President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime – Lou Cannon, 1991 ★★★★

Weighing the Reagan Legacy

Two things Lou Cannon wants you to come away thinking after reading this, his widely-respected account of Ronald Reagan’s presidency:

1) Reagan was a really nice guy who did some decent things in office.

2) Americans must never, ever elect someone like Reagan again.

Never mind Cannon’s critical-minded perspective: this is a book that reaches across political divides in discussing the consequential aspects of Reagan’s presidency, and gives you a probing sense of what our nation’s 40^th president was all about. Those who champion Reagan and his legacy will recognize the person Cannon writes of. Here was a man who led his life on one stage or another, and had the rare power of giving people something to believe in.

“This book is an effort to penetrate the illusion of the Reagan presidency and to write about him as he truly was,” Cannon states in his book’s preface.

To that end, he looks at Reagan’s presidency not in the form of a chronological history, but as a series of long essays, sometimes gruelingly long, on various crises and policies which defined Reagan in office. Individual chapters take on such matters as Reagan’s policy toward Communist insurgencies in Central America, his budget battles with Congress, and his historically successful “Morning In America” re-election campaign.

The book’s two largest chapters center on the biggest scandal of Reagan’s presidency, the selling of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage, which Cannon presents here as illustrative of a core fault of Reagan’s leadership style, a failure to confront subordinates and manage details. This is established at the outset of the book and becomes a common theme.

At the core of Cannon’s critical thesis is how Reagan saw government, and how that in turn influenced his leadership.

“His faith was in a tripartite creed of reduced government spending, enhanced military defense and substantially lower tax rates,” Cannon writes. “He did not recognize that the tax rates he favored were insufficient to produce the revenue to pay for the government programs he thought necessary. He saw no necessity of accommodating any one of his beliefs to make the others more plausible.”

However irrational Cannon finds those beliefs, he admits Reagan got results. Reaganomics brought a marked upswing in the nation’s economic fortunes, for example reducing inflation by almost two-thirds. The military buildup Reagan championed jacked up the deficit enormously, but after Reagan left office, contributed to the end of the Cold War. Cannon doesn’t credit Reagan alone for these accomplishments, but makes the point he helped in their realization.

Even where Cannon criticizes, it is with a kind of understanding: The Role Of A Lifetime is no hit piece.

Dealing with the aftermath of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Reagan ordered a peacekeeping exercise that, a year later, would leave 241 Marines dead in a surprise suicide bombing. Cannon details the humanitarian thinking behind Reagan’s deployment, and how what quickly became a fatally flawed policy was driven not by hawks within his cabinet, but rather by those whom Cannon terms “pragmatists” and whom Cannon conversely credits with many of Reagan’s first-term successes. They sincerely thought they were contributing, not to a geopolitically combustible situation as turned out to be the case, but to a peaceful resolution of a bloody conflict.

Cannon describes Reagan, infuriated by television footage, calling Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to demand a halt to his country's bombing of Beirut. Begin grumbles, but complies. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” Reagan marvels after.

But the resulting departure of Israeli forces left a vacuum that Reagan and his cabinet decided the U. S. should fill, alongside French and Italian forces. These soldiers were soon seen as combatants on the side of the minority Christian population by the country that had controlled Lebanon for years, Syria, and their Hezbollah allies, who instigated the suicide bombing in October, 1983.

“On balance, Reagan was a strong man, but an extraordinarily weak manager,” Cannon claims.

Reagan at work in the Oval Office: While he set an orderly tone, the mood in executive policy meetings was often anything but efficient. Image from nydailynews.com.

He notes the Reagan cabinet was continuously beset by epic cage-match feuding. Reagan’s first national security advisor, Richard Allen, found himself in heated confrontations about foreign policy with Secretary of State Al Haig until Haig succeeded in pushing Allen out. Later, Haig’s replacement as secretary of state, George Shultz, butted heads with the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, in confrontations so visceral they dominated roundtable discussions and stymied decision making.

Cannon sees in Reagan a fatal unwillingness to confront dispute, an almost pathetic desire to get along which he ascribes to Reagan’s growing up with an alcoholic father. An inability to form personal connections with those who worked for him is similarly connected to the end of Reagan’s first marriage, when his movie-star wife Jane Wyman ordered him out of their house for reasons he never understood. “Reagan’s capacity for self-denial in personal matters was extraordinary,” Cannon writes.

In such times, the book delves too far in Freudian cliché, trying to winkle out some early-life reason for things Reagan did in office that turned out badly. A problem is that Cannon’s book doesn’t really explore Reagan’s pre-presidential life enough to merit this kind of conjecture or connect it to his later actions. In The Role Of A Lifetime, we only see him in action as president. [Cannon had written two earlier books about Reagan, and would write more.]

There’s also an overreliance on Reagan’s liberal critics. Garry Wills in particular gets quoted often and at length, pontificating about “the perfection of the pretense” in Reagan’s career, as if Reagan were the first president that pushed an idea about America that did not correspond in all ways with accepted reality. At times, you get the sense Cannon is gunning too hard to show he gets why the Left was so enraged by Reagan, beyond his winning elections and reshaping dialogue around national policy.

But Cannon also challenges conventional liberal thinking about Reagan. He disputes for example the notion advanced most strongly in Reagan’s tenure by the Democratic Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, that Reagan was a man who lacked compassion. Time and again, Cannon presents Reagan acting compassionately, if somewhat impersonally, towards those he encounters. His policies toward the poor may have seemed cold; Reagan himself thought he was working for them, too. So did many voters.

This misreading of Reagan cost Democrats in the 1984 election. Reagan won 49 of 50 states that year, a margin of victory unimaginable today.

“Instead of campaigning against the ineffectual, uncomprehending Reagan who read to them from his four-by-six cards, the Democrats campaigned against a caricature of a heartless president who had turned his back on the problems of the poor,” Cannon writes. “[Voters] might have been persuaded that Reagan did not know enough, but it was more difficult to convince them that he did not care.”

Where Reagan’s contemporaneous critics accused him of being eager for confrontation with the Soviet Union, pushing for a massive increase in nuclear arms, Cannon presents in The Role Of A Lifetime a man committed both to peace and a world without nuclear arms. It’s a surprising portrait, one that doesn’t square with the stereotype of Reagan the gun-toting cowboy that followed him as president but comports more with his legacy today, that of a president who fostered a consensus around a nuclear-free world with his Soviet counterpart, Mikael Gorbachev.

“Ultimately, Reagan’s desire to reduce the threat of nuclear war proved inspirational and productive – in large measure because Gorbachev showed himself willing to take the risks of reducing nuclear arsenals, withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and restructuring Soviet society,” Cannon writes.

Though filled with criticisms and caveats, The Role Of A Lifetime winds up in the end fairly appreciative of Reagan’s legacy, if from a political perspective significantly different from that of Reagan’s conservative base. For all the wrongs Cannon details about Reagan’s leadership, there is a countermanding sense of Reagan as a figure of destiny who had the right instincts at crucial moments, and whose worse moments were reflective more of myopia than malice. While somewhat repetitive in its critical bent, readers will appreciate its fair and compelling portrait of one of America’s most notable presidencies.