Reagan: He's baaaack! ; How an ex-lifeguard went from B-list actor to A-list president to enduring American icon

James E. McWilliams, SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN 27 March 2005, Austin American-Statesman, K5

On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency, few voters saw "the Gipper" in the optimistic glow of morning's light. Americans, in fact, were more likely to know the former governor of California as an aging movie star than an accomplished politician. As Gil Troy explains in his superb "Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s" (Princeton University Press, $29.95), Reagan "entered the White House as the most unpopular president- elect in modern American history." He left in not much better shape, under a cloud of controversy and burdened with mediocre approval ratings, the symbol to many voters of what was seen by many as America's slide during the '80s into political corruption and personal indulgence.

How quickly reputations change. Twenty-four years later, at Reagan's funeral, it became dramatically clear that the man had exceeded expectations. Washington, D.C., effectively shut down out of respect. Financial markets officially closed. The media brimmed with affection. Even former President Clinton couldn't resist touting Reagan as a president who "personified the indomitable optimism of the American people."

And now, predictably, the history books have arrived to crown Reagan's achievements. The three titles mentioned here are a mere sample from a publishing heap that includes everything from Paul Leftow's "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" to the forthcoming "Why I am a Reagan Conservative," a volume of essays by the likes of Bob Dole, Ed Meese, Robert Novak and Bill Frist and edited by Reagan's former chief of staff, Michael Deaver.

How did this transformation take place? How did the "most unpopular president-elect" become one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history? And why is it that the doubters among us might have a thing or two to reconsider?

The pat answer is "the Reagan revolution," which tolled the bell of liberalism's demise by exposing the flawed assumption that government was the solution to, not the cause of, the economic and social ills that plagued America during the '70s. Liberalism consequently fell down a cultural trash chute, becoming a word sneered in vain about latte-drinking, Volvo-driving bobos late for Pilates class.

John Ehrman, a foreign affairs analyst for the federal government, toes this simplistic line with a simplistic book. In "The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan" (Yale University Press, $27.50), Ehrman demonstrates an impressive mastery and distillation of massive political detail. Unfortunately, he writes like a college Republican trapped in a dorm room full of smug Democrats. "The Eighties" doesn't aim to engage the complexities of political change so much as lionize Reagan, dismiss liberalism as bad joke that Americans had to endure for more than 40 years, attribute the Iran- Contra scandal to Reagan's overly trusting "management style" and impugn alternative economic solutions (namely, those of Robert Reich) as "uncomfortably like those of European fascists during the 1930s." It is, in short, a polemic.

As such, it's a tour de force of creative historical editing. After compiling and condensing the political issues that dominated Reagan's two terms, Ehrman molds them into a heroic narrative driven by "a brand of conservatism (that became) the most vigorous force in American politics." Reagan is Ehrman's cosmic prime mover, a man under whom "(v)irtually every area of American life underwent some type of transformation."

The problem with Ehrman's "revolutionary" pivot is that politics - - when cast in the long view of history -- don't operate this way. In "Morning in America," his more nuanced study of the '80s, Troy, a McGill University historian, expresses deep skepticism for the sort of "storyline of decay and renaissance" touted by Ehrman. In other words, Troy -- whose politics lean to the right -- does what the historian is trained to do: allow change and continuity to coexist.

The result is a balanced book on a plausibly human politician. Troy works from the premise that "symbolic leadership is significant." Although his book ultimately offers a favorable assessment of Reagan, he's as likely to highlight Reaganism's failures as illuminate its accomplishments. Reagan's policies -- tax reform and deregulation -- might have inspired a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial environment, as Troy shows, but they also led to the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, a mounting debt, expanded disparity between rich and poor, "pathologies of crime, drugs, ghettoization" and "growing superficiality and selfishness." Troy, for all his admiration of the man, never ignores the ugly underbelly.

But Reagan's economic and social policies aren't Troy's primary concern. Instead, he's more concerned with how Reagan perfected the "meeting of the man and the moment." Reagan's unique brand of conservatism thrived, Troy claims, because it brilliantly accommodated "the baby boomer hippies (who) were getting haircuts, shaving and putting on suits." Rather than rejecting the changes liberalism wrought, Reaganism -- fatefully and with consequences that resonate today -- redesigned conservatism around the Big Chillers who were coming of age in the '80s.

The evidence on this point is controversial and compelling. AIDS activism and the gay rights agenda became mainstream movements during that decade. Millions of African Americans "entered the professions, moved into good neighborhoods, received better educations, and progressed." Environmentalism reached a fevered pitch. Women achieved majority numbers in law and medical schools. Liberalism -- which explicitly fostered all of these goals -- was hardly gasping its last breath. But conservatism was now taking credit for liberalism's positive outcomes -- while saddling liberals with the movement's unsavory associations, a branding that they still smart from today. Reagan's "poetic politics," as Troy calls it, made Republicanism the "party of Main Street," a street inhabited by men and women who still had a soft spot for Woodstock and dope.

Every politician, of course, embraces Main Street. One of the few benefits to come from Craig Shirley's hagiography of the man for whom he ran independent campaigns in 1980 and 1984 is a rare insight into Reagan's private character. "Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started It All" (Nelson Current, $25.99) examines in minute and often dramatic detail Reagan's 1976 losing bid to Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Shirley's larger thesis is that -- guess what! -- Reagan inspired a revolution, and that "it all" began in 1976. Though the argument is dull and unconvincing, the subject at the center of it turns out to be anything but. "(Reagan) was utterly, utterly charming," Shirley once said in an interview. Evidence of that charm permeates his book. Reagan's grace under pressure, the way he carefully pitched his emotions to make his case, the savvy with which he negotiated the often competing demands among his campaign staff, his gut instincts - - all of these qualities pulled Reagan one faltering step closer to the White House.

Troy and Shirley are surely onto something when they emphasize Reagan's personal appeal, but they fail to note a historical truth that made his charisma and his knack for storytelling so powerful: Politics in the United States has always encouraged a strategic amount of deception. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We are and always have been a polyglot nation burdened with the unenviable task of persuading myriad interest groups, races, ethnicities, genders and religions to downplay differences and arrange themselves into a workable mosaic.

Given the enormity of this task, our most successful presidents have been those capable of transcending political details, stepping back, seeing the mosaic in the most optimistic and patriotic terms, and using the bully pulpit to tell Americans with unabashed pride how very exceptional we are. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and both Roosevelts did it. And Reagan -- as Shirley shows -- mastered the skill.

It might seem disingenuous to attribute Reagan's current ascendance to his ability to deceive. But that precise quality has allowed his ideology to be, in Troy's description, "liberty-laden but moralistic, consumer-oriented but idealistic, nationalist but individualistic, and consistently optimistic." Reaganites who wish for more will always have Ehrman and Shirley to consult. Those who cannot bear the thought of granting the man even so much as a backhanded compliment, by contrast, might find solace in the truism that presidential reputations are destroyed as quickly as they're built.

James E. McWilliams is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos. His 'Politics & Prose' column appears monthly.

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