The Eternal Mystery of Ronald Reagan

There’s a story that shortly after he won election against California’s popular incumbent governor, Ronald Reagan was asked how he planned to tackle all the problems facing the nation’s most populous state. “I don’t know,” he said solemnly. “I’ve never played a governor.” John Patrick Diggins, the author of Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (W. W. Norton, 493 pages, $27.95), likes that anecdote but also views the actor-turned-politician as a serious thinker, who “unnerve[d] America with words and ideas.” He sets out in his ambitious volume to situate Reagan in a long line of popular democratic theorists.

Central to Diggins’s book are four rather big claims: first, that Reagan was closer in intellectual temperament to the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine than to the conservative British statesman Edmund Burke, and hence was a peculiarly revolutionary character to have led a conservative counterrevolution; second, that Reagan, ever optimistic, didn’t share the religious right’s theological worldview, especially its overriding concern with evil; third, that he had little in common with his neoconservative supporters, who were far more enamored of force and power than he was; and fourth, that he was the greatest liberator President since Abraham Lincoln.

It should go without saying that this is going to be a controversial book. Though his narrative is somewhat discursive for a biographical work, often weaving in and out of long, tangential sections on the history of modern political thought, Diggins, an accomplished scholar of American intellectual history, never fails to stimulate and provoke. His interpretation will satisfy neither liberals, who will be loath to think of Reagan as a great emancipator, nor conservatives, who will not enjoy learning that their hero was a more moderate and moderating figure than they often claim.

In his search for the seeds of Reagan’s free-market conservatism, Diggins takes readers on a familiar walk through the future President’s early years in Dixon, Illinois, where as a teenager he worked summers as a lifeguard on the Rock River and saved 77 people from drowning. “Lifeguarding provides one of the best vantage points in the world to learn about people,” Reagan later wrote. “I guarantee you they needed saving—no lifeguard gets wet without reason. . . . Not many thanked me, much less gave me a reward, and being a little money-hungry I’d done some daydreaming about it. . . . I got to recognize that people hate to be saved. Almost every one of them later sought me out and angrily denounced me for dragging them to the shore. ‘I would have been fine if you’d let me alone,’ was their theme. ‘You made a fool out of me trying to make a hero out of yourself.’” Projecting forward to Reagan’s conversion from New Deal Democrat to Goldwater conservative, Diggins wonders if these early exploits didn’t teach the future President that, as he puts it, “dependency begets servility.”

Some of the best chapters in the book chart Hollywood’s internecine political wars in the 1940s, complicated struggles that left Reagan increasingly disillusioned with liberalism, which he viewed as too ready to forgive the crimes of Stalinist Russia. Again the story is a familiar one—as president of the Screen Actors Guild he cooperated with the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities and thus broke with many of his left-wing colleagues—but Diggins frames it in a fresh and provocative way. Though he comes down hard on the left, at times even harder than Reagan did, he believes that the future President failed to “acknowledge that the first outspoken critics of communism were liberals and anarchists, figures such as Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman.” The book is dedicated to Sidney Hook, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Theodore Draper, François Furet, and Raymond Aron, four Cold War liberals who probably held no brief for Reagan but whom Diggins admires for having “taught us how to think about communism.” For all his praise of the latter-day emancipator, the author is still baffled that “Ronald Reagan’s miseducation led him to believe that in order to fight communism he had also to fight liberalism.”

Despite his tart denunciation of liberals who cynically turned a blind eye to Soviet brutality, Diggins seems a little too eager to ignore the serious contradictions in Reagan’s own political worldview. He observes that Reagan was a fundamentally good fellow who deplored racism and befriended a black football player in college and doesn’t dwell long on the darker side of the President’s political career. Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act both in 1965, when it was first enacted, and in the early 1980s, when it was renewed. He campaigned against California’s controversial open-housing law, which barred racial discrimination. And he launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a backwater town famous only for having been the staging ground of the murder of three civil rights activists. Presidential politicians don’t visit places like Philadelphia, Mississippi, unless they’re trying to send a message. Like other converts to conservatism, Reagan denounced liberals for colluding with Communists but had little problem colluding with segregationists. This was the moral failing not only of conservatives but also of many Cold War liberals whom Diggins admires.

From the Hollywood Hills, the book takes us to Sacramento, where Reagan proved an unusual politician. Though he rode a popular anti-liberal wave to the State House, in his eight years as governor he increased state taxes (and made them more progressive), refused to veto a bill that broadened access to abortions, helped kill legislation that would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools, and racked up a pro-conservation record on the environment. Though he sharply cut state spending, and though he famously cracked down on student protesters, he funded California’s university system more generously than did his successor, Jerry Brown—the son of the man he defeated in 1966.

It’s in his chapters on Reagan’s Presidency that Diggins stakes his boldest ground. In particular, he argues that Reagan was an early convert to arms control who, unlike his neoconservative supporters, believed that the Cold War could be defused through negotiation and suasion rather than force, and that his tax policies were a boon to the working poor. On the second point, Diggins marshals impressive evidence: an Urban Institute study that shows 55 percent of the income gain in the 1980s flowing to Americans in the bottom two quintiles. For those raised on the notion that Reagan stole from the poor and gave to the rich, this is a hard pill to swallow. On the other point, however, the jury is still out. The conservative editor Rick Lowry recently wrote that this view is “revisionism gone amok. Reagan always thought he could save the world precisely by defeating the Soviets. Asked by an adviser in the late 1970s what his theory of the cold war was, Reagan replied, ‘We win and they lose.’ Early in his administration, he oversaw the development of several key documents realigning American national security policy along these lines.” It’s going to take more than one book to convince conservatives that their lion was a pussycat.

In the end, Ronald Reagan emerges as more enigmatic and complicated than ever. How he got so far and what he really believed remain unresolved. One suspects that he often felt that way himself. Visitors to the Oval Office noted with amusement that he “could not resist stopping to look at himself in the mirror and, fixing his tie and clicking his heels, say, with a smile, ‘I’m the president of the United States.’” Who ever would have imagined it?