Reagan: His Life and Legend
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES • 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2024
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Washington Post • 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
Best Books of 2024: The New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library, The Auburn Citizen
"This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style.... A landmark work." —New York Times, "10 Best Books of 2024"
"Reagan: His Life and Legend aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds." —New Yorker
"Magisterial.... Important.... Vivid... Splendid." —Washington Post
Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician—America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography.
In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date” (Robert Mann).
The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, small-town Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. And contextualizing Reagan’s life against American history, Boot re-creates the world in which Reagan transitioned from local Iowa sportscaster to budding screen actor.
The world of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s would prove significant, not only in Reagan’s coming-of-age in such classics as Knute Rockne and Kings Row but during the twilight of his film career, when he played opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, and then his eventual emergence as a television host of General Electric Theater, which established his bona fides as one of the leading conservative voices of the time. Indeed, the leap to California governor in 1966 seemed almost preordained, in which Reagan became a bellwether for a nation in the throes of a generational shift.
Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. But Boot also shows how Reagan was armored in obliviousness. He traces Reagan’s opposition to civil rights over forty years, reveals how he neglected the exploding AIDS epidemic, and details how America experienced a level of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.
With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Providing fresh examinations of “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, as well as a nuanced portrait of Reagan’s family, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ronald Reagan embodied an ideologically unmoored but effective blend of hard-line conservatism and pragmatism, according to this sprawling biography. Washington Post columnist Boot (The Road Not Taken) traces Reagan's journey from movie star and New Deal liberal to staunch right-winger who extolled capitalism, anathematized big government, and clothed ugly prejudices—he privately called Africans "monkeys"—in a sunny, charismatic persona. But his extremism, Boot notes, coexisted with practical flexibility; for example, when his signature tax cuts ballooned government budget deficits, he backtracked and accepted new taxes, and he pursued negotiations with the Soviet Union even as he was calling it "an evil empire." Boot strongly criticizes Reagan's moral failings, including his habitual resort to racist dog whistles, the inequity of his economic policies, and his support for murderous right-wing dictatorships in Latin America. But he's also alive to Reagan's political strengths, which included cutting deals (he oversaw groundbreaking nuclear arms reduction treaties with the Soviets) and communicating an appealing, if simplistic, political vision. Boot's effort to paint Reagan as basically a moderate at heart—or at least in practice, by way of balancing his excesses against his moments of judiciousness—leaves the man himself somewhat inscrutable, casting him instead as an avatar of American democracy's complicated mix of earnest dogma and muddled consensus. It makes for an unusually middle-of-the-road and not very revealing portrait.
