Product Description

An important reassessment of the fortieth president, placing him in the pantheon with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

In this bold, revisionist biography, distinguished historian John Patrick Diggins shows that Ronald Reagan, in his distrust of big government, his pursuit of libertarian ideals, and his negotiations with Gorbachev, was a far more active and sophisticated president than we previously knew. Affirming the fortieth president to be an exemplar of the truest conservative values, Diggins "identifies Reagan as the 'Emersonian President,' who believed that power is best when it resides in people, not government" (Library Journal). 13 photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #103518 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Diggins (The Rise and Fall of the American Left) provides an original reappraisal of Ronald Reagan from the conservative perspective. Throughout, Diggins discovers nuances that have heretofore escaped notice by most other Reagan scholars. For example: in appraising Reagan's reaction as California governor to '60s radicals, Diggins is the first writer to acknowledge the extent to which the onetime movie star shared common ground with rebels on campuses nationwide. Reagan, with his reverence for Thomas Paine and passion for limiting the reach of government, was—on at least one level—more than sympathetic when Berkeley protesters chanted, "Two, Four, Six, Eight, Organize to Smash the State!" Although a fan of Reagan's, Diggins doesn't hesitate to be critical—as when he discusses Reagan's attitude as president toward environmental issues, which Diggins characterizes as "puzzling" and "disastrous." (Diggins notes that Reagan's record as governor of California, where he allied himself with old guard Republican conservationists, was far more environmentally-friendly.) Overall, Diggins does a superb job of tracing Reagan's intellectual development from old school New Dealer to thoughtful, Emersonian libertarian, and also firmly establishes Reagan's credentials as a major architect of communism's final collapse. 13 photos. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Because Reagan has been misinterpreted by both the Right and the Left, his legacy in American political history has been distorted and undervalued, according to Diggins, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992). Contrary to liberal opinions, Reagan was no philosophical lightweight, nor was he the moral absolutist lauded by conservatives. He was a man of consistent beliefs, forged during the cold war. In his efforts to end the cold war, he was closer to liberals who always thought it possible than to conservatives who didn't believe it could ever be done. Reagan was "the only president in American history to have resolved a sustained, deadly international confrontation without going to war," defying liberal expectations of him personally and conservative expectations of the value of diplomacy. Reagan rejected the authority of religion as much as government. By convincing Americans to believe in themselves, Reagan demonstrated the duality of American political culture, that it is both liberal and conservative. This is a thoughtful book for both Reagan admirers and critics. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A middle-of-the-road liberal (John Adams, 2003, etc.) looks into Ronald Reagan's soul and concludes that it was great-and that the president was "politically wise, humane, and magnanimous" to boot.Reagan was more radical than conservative, by Diggins's account. He found inspiration in the life and work of Tom Paine, that little acknowledged founding father; he quoted Paine to the Soviets and hailed the Afghan mujahedeen and Nicaraguan contras as Paine's rightful heirs. He considered the state to be the source of most evil, though his actions, Diggins writes, made big government inevitable; his dream of an almost stateless society and his sensibility generally "partook of the tragic vision of liberalism." And, Diggins suggests, Reagan's religion was less inclined to Christian fundamentalism than to a Jeffersonian deism: "He seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice." All in all, Diggins writes, Reagan "was a liberal romantic who opened up the American mind to the full blaze of Emersonian optimism." For this and many other reasons, not least because Reagan knew his Transcendentalists, Diggins holds that Reagan needs serious attention from intellectual historians, who have largely dismissed him as a nonintellectual. Not so, Diggins counters: Reagan was aware of the nature of his arguments, was well schooled in them. If Diggins has a beef, it is with the unworthy neoconservatives who claim Reagan as their own; Diggins faults Reagan's view of the Cold War as inaccurate and lacking in complexity, for instance, but clearly favors it to the reckless warmaking of the current administration. "To rescue Reagan from many of today's so-called Reaganites may help rescue America from the pride of its present follies," he adds.A significant book, if surely arguable in granting Reagan more depth and ability than most nonbelievers have hitherto suspected. (Kirkus Reviews)

Diggins does a superb job of tracing Reagan's intellectual development from old school New Dealer to thoughtful, Emersonian libertarian. -- Publishers Weekly

Customer Reviews

Ronald Reagan: The Romantic President
For the most part, the biographies that have been written about Ronald Reagan in the years since he left office have suffered from one of two defects. Either they have been overly critical and dismissive and failed to grasp the truly revolutionary aspects of the Reagan Presidency, or they have been overly worshipful, something more akin to adulation than real scholarship. In both cases, the differing interpretations of Reagan have likely been based on ideological differences and political resentments of the 1980s and beyond.In Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, John Patrick Diggins takes a worthy first step toward moving beyond either the worshipful or the hate-filled evaluations of the Reagan Presidency and gives America's 40th President the respectful, if not always positive, evaluation that he deserves.

Reagan's singular achievement, Diggins argues, was the role he played in bringing a peaceful end to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though he came into the White House with a promise to rebuild the American military and confronted what his advisers contended were Soviet-sponsored regimes in nations ranging from Nicaragua to Angola, it's clear that, very early in his Administration, if not before then, Reagan became committed to the idea of drastically reducing, if not eliminating, nuclear weapons.

Much to the consternation of his neo-conservative foreign policy team, Reagan made overtures to the Soviets as early as April 1981, when he wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev while recovering from an assassination attempt. The Brezhnev dialog never went anywhere, largely because Brezhnev was apparently too stubborn and too ill to actually pursue serious negotiations. Similarly, the short-lived reigns of his two immediate successors made pursuing peace impossible. As Reagan himself once quipped, "They keep dying on me."

It was only with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, who required reduced tensions with the U.S. to pursue his ultimately doomed strategy of reforming Communism, that Reagan was able to pursue his desire to bring both countries out of the horrifying doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.

One interesting thing that Diggins' book brings out is the extent to which many of Reagan's conservative supporters became convinced in the late 1980s that their leader had sold America down the river. Many of the same people who, on the occasion of his funeral in 2004, lionized him as the man who had "won" the Cold War. Among the critics were William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will, and Henry Kissinger, all of whom seemed convinced at the time that the Cold War and the tensions with the USSR were a permanent and irreversible fact (Jeane Kirkpatrick had in fact said as much in her writings prior to being named U.N. Ambassador).

Reagan, Diggins, argued, never accepted the neo-conservative view of history and rejected the idea that the Cold War was a permanent fact of life that could only end with an exchange of nuclear missiles that would destroy both nations, if not most of the civilized world. In fact, rather than being a true conservative, Diggins persuasively argues that Reagan was really more of a traditional old-style liberal, what we would today call a libertarian, and that his ideas were influenced more by the libertarianism of Thomas Paine and the romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson than conservative hero Edmund Burke. While Reagan courted social conservatives and neo-cons, he did not share their views on the inherent sinfulness and fallibility of man.

Diggins goes criticize some aspects of Reagan's record, most notably, in the domestic sphere, and he rightly criticizes him for the mis-handling of the Iran Contra affair. But, like I said, this is a biography not a hagiography. On the whole, though, Diggins does an excellent job of rescuing our 40th President from his detractors and his worshipers. Hopefully, other historians will follow suit.

Reagan's Three Dragons
There is already a vast amount of literature on the life of Ronald Reagan, and it shows no sign of abating. The 40th President of the United States is a continuing subject of fascination as the man who reasserted his country's superpower dominance, engineering the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War.

His domestic policies, dominated by his passionate belief in small government and the ability of individuals to shape their own destinies, earned him the enmity of liberals, yet even on his own side of politics he is not the unquestioned hero as for example his contemporary, Margaret Thatcher, is among British conservatives.

I recall a conversation with a retired American diplomat who preferred the unsuccessful 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as the true founder of the modern conservative movement in the US, dismissing Reagan as an opportunist, a former Democrat who could see the way the wind was blowing, jumping on the bandwagon in the right place at the right time.

John Patrick Diggins seeks to dismiss this argument. For him Reagan deserves to be rated alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the greatest presidents of all time. He believes history will vindicate Reagan in the same way it did Lincoln, whose reputation was besmirched for many decades after his death, but more about that relationship later.

The problem that Diggins and any other biographer of Reagan face is proximity. As the author states with some exasperation in the bibliographical notes, more than 80 per cent of the material in the presidential library remains classified and can be obtained only through the laborious and often unsuccessful method of applying under the Freedom of Information Act.

Undeterred, he turns to other sources, notably the evidence emerging from Soviet archives of the relationship with the Soviet Union's last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as the burgeoning amount of literature discussing the origins behind the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union two years after Reagan left office.

The result is a scholarly, meticulously-researched book that seeks to understand not just the president of the 1980s, but the film actor of the 30s, 40s and 50s, the California Governor of the 60s and 70s and the man who passionately believed in a new beginning for his country - a rebirth that came to be called "Morning in America".

For Diggins, the man who took office in January 1981 had three dragons to slay: the nuclear arms race that threatened the world with extinction; the expanding welfare state that increased dependency and lowered self-esteem and the third, most controversially "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 enjoyed it".

This was hardly the language that the increasingly influential religious right would have wanted to hear but Reagan could see no conflict in embracing the rewards of this world - after all, it was what trade unions had been advocating for their members for half a century. He may have been ushering in the decade of Wall Street and `Greed is Good', but it is the author's insistence that the president wanted Americans to enjoy the pursuit of wealth and not be ashamed of the bounty they accumulated. It was, Diggins asserts, a necessary step in order to restore Americans' confidence in themselves after the debacle of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran hostages humiliation and a decade of economic malaise.

Diggins does not hold back on the obvious black marks of the Reagan presidency, most notably the Iran Contra scandal, occurring deep into Reagan's second term and at least partially resorting from the arrogance that comes from years of unbroken power.

As with the Nixon presidency 15 years previously, there had been the subtle growth of a macho `can do' culture with little regard for moral or ethical objections. The difference being that Reagan quickly shouldered the blame in a televised mea culpa address in which the Great Communicator was at his best: "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not...what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages."

I take issue with the final chapter in which the author seeks to link Reagan even closer to Lincoln by likening Reagan's battle against communism to Lincoln's struggle to free the slaves. It is for readers to follow Diggin's closely argued reasoning and come to their conclusions, but the fact is Lincoln went to war not to free slaves but to save the Union and that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a ploy to turn foreign opinion against the Confederacy and disrupt it internally at a time when the conflict was going badly for the North.

However, it is certainly worth noting that the Cold War was won bloodlessly while the Civil War resulted in the deaths of more Americans than have been killed in all conflicts combined in the century-and-a-half since.

There are times when this book stumbles into academic denseness, and I am unconvinced that Diggins has made his case for Reagan to be elevated to the heights of the presidential pantheon, but for those seeking an insight into the mind of the man who radically altered the face of American politics, it is to be recommended.

An Intellectual Historian in Name only
The dust jacket of this biography claims that John Patrick Diggins is one of America's "most interesting intellectual historians". This description gets two things right - Mr. Diggins is interesting, and Mr. Diggins is undoubtedly a historian. Whether he is much of an intellectual is another matter.

Mr. Diggins' thesis is a peculiar and engaging one - that Reagan is one of the greatest Presidents of our nation, and also one of the most Emersonian, classically liberal Presidents of our time. Diggins, however, does not quite manage to provide definitive proof for either claim, though he does a better job of proving Reagan's intellectual roots than of proving his greatness. The reason for this failure, unfortunately, is not a problem with Diggins' scholarship, but rather an unfortunate case of self-sabotage which begins to show in the latter half of the book. During this section, one wonders if Diggins himself doubts his own thesis. In fact, one wonders if Diggins actually wanted to write a book with said thesis, or if the original argument he wanted to make was as follows: "Ronald Reagan is not a conservative, but even if he was, conservatives can't beat communism in the long run, anyway. Ha ha ha. Neener neener neener."

To this end, many passages within the book are unabashedly, obnoxiously didactic. In fact, one often feels as though one is reading a philosophical essay meant to impugn the purity of American conservatism, rather than a biography of a conservative figure. One of the more absurd of these moments comes near the very end, when Diggins tries to impugn Reagan's conservatism by contrasting his vision with that of Edmund Burke. There are two problems with this analysis - firstly, Diggins misinterprets Burke's quote about the necessity of restraint for rights as implying that a paternalistic government is required to stop people from being greedy. What Burke was actually talking about, of course, was the tendency of people to believe they have a right to everything they want - a dangerous tendency, which often leads to things like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which contradicts itself numerous times). The second problem with this analysis, however, is that Mr. Diggins is assuming that conservatism's nature has not changed at all since Edmund Burke. It is not as though Burke sat down and wrote out a "Constitution of Conservatism". Many conservative thinkers, in fact, believe that deriving a contemporary position from Edmund Burke's writings is impossible. It doesn't help, of course, that Burke was from England, and the conservative tradition in England is almost completely non-applicable to America.

Furthermore, Diggins seems determined to convince his audience that Reagan was not really all that religious, as though there is something shameful in one of our greatest presidents being religious. Diggins also seems fixated on Reagan's fiscal policy, which he often links with the words "greed" and "selfishness." Finally, though Diggins initially credits Reagan with ending the cold war, he later throws in backhanded implications that it had more to do with Gorbachev than Reagan. It is as though Diggins wrote his thesis that Reagan was one of our greatest Presidents and then choked on it and had to go back and assure his readers that while Reagan was one of our greatest Presidents, he was still the selfish, shortsighted clod that Academics envision him to be.

The existence of these flaws is unfortunate, because the book is historically excellent and so readable that it almost rivals a Harry Potter novel. Ultimately, I must recommend the book, with reservation. I give Mr. Diggins three stars for interesting history, and no stars for his intellectual pretensions. It is a pity. If Mr. Diggins had the courage to stick to his original thesis rather than frantically reassure his audience that he was not one of those awful Reagan-loving freaks, we might be reading the best Reagan biography yet.