hoc\u201d speech, delivered on the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984, was not just about American election-year politics, as Mr. Brands portrays it. Recalling the common struggle against Nazism was part of countering Soviet attempts to strip European public support away from the Atlantic Alliance. So was Reagan\u2019s 1985 speech following a visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg, West Germany. Emphasizing decades of reconciliation, he drew a line between Germany\u2019s totalitarian past and its free present, celebrating its alliance with the United States. Two years later, Reagan\u2019s \u201cMr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall\u201d speech at Berlin\u2019s Brandenburg Gate opened public imaginations on both sides of the Iron Curtain to the end of divisions in Germany and Europe. Finally, Soviet-era dissidents have told former Reagan White House speechwriters how essential the president\u2019s forthright addresses throughout these years were to their continued resistance.<\/p>\n Mr. Brands does give appropriate attention to Reagan the negotiator. Three chapters focus on the November 1985 Geneva summit and five on the October 1986 flash summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. But here again he reveals little comprehension of his subject.<\/p>\n Reagan established his approach to bargaining during his years as president of and lead bargainer for the Screen Actors Guild, the Hollywood actors union. In 1947, the newly elected SAG leader appeared before a congressional hearing investigating the influence of communists in the film industry. He rejected suggestions that the party should be banned from union activity. By fully informing the union\u2019s membership, he said, he and his associates had kept the communists at bay. Decades later, at the end of the Geneva summit, as recorded in meeting notes but not in Mr. Brands\u2019s book, he told the Soviets that a long night awaited him and his staff as they headed for Air Force One. They had to prepare their report to the American people, a speech that he delivered before Congress immediately after landing in Washington.<\/p>\n In other words, Reagan used speeches and other communications to make the stakes on any given issue clear to all. He unified supporters while encouraging dissenters inside the opponent\u2019s ranks. He always worked to position the opposition as obstructionist if they were not forthcoming, but, as with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1988 Washington summit, encouraged a full measure of public applause when they came to terms.<\/p>\n In actual talks, he was an attentive listener. Yet reading transcripts, including those Mr. Brands quotes, one is struck by how candidly he engaged Mr. Gorbachev in debate about each side\u2019s character and intentions. He worked to put Russia\u2019s interests in a new light for the Soviet leader. One Soviet negotiator later said that, in negotiations, Reagan takes you by the arm, walks you to the cliff\u2019s edge and invites you to step forward for the good of humanity.<\/p>\n Some of Mr. Brands\u2019s blindness comes from not understanding pivotal factors. \u201cThe SS-20s threatened merely America\u2019s allies,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut the Pershings . . . threatened the Soviet Union itself\u201d\u2014which, of course, entirely misses the nuclear chess play.<\/p>\n Then, too, he writes that Reagan \u201cpromised Americans the gift of tax cuts, which he delivered without insisting on conservatism\u2019s traditional preconditions, spending cuts.\u201d So what was the purpose of all those battles with Tip O\u2019Neill over budgets that the speaker declared \u201cdead on arrival\u201d?<\/p>\n In point of fact, Reagan\u2019s was the only full presidency in the past five decades during which domestic discretionary spending in constant dollars has declined. Reagan\u2019s Greenspan Commission put the period\u2019s big entitlement challenge, Social Security, on a sound financial footing for the next quarter-century. And the surpluses of the later Clinton years came heavily from defense spending cuts, the result of ending the Cold War, impossible without the costly defense buildup of Reagan\u2019s first term. But, of course, a biographer who fails to notice America\u2019s role in the Cold War\u2019s conclusion won\u2019t make that connection.<\/p>\n Missing the essentials, Mr. Brands focuses on peripherals. He devotes six chapters and parts of others to Iran-Contra. Oblivious to strategic context, he presents resistance to Soviet moves in Central America as a kind of Reagan chew toy, a personal obsession. He absolves the president of foreknowledge about the diversion of funds to Nicaraguan resistance forces. He quotes White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan\u2019s observation that Reagan \u201cblanched\u201d when Attorney General Edwin Meese informed him of the rogue operation. He adds that First Lady\u00a0Nancy Reagan<\/a>\u00a0described the president as \u201cpale and absolutely crushed\u201d a few hours later when he told her. But, against his own evidence, Mr. Brands concludes: \u201cReagan didn\u2019t know about the diversion of funds . . . because he didn\u2019t want to know.\u201d<\/p>\n He would have done better to pay attention to the first lady\u2019s own astute assessment, which he quotes. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that this problem would have developed during Ronnie\u2019s first term,\u201d she wrote, \u201cwhen the \u2018troika\u2019 of [Chief of Staff James] Baker, [Counselor to the President] Meese, and [Deputy Chief of Staff Michael] Deaver was in charge. The West Wing was far more open then, and if anything devious had been going on in the White House basement it would have come to light\u2014and certainly to Ronnie\u2019s attention.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Brands is weakest when plumbing deeper motivations. His explanation for every career move is Reagan\u2019s drive to \u201cplay on a bigger stage,\u201d which puts theatrical makeup on a banality: that a man who sought the presidency was ambitious. He does not grasp the prairie Protestantism of Reagan\u2019s mother, which made dedication to first principles of individual freedom her son\u2019s driving inner force. Nor does he see the influence of the lapsed Irish Catholicism of Reagan\u2019s father, which instilled an iron sense of justice in the son. And it entirely escapes his attention that two groups Reagan so deliberately drew with him into the Republican coalition\u2014non-hierarchical Protestants and Irish Catholics\u2014look very much like his parents.<\/p>\n Drawing on memoirs and oral histories, as well as on Reagan\u2019s own speeches and writings, Mr. Brands has produced a comprehensive, highly readable but superficial and largely clueless work. Those interested in knowing about the 40th president would do well to turn instead to authors like Steven Hayward, Craig Shirley, John O\u2019Sullivan, Peter Schweizer and Peter Robinson.<\/p>\n This biography is newer. It isn\u2019t even close to better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the day Ronald Reagan\u00a0assumed the presidency, the United States faced challenges as daunting as any in its history. The country\u2019s globally dominant economy was like an all-but-beaten prizefighter, a giant on wobbly legs, eyes glassed over, swaying toward collapse. The legs were unemployment and inflation. Economists from the super-confident neo-Keynesian consensus of the \u201960s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,181],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-ronald-reagan-and-administration","tag-wall-street-journal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1886,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions\/1886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}