September 26, 2003
CIRCLE THE CANNONS:
Political biography tells half the tale: A lopsided look at Reagan and America: a review of Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power By Lou Cannon (Rick Perlstein, September 21, 2003, Chicago Tribune)
[R]eagan was not in the final analysis simply a Teflon President, uniquely immune to damage and criticism, any more than he was simply a Teflon Governor. Cannon tends to ignore in his work on Reagan--as others do as well, including Morris--that the man was also, for many millions of Americans, a consistent object of rage. That's an unbecoming flaw for a biographer. Dazzled by how much Reagan was loved, Cannon refuses the challenge of understanding how much he was simultaneously hated--and what the simultaneity of these emotions says about America's divisions as they evolved during the 1960s, and as they endure through our very own Aughties.Here's something you would never know from reading Cannon: In summer 1968, Reagan's approval rating in California was 30 percent, and he was the object of a serious recall campaign himself (that this was also the period in which he was being seriously pushed as a Republican presidential nominee gets to the heart of the enigma of Ronald Reagan, that creature of dreams, whose mysteries neither Morris nor Cannon, and certainly not conservative propagandists like Dinesh D'Souza, have yet come even close to figuring out). The recall was run by liberals, it was a shoestring operation--as of June 1968 they had spent $7,000 and had $52 in the bank, compared to the nearly $2 million that had been pledged to the Davis recall by June this year--and it did rather well, considering: They got about half the signatures the Davis petitions did, though they were gathered so unprofessionally that only about 30 percent of them counted.
The absence of this story (as well as the story of a later, 1971 recall attempt against Reagan by conservatives) is a symptom of a not-so-good book. It lacks richness, intensity, irony, complexity, strangeness--the strangeness of its subject, which is, ultimately, us: a nation that loves its dream weavers and excuses them; and hates its dream weavers for deceiving them; and, sometimes, hates each other over the disagreements we have about what constitutes a dream and what a nightmare. You simply don't see anyone disagreeing about Ronald Reagan in this book.
Americans disagree. Recognizing that should be a fundamental building block of any biography of any American leader who's major enough to deserve one. Let alone one of the most major of them all.
We're big Rick Perlstein fans--his book on Barry Goldwater was a model of fairness--and his point is perfectly valid, but it's not terribly realistic. For instance, the next bestselling biography of Harry Truman or FDR that isn't a slobbering hagiography will be the first. Meanwhile, the Reagan wars are being fought out by two fairly coequal camps--with the Noonans, D'Souzas, etc. on one side and the Wills's, Haynes Johnsons, etc. on the other. Neither side makes much effort at non-partisanship. What's most interesting is that Mr. Cannon started out as at best skeptical of Ronald Reagan, when he covered him as a reporter, then wrote fairly about him in Role of a Lifetime and only in recent years has become a Reagan defender. Maybe he just feels lkike the Reagan haters have had more than their say? Posted by Orrin Judd at September 26, 2003 8:24 PM
Combined with his biography of Moses it represents the most important examination of the exercise of political power and the corruption of liberal ideals ever written.
Posted by: oj at September 27, 2003 5:23 AMOne things I've noticed is that, except for an article about the North Dakota recall of 1921, there's been a lack of historic context for the current recall. The mention of the recall attempt against Reagan brings that to mind-- 30% of 50% is not a lot, and I'm not impressed by his use of the anecdote. But I don't know how to judge that, because I don't know how all the other crackpot attempts to recall Earl Warren or Pat Brown (or even Moonbeam Brown) went. I do know that in California politics, if there aren't some mutterings about recalls, you aren't trying very hard. So maybe Cannon was correct to ignore the recalls against Reagan, because they were irrelevant. Or perhaps he considered them to be just another piece of supporting evidence, and they got cut.
It seems to me that Perlstein is upset because his little subset got shafted. The fact is that the Reagan-haters then and the Bush-haters now are a decided minority. The same is true, for that matter, of the Clinton-haters. But haters in general have an abnormaly high representation in groups of people who talk about things for a living, and so to those people, and those who listen to those people, they feel like they are more important than they are.
Posted by: Timothy at September 27, 2003 10:07 PMI'm a big Orrin Judd fan, but I can't agree with him that the sides are "coequal" in the Reagan Wars. Wills and Haynes Johnson did their worst--in the '80s. Now the consensus is either a false memory that he was universally loved; that once people unfairly disparaged him as stupid, but now they see the light; or--most pernicious, and evinced today in a New York Times editorial--the slack implication that since he was a nice guy, he must have been a good president. Together, all this seems to me to add up to a new hegemony--a new "common sense" about Reagan that retroactively takes on the feeling of truth. I have evidence for this. Look up the article in a recent Christian Science monitor in which I was quoted on the "Reagan Revival." I offered the off-the-record observation that from what little I've seen of these newly published letters they show Reagan to be just as anodyne as many of us always believed him to be. The reporter agreed, but said he couldn't say that because he was doing an "objective" article. Which I interpret the journalist to be saying means: that Reagan was a swell guy is now the accepted interpretation, and the older caveats are now taken as mere opinion, outlandish opinion at that. Conservatives, lift a glass: you have won the Reagan wars.
Posted by: Rick Perlstein at September 29, 2003 5:34 PMMr. Perlstein:
I'll believe we've won when the Times acknowledges that Reagan won the Cold War, instead of the usual line that Gorbachev decided to reform the USSR into a liberal democracy. :)
Posted by: OJ at September 29, 2003 6:50 PMNo doubt Reagan thought Reagan won the Cold War.
Like Jellicoe, he could have lost in an an afternoon, but he had little ability to win it.
Did the USSR fall or was it pushed? It was unstable and was pushed. It would have fallen if it hadn't been pushed.
The U.S. paid a pretty high price for Reagan's fancies.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 30, 2003 3:48 AMHarry:
High price? I don't follow.
But the point is that only three men who mattered realized it was rotten: Solzhenitsyn, the Pope and Reagan. The push would have worked for 50 years.
Posted by: oj at September 30, 2003 8:01 AM