Chapter One
How to Think About Ronald Reagan
Thomas Jefferson currently holds the title of "American Sphinx," no doubt because of his complex character. A man full of contradictions, he lived and breathed liberty but owned slaves and even had children by one. He believed in a limited presidency yet used "sharp practices" to negotiate the largest territorial acquisition in American history. The list of surprises continues. Jefferson was indeed inscrutable, sphinxlike. But his title may soon be wrested away by Ronald Reagan, whose apparent simplicity gave way to even deeper levels of complexity. A Democrat until he was fifty, Reagan became a true champion of conservative causes, enlivening a moribund ideology and riding it into the White House. Once there, however, a different Reagan emerged. The hawk who had worried about falling behind in the nuclear arms race became the chief dove of his own administration. The lifelong opponent of communism chose to negotiate directly with his Soviet counterpart to bring a peaceful end to the cold war.
Beyond all his surprising policies and proclivities, Reagan proved to be almost unknowable to others, even to close associates who worked with him for decades. Never was a life as public as Reagan's lived so privately. Moving constantly under the glare of media scrutiny during his several decades in show business, becoming a de facto editorial member of the broadcast news media, then finally holding high elective offices for sixteen years, Reagan nevertheless found ways to nurture his essential need for privacy. He seemed to keep his deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires to himself and his wife Nancy. The former Nixon- and Ford-era national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who had considerable involvement with Reagan over the course of many years-though not all of it friendly-offers perhaps the most trenchant assessment of his personality:
Reagan's bland veneer hid an extraordinarily complex character. He was both congenial and remote, full of good cheer but, in the end, aloof. The bonhomie was his way of establishing distance between himself and others. If he treated everyone with equal friendliness-and regaled them all with the same stories-no one would have a special claim on him. The repository of jokes that were recycled from conversation to conversation served as protection against being blindsided. Like many actors, Reagan was the quintessential loner. ... An individual widely perceived to have been an intimate of his said to me once that Reagan was both the friendliest and the most distant man he had ever known.
All of Reagan's biographers have made this point, or one much like it. Edmund Morris, for example, recognized this distancing phenomenon and noted that it became more pronounced over the course of his presidency. Morris observed
a growing remoteness in his manner. Now those who stayed with him began to be ever so slightly chilled by it. While never unfriendly (he remained the most outwardly genial of men) he withheld more and more of himself.
Of those who served under Reagan, there is also mention of this. Peggy Noonan, one of his key speechwriters, described his inherent "emotional detachment" as Reagan's principal weakness-though she found it to be offset by an almost "Lincolnian kindness." Another interesting observation from an insider comes from Larry Speakes, Reagan's press secretary from 1981 to 1987:
On a more personal level, there is a big difference between the public Ronald Reagan, an outgoing, friendly, personable man, and the private Reagan, who is still charming and affable, but in an impersonal way. Privately, he tends to be a loner, content to spend most of his time with his wife and no one else. He almost never reveals his personal emotions to anyone but Nancy. Perhaps it's because he was an actor and his every move was closely scrutinized, so now he feels that his emotions should be private.
Even Reagan may have seen something in himself that lay beyond articulation, as the very title of his pre-presidential autobiography suggests: Where's the Rest of Me?
Beyond biographies and insider memoirs, writers have amassed a large body of classical political analysis of Reagan's approach to the presidency. In it he proves to be an elusive target. Reagan hardly fits the arch-conservative label given him. The whole notion of planting him somewhere on a spectrum from right to left unravels quickly, for his public persona showed just as much complexity and depth as his private one. As governor of California, for example, he tightened eligibility for welfare but made sure that recipients were protected against the ravages of inflation. As president he espoused laissez-faire economics and effected tight-fisted monetarist fiscal policies that tamed inflation; yet he helped bail out Chrysler, ran then-record budget deficits, and used fiscal stimuli like the best of Keynesians. He ran for office in 1980 on a platform that portrayed America as dangerously behind the Soviets in the arms race yet quickly became his administration's chief advocate of arms reductions. He called for the creation of strategic missile defenses yet promised to share them with the Russians. He saw the Soviet Union as evil yet reached out in partnership to the leader of that evil empire. This was not a president who could easily submit to ideological labeling-a point that infuriated conservative pundits, one of whom labeled Reagan's reaching out to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as both "ignorant and pathetic." Another leading conservative who opposed the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union put the matter even more sharply: "Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West...."
Reagan also defies classification of the sort attempted by the political scientist James David Barber in his framework for understanding presidential character. Barber argues that all presidents can be categorized in one of four clearly defined ways, based on combinations of two factors. The first is the amount of energy (measured in terms of their levels of activity or passivity) they poured into the business of governance and statecraft. The second considers their positive or negative emotional attitudes about politicking and the job of the presidency itself. For Barber, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a classic "active-positive" president, the category he suggests is most linked to success in office. Richard Nixon was the quintessential "active-negative" personality, the type Barber thought most likely to get into trouble. (His other active-negatives include Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, who gave us, respectively, the depression and Vietnam.) Of the low-energy "passives"-who do not rate very highly according to this theory of character-Dwight D. Eisenhower epitomized the negatives while William H. Taft exemplified the positives.
Barber categorizes Reagan as a quintessential "passive-positive," but the evidence he employs in making this judgment-mostly commentary about Reagan's bonhomie, followed by a recounting of his penchant for short work hours-seems thin. While it is clear that Reagan took a joyful approach to meeting voters and sharing his message with them, there is also much evidence of the emotional detachment that Peggy Noonan observed. It was as though Reagan, to protect himself, had to maintain a kind of professional distance from others-scarcely in keeping with notions of the classic "positive" personality. As to his energy level, Reagan was indeed famous for being caught nodding a few times and for not working long days in the office. But this hardly speaks to the overall energy with which he approached the presidency. Any president who comes into office intending to reduce the size of government, improve the common defense, and bring down a great external enemy simply cannot be viewed as "passive." Beyond the sweep of the many new policies that he envisioned, we now know (largely through the research of Kiron Skinner) that Reagan also had an almost boundless intellectual energy that kept him writing-whenever he had a private moment-throughout his two terms.
In addition to Barber's notions about presidential character, a few other major theories about presidents and the presidency itself may prove useful in attempting to understand Reagan. Richard Neustadt's theory of presidential power seems at first particularly well suited to Reagan. Neustadt's basic point is that presidents are inherently weak, an artifact of the Constitution's design for divided policymaking powers. For Neustadt, a president is only as strong as his ability to persuade others and must husband this form of power by being especially mindful of the risk to his reputation posed by any decision. Neustadt's core belief is that even a president is only a small part of a big government that will function well when persuaded and inspired, and will do more poorly when simply commanded.
Reagan is a puzzle to Neustadt, who says of his presidential attributes: "the Reagan combination [of traits] is not found in any other President of modern times, from Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush." Neustadt proceeds to describe a president with outstanding persuasive skills but one, in his estimation, with virtually no substantive knowledge and little apparent desire to increase his intellectual capital. Neustadt then dwells at length upon Reagan's misstep into the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages affair as evidence that he fits the pattern of presidential weakness. As with Barber's analysis, Neustadt's evidence seems lacking. For example, he quickly passes over Reagan's summitry with Gorbachev-which Barber fails to discuss at all-in less than a sentence. And Reagan's high public approval rating at the end of his presidency further belies the notion that this was a president who squandered his reputation and power.
One more leading theory to consider is that of Samuel Kernell, who built upon Neustadt's notions by pointing out that a president has effective options even when his legislature and civil administrators may balk at his ideas: he can "go public," speaking directly to the electorate. By persuading the mass public of the worth of his ideas, the president may then induce others in government, through indirect pressure, to align themselves with his policies. Ronald Reagan, who earned the sobriquet the "Great Communicator," continually demonstrated his skill at persuasion-both in government and on the many occasions he took to speak directly to the American people about his hopes, dreams and policies. Clearly these persuasive skills also worked well in his interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev.
These leading academic theories about presidents and the presidency probably bring us only marginally closer to understanding the inner Reagan, but they do suggest ways for us to evaluate his public persona that begin to give us at least some glimpses of the private man. After all, these are theories about individual character and interpersonal skills. In assessing Reagan's persuasive power, Neustadt takes on Barber's notion that he was a "passive" president. As Neustadt puts it, "we will not look back on Reagan as 'passive' in policy terms." He also shares insights about Reagan's complex character as lying outside traditional notions of conservatism or liberalism, noting that as president he was "the last Roosevelt Democrat" and that he reflected "the old-fashioned patriotism and the anti-Sovietism of a Truman Democrat." In the course of analytic efforts such as these-which despite their flaws strive usefully to achieve a better understanding of his public life-the "private Reagan" finally begins to emerge more clearly. It may prove useful next to consider more of Reagan's public record as president, but without trying explicitly to crack the carapace of his psyche.
A more general approach to understanding the presidency and its various officeholders-one that eschews psycho-biography and the crafting of vastly detailed personal histories-includes studies that range far beyond dealings with Congress, the various government bureaucracies, and the mass public. Some look explicitly to the connections that a president must make with the wider world. One of the earliest and most important of these efforts was undertaken by Sidney Warren in his thoughtful study of "presidents as world leaders." Warren argued that from the time the United States moved decisively onto the world stage as a great power-beginning with the war against Spain in 1898-its presidents have had to take on the mantle of world leadership. Before then American presidents did interact with the larger world, of course, but mostly in ways designed to keep the United States from becoming entangled in global political struggles, or to shield the Western hemisphere from European colonialism, as the Monroe Doctrine sought to do. This "limited presidency" was changed forever at the beginning of the twentieth century, Warren argues, when under Theodore Roosevelt American leadership took the form of negotiating a peace in 1905 between Russia and Japan, ending the bloody war they were waging in northeast Asia. A decade later, Woodrow Wilson attempted to end World War I, then sought to redefine the world system along more liberal democratic lines. Warren surveys each president in this manner, finding that the world leadership role grew larger with each succeeding chief executive. His study ends with John F. Kennedy, but the trend is clear: the burden of world leadership seemed only to grow heavier. By Reagan's time the stakes were exceptionally high, and his ability to act with fluidity and flexibility under such pressure reveals an important aspect of his character and emotional timbre.
Another important theory, recently advanced, is more about foreign policy than the presidency per se, yet it may prove the most useful in understanding a given president's character and actions. This is Walter Russell Mead's idea that American presidents relate to the world in ways that fall within four identifiable archetypes, three of which he associates with particular presidents, the fourth with one of the Founding Fathers. First, Mead sees Woodrow Wilson as the model for those who would emphasize the spread of democracy and concern for human rights, and who would be most likely to emphasize the need for international consensus on matters of high statecraft.
Second are the ideas of our country's first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who is the intellectual polestar for those fundamentally concerned with economic issues. But it is important not to equate a focus on prosperity with any particular economic ideology. In the nineteenth century the Hamiltonians supported protectionist approaches to trade in order to nurture infant U.S. industries. In the twentieth century, however, they became far more supportive of free trade for reasons of national interest. Today Hamiltonians tend to be associated with ensuring that the United States is on the leading edge of economic globalization.
The American folk ethic that favors developing maximal military power while simultaneously upholding populist values would be the province of the third major strand of thought in American foreign policy, articulated by Andrew Jackson and his "descendants" in office. Jacksonians are thus seen as supporting both large defense and entitlements spending. In present terms, for example, they would favor both advanced weapons purchases and cost-of-living increases for seniors. Beyond pocketbook issues, Mead is careful to note that Jacksonians care a great deal about their country's reputation in the world. Yet they are not eager to intervene in foreign conflicts or crises-and are likely to be instinctively suspicious of strategies of regime change undertaken in the cause of nation-building and democratization.
Finally, those who care most about protecting individual civil liberties and imposing constitutional limits on the various uses of presidential power form the fourth pillar of foreign policy. They walk in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, whose beliefs are nicely summed up in his aphorism "That government is best which governs the least." In terms of foreign policy, Jeffersonians have little interest in imposing their ideas and values upon others, and their deep-seated worries about military institutions encourage them to embrace the use of force only as a last resort. In the context of the ongoing war on terror, the true Jeffersonian would most likely oppose intrusions on civil liberties at home (such as those of the Patriot Act) and would support, at best, a more limited, surgical approach to the use of force against terrorist hideouts and havens abroad.
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Excerpted from THE REAGAN IMPRINTby John Arquilla Copyright © 2006 by John Arquilla. Excerpted by permission.
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