The Reagan decade
Gil Troy produces a colourful portrait of the U.S. in the 1980s, as reaganism restored optimism and perpetuated selfishness

Reviewed by NORMAN WEBSTER, The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, March 19, 2005
Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, By Gil Troy. Princeton University Press, 417 pages, $40.50.

Photo Credit: BARRY THUMMA, ASSOCIATED PRESS President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office in 1987: he knew what he wanted, Gil Troy suggests.


I covered Ronald Reagan just once. It was at the Republican convention in Kansas City in 1976, when the former governor of California was trying to wrest his party's nomination away from interim President Gerry Ford.

Ford, one of the most inarticulate public figures since Caligula's horse, edged through in the end and would go on to lose in November to the Democrats' Jimmy Carter. Reagan seemed finished as a national force. "An aging actor with some bizarre preoccupations," I wrote. Er, not quite.

Reagan's loss in Kansas City may, in fact, have been a lucky break for the old smoothie. Gil Troy, professor of history at McGill University, notes in Morning in America that the country's sense of malaise only increased after 1976. Carter's turned out to be a fourth straight failed presidency, following those of LBJ, Richard Nixon and Ford.

When Reagan finally broke through in 1980, winning the first of two terms as president, the time was right for contagious optimism, an actor's sunshine smile and a vision of America as a shining city on a hill, beacon to the world.


Reagan was happy to oblige. Performing was what he did best; indeed, he couldn't understand how someone could master modern politics without a show-biz background.

Opponents had a grouchier take. Performing, they said, was all he could do, and he needed a script to deliver his lines.

Troy has a balanced judgment on the Reagan years. "At its best, Reaganism helped restore an idealism and entrepreneurial can-doism central to the American spirit. At its worst, Reaganism perpetuated self-righteousness mixed with selfishness."

He concludes, though, with a thumping endorsement:

"Ronald Reagan's legacy continues to define his country; he remains the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt." Mt. Rushmore, here we come.

Troy does a couple of interesting things. One is to delve, via a Freedom of Information request, into files containing Reagan handwriting - drafts of letters, revisions of speeches, scrawled notes about telephone calls to congressmen and senators.

The results may surprise those who have always thought of Reagan as a Mister Magoo suffering from premature senility. Troy's digging indicates that there was, for the most part, a working intelligence in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan knew what he wanted, concentrated on those few things and found the words - his own words - to advance his causes.

The other thing Troy does is place this political activity within the larger context of U.S. culture. The book, in fact, is not a biography of Reagan; the man is a ghostly presence throughout, but we learn little about him that other writers have not already uncovered.

The main thing Troy has produced is a portrait of the United States in the 1980s in all its colour and texture - Dynasty and Hill Street Blues, New Coke, CNN and USA Today, The Big Chill, drug wars, feminism, "shock jocks,'' Wall Street greed, race and crime, AIDS, Bill Cosby, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye (did they really exist or were they just a weird dream?), Lee Iacocca, Ivan Boesky, Calvin Klein, the Los Angeles Olympics and Michael Jackson when he was still an entertainer.

Sometimes the detail can be overwhelming. (Did you know that the age of first-time fur coat owners dropped from 50 to 26 in a decade?)

Still, the book is a mine of information on U.S. popular culture, presented by one who lived through those times before heading north to Montreal in 1990. It was a decade aptly symbolized by a president known as America's oldest yuppie.

In the election of 1984, Walter Mondale and the Democrats tried to knock him off with a novel approach: "(They) trusted the power of facts to refute Reagan." Hah. The Gipper swept 49 states.

Norman Webster is a former editor in chief of The Gazette.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005