Ronald Reagan campaigned on a slogan to “Make America Great Again” and ushered in a new era of conservatism in America. That was more than forty years ago, and his Republican Party today looks very different with Donald Trump at its helm. Does the Reagan legend — a tax cutting, government shrinking, Cold War winning optimist — stand up to close scrutiny? And how did Reaganism pave the way for Trumpism? This week’s guest is Max Boot, who’s just written an authoritative, wide-ranging biography of the 40th President of the United States.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
###
ARCHIVAL Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Mrs. Reagan, and the family. [MUSIC: “Hail To The Chief”]
In this political season, 40 years ago — in 1984 — the Republican candidate for president won re-election in one of the biggest landslides in American history.
ARCHIVAL Dan Rather: Ronald Reagan — his hopes for an unprecedented 50-state sweep, those hopes still alive and working.
Reagan won 49 of the 50 states and 59-percent of the popular vote. Totals that no other candidate since then has come close to matching.
ARCHIVAL Crowd: Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: I think that’s just been arranged! [CHEERS]
Four years earlier, in his 1980 campaign, Reagan had appealed to voters who had lost hope…with an optimistic message.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: We’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.
In slogan, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are the same.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: And we will make America great again! [CROWD CHEERS]
In style, Trump is often similar to Reagan.
Max Boot: He often bought into right-wing mythology and passed it along, and it was very hard for fact-checkers or for aides to convince him that something that he was using in his speeches was not necessarily true.
But in substance, they’re mostly miles apart. Reagan on immigration.
Max Boot: He talked about eliminating the border barriers between the United States and Mexico.
On gun control.
Max Boot: Certainly, Ronald Reagan supported greater regulation on guns.
And on foreign policy.
Max Boot: I suspect that Reagan would be very anti-Putin.
That’s the voice of Max Boot, author of a new biography of the 40th President of the United States, Reagan: His Life and Legend. Reagan’s ascent to power was a turning point in American government, from liberalism to conservatism, a shift away from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This comprehensive and authoritative biography spans Reagan’s whole life — from his surprisingly troubled childhood in rural Illinois.
Max Boot: His father, Jack, was this alcoholic shoe salesman who kept losing his job.
To his acting career in Hollywood. From the California governor’s mansion…to the White House. And Boot takes on many myths about Reagan.
Max Boot: He actually passed more tax increases than tax cuts, even though he's often associated with tax cuts.
Including misconceptions about ending the Cold War and a legendary challenge to the other superpower leader.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! [CROWD CHEERS]
Max Boot: I don't think that particular bit of rhetoric from Reagan was as consequential as a lot of people think it was.
In this year’s consequential election, Boot helps us to understand how far the Republican Party has veered from the classic conservatism Reagan ushered in, with interviews with top officials who were in the room when Reagan made historic decisions and important documents available only in recent years.
Max Boot is my guest today on “In the Room”
[THEME MUSIC]
Peter Bergen: You came to the United States as an immigrant from Russia.
Max Boot: Yes.
Peter Bergen: Reagan was sort of a hero of yours when you were growing up. Explain a little bit about your background and how Reagan played in it.
Max Boot: I was a small kid. I came here in 1976 with my parents when I was seven-years-old, from the Soviet Union, and I think Soviet emigres are a lot like Cuban emigres or other emigres from communist regimes, Venezuelan emigres today. When you come from, you know, a socialist or communist regime, you tend to gravitate towards the right, and of course, Ronald Reagan was the voice of the right in the 1980s, and he was a very appealing voice.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: Let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness.
In 1983, Reagan famously labeled the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’ He cast his anti-communist views in stark religious terms to an audience of evangelical Christians.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: While they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Max Boot: So, as a kid, I thrilled when he said, 'This is the evil empire,' because I was turning that on and saying, 'Yes, that's true. That's accurate.' And in many ways, it was accurate. That's how I became a Republican, and Ronald Reagan was a very inspirational figure for me in those days.
Peter Bergen: You were at a Reagan campaign rally, I think, as a young man?
Max Boot: In 1984, yeah, in the San Fernando Valley.
Peter Bergen: Is that the genesis of your interest in politics and the genesis of this book? How old were you, and what were the circumstances?
Max Boot: I was in high school. Reagan made conservatism cool in the 1980s, and I was certainly part of that generation that was drawn to the conservative movement and the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan. He was such a powerful communicator, seemingly a warm and wonderful person that it was very easy to be drawn to him, and I was, and over the years, as time has passed, I'm no longer a Republican, but I haven't become a Democrat. I'm an independent, and so I think, with this book, can kind of view Reagan much more objectively than I could at the time.
Max Boot: I still have some sentimental attachment and some affection for him, and now you know we're able to take a look at his record and see that, yes, there were achievements and significant achievements, and I think he rightly belongs in the top ten presidents, where he's been placed by so many historians. But there's also huge downsides to his administration and things that we entirely missed in the 1980s. For example, it's striking to me that the ‘80s was the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, and Reagan almost entirely ignored AIDS. He didn't give a speech on the subject until 1987, even as tens of thousands of Americans were dying of AIDS.
[MUSIC]
Reagan's legacy has been hotly debated for the past four decades, and he still looms large. He left office in 1989 with a 63-percent approval rating. Among recent presidents, only Bill Clinton's was higher at the end of his tenure. Reagan was, in President Barack Obama's words ‘a transformative political figure.’ And that transformation accelerated with his first inaugural address, in 1981.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
That anti-government, anti-tax dogma is championed by Republicans to this day.
Peter Bergen: The subtitle of this book is 'his life and legend.' You blow apart quite a number of myths along the way. What are those myths about Reagan?
Max Boot: Well, there's a lot of them created over the years. It's not like the myth is all glorious, and the reality is all bad, but it's just, there's quite a bit of discrepancy between them. There are so many things one can point to from this mythology about how Reagan defeated a communist takeover of Hollywood in the 1940s to how he bankrupted and brought down the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and quite a few things in between.
Boot credits Reagan with lifting the nation's morale and reviving the economy, and he highlights his pragmatism and bipartisanship. Although Reagan remains a Republican icon, Boot says, some policies pursued by Trump’s party are quite different.
Peter Bergen: Would Reagan be considered a Republican in today's Republican Party?
Max Boot: That's a great question. I mean, I'm sure if he were still alive, he would have a residual loyalty to the Republican Party, with which he was affiliated. But, I think, he would also be somebody who would be denounced as a RINO, as a Republican In Name Only, certainly the way that you've seen the Bushes denounced or John McCain or Mitt Romney or Mitch McConnell.
Max Boot: In Washington, he cut deals with Tip O'Neill, the powerful Speaker of the House, a Democrat. He actually passed more tax increases than tax cuts, even though he's often associated with tax cuts. For example, in 1981, he passed a massive cut not only in personal income taxes, but also in business taxes, and the result of that was, with the economy heading down in a recession, the deficit was getting out of control, and so in 1982, he agreed to sign a law that raised business taxes, one of the biggest tax increases in U.S. history. And so that's a sign of how pragmatic he could be. He often reached decisions that, I think, were an unpleasant surprise to a lot of his conservative supporters.
Max Boot: On so many issues, Ronald Reagan would be very much at odds with today's Republican Party. I mean, just to take one, in 1986, he signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Act, which legalized millions of undocumented immigrants. This is what today's Republicans would call an amnesty bill. They would be horrified. And yet, this was Ronald Reagan signing it, and guess what? Ronald Reagan was actually pro-immigration. He didn't rail about quote, unquote, illegal aliens. He talked about eliminating the border barriers between the United States and Mexico. He set into motion NAFTA. So, he had a very different vision on a lot of issues than the one enunciated by Donald Trump's GOP.
Peter Bergen: Yeah, and it's easy to forget that the Democrats and trade unions were very opposed to immigration. Republicans saw them as basically additional labor for the labor force.
Max Boot: Yeah, that's exactly right. Huge shift on immigration over the last 40-plus years.
[MUSIC]
Reagan also held more moderate views than today's Republican Party on the issue of guns — something that Reagan was personally and terrifyingly familiar with.
ARCHIVAL Frank Reynolds: An incident that took place less than 15-minutes ago at the Washington Hilton Hotel, when shots were fired at President Reagan. Here you see the President coming out now. [SOUNDS OF COMMOTION]
In March 1981, a would-be assassin shot Reagan with a 22-caliber revolver. The bullet punctured his lung and landed one inch from his heart. He was hospitalized for 12 days.
Peter Bergen: Ronald Reagan survived this very serious assassination attempt, which basically at the time, was downplayed as, it wasn't that big a deal. Now we know, of course, that he's very lucky to have survived, and he had two great lines: 'Honey, I forgot to duck,' to Nancy Reagan after the assassination attempt, and the other one was when he was wheeled into surgery, he asked all the doctors: 'I hope you're all Republicans?’ So, he was able to really maintain his sense of humor.
Max Boot: No question about it. I call the chapter on his shooting 'Finest Hour,' because that really was Reagan's finest hour. You know he was showing grace under adversity, which is the definition of courage.
Peter Bergen: But his interest in gun control preceded the fact that somebody almost killed him. So, another area where he would not be welcome in today's Republican Party.
Max Boot: Yeah, absolutely. Even in the 1990s, there were Republicans who were voting for an assault weapons ban, and certainly Ronald Reagan supported greater regulation on guns, and now you're drummed out of the party if you're willing to restrict gun access in any way. As governor of California, in the 1960s, he signed one of the toughest gun control laws in the country, and oh, by the way, he also signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. Now, he later said that he regretted signing the abortion law, but he did sign it, which is an indication that he was not nearly as doctrinaire in office as he often sounded on the campaign trail.
Peter Bergen: Early in the book, you pose a question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” What's your answer?
Max Boot: My answer is, at the risk of being frustrating, is ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ or ‘it's complicated.’ You know, it's impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan having any hesitation about arming Ukraine right now to resist this new evil empire. So, there's huge differences, which are greater than the similarities. But there's also some continuities that you can point to, including the fact that Reagan played on white backlash politics throughout his political career. He opposed civil rights legislation. He made a conscious play for white voters and especially the so-called Reagan Democrats.
Peter Bergen: These were in the form of dog whistles, like 'welfare queens' and-
Max Boot: Yes.
Peter Bergen: How did it work?
Max Boot: He talked about law and order, welfare queens, school busing. In 1980, he infamously used the phrase 'states’ rights' while speaking in Mississippi near the site where three civil rights workers had been slain 20 years earlier. So, these kinds of messages got across. You know, he was opposed to a Martin Luther King holiday. He tried to water down civil rights laws. He opposed strict sanctions on South Africa. I mean, he certainly didn't use openly racist language, but he had a troubling record on civil rights.
Max Boot: You know, there's some other ways, you can argue that he inadvertently paved the way for Trumpism, and one of those was that he often had a very cavalier attitude towards facts. He did not lie at the rate that Trump lies. Nobody does. That's impossible. But he did repeat a lot of myths time after time, even when they were being pointed out to him.
Max Boot: And there was one example that I found kind of fascinating from the mid-1960s, because a staple of his speeches at that time was to say, ‘No nation has ever survived a tax burden of one-third of national income.’ Sounds plausible, but it's not true. Right now, every country in the western world spends more than a third of its national income on government spending, and even at the time, that was true of a lot of countries. And so, a persnickety graduate student actually contacted Reagan and asked, 'What is the source for this assertion?' And his reply was, 'Oh, you know, it was something I read a while ago, I just don't have that information anymore.' But he wasn't stopped from the fact that he couldn't point out to an actual source. He kept on repeating it anyway.
Peter Bergen: Are there other similarities or differences?
Max Boot: Reagan and Trump were the only two people ever to host national television shows before becoming president, and that was a lot of the reason why, in both cases, they became president.
ARCHIVAL General Electric Theater Theme Music
Max Boot: Reagan was host of The General Electric hour, one of the top-rated programs on TV in the 1950s.
ARCHIVAL Announcer: For General Electric, here is Ronald Reagan.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: Good evening. Tonight, Jack Benny with Zsa Zsa Gabor stars on the General Electric Theater.
Max Boot: Obviously, Trump was host of The Apprentice, and in both cases, they projected an image onto the screen, which reached millions and millions of Americans and convinced millions and millions of Americans that this was somebody that they knew, even though they didn't really, but people thought they knew them, and it also allowed them to communicate very effectively, because obviously, since let's say 1960, mastery of television has been an essential skill set for any American politician.
Peter Bergen: You know, I'm old enough to remember when Reagan was elected, for liberals in the Northeast, it was like the second coming of the Antichrist. They really hated him. They thought he was 'an amiable dunce,' to quote one of the people you quote in the book. What's wrong with that picture, the 'amiable dunce' picture?
Max Boot: I think it leaves out a lot, because, I think, what we've seen based on the historical record, he was certainly not an intellectual, and he didn't have any pretenses to being an intellectual, but he was also a reasonably intelligent person. He read a lot.
Peter Bergen: That was one of the things I was surprised by in your book, how much Reagan read.
Max Boot: His problem was not that he wouldn't read stuff. He read stuff all his life, clipped articles, kept notes, wrote index cards. His problem was that, A) he would read stuff, but B) he would read often indiscriminately, and he would tend to believe what he read. He would read Reader's Digest or Human Events or National Review, and there would be some apocryphal story in there, and then he would take it to heart, and then he would memorize it. He was somebody who could look at a page of script and memorize it in Hollywood. But the problem was he was not always a very discerning reader, and so he often bought into right wing mythology and passed it along, and it was very hard for fact checkers or for aides to convince him that something that he was using in his speeches was not necessarily true.
Domestically, Reagan’s economic forecasts also turned out to be untrue. He promised to cut taxes and increase defense spending while also balancing the federal budget. He achieved the first two goals at the expense of the third. In fact, the annual budget deficit doubled under Reagan’s watch.
Max Boot: Reagan's failure to balance the budget was actually one of the few regrets that he expressed about his own presidency. He had been talking, going back to the 1950s, about the importance of getting rid of deficit spending and balancing the books and all these things, and in the early ‘80s, Reagan engaged in some magical thinking, where he imagined that cutting taxes would spur so much economic activity that you could cut taxes and actually increase government revenues.
Max Boot: That's what became known as 'supply side economics.' But it was, as George H. W. Bush said, 'voodoo economics.’ There was no serious economist who believed that, and of course, under Reagan, the budget deficit ballooned considerably, and that was actually one of the major criticisms made of Reagan at the time. But I would argue, in hindsight, it doesn't loom so large, because even though budget deficits were big under Reagan, they've become a hundred times bigger today.
[MUSIC]
On foreign policy, Reagan was laser-focused on defeating communism. He funded anti-communist fighters in covert actions and proxy wars from El Salvador to Angola to Afghanistan. He believed in battling what he saw as Soviet expansionism around the globe and predicted its demise in a speech to the British Parliament, in 1982.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: What I'm describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term: the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies, which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.
Reagan promoted the idea of ‘peace through strength’ and increased military spending by about two-thirds by 1989, which Boot calls ‘an unprecedented defense buildup for peacetime.’ The conventional wisdom for decades has been that this caused Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, essentially, to stand down.
Max Boot: The mythology is — he called out the evil empire, he supported freedom fighters around the world, he increased defense spending, and as a result of all that, Gorbachev basically said: 'I give up. I can't keep up with you.’ The real story is almost the opposite of this conservative mythology that's grown up around Reagan. There was no evidence that the Soviet Union was going bankrupt in the 1980s. Although, yes, they had economic problems, and the reason they had economic problems was not because Reagan had some plan to undermine the evil empire. The reason they had economic problems was because they had communist central planning, which didn't work very well. World oil prices were falling in the 1980s. So, it was kind of a double whammy.
Peter Bergen: And the Russians, of course, do have a lot of oil.
Max Boot: Yes, they do have a lot of oil, and they were really being hurt by the fall in oil prices. But you look at other communist regimes from the 1980s, and a number of them survive — Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, China. They all survived, even though they were not doing any better than the Soviet Union in the 1980s. So, the Soviet Union could have survived. The reason it didn't was because Mikhail Gorbachev took over in 1985, and he was kind of a black swan, because he was an almost unheard of example of somebody who rose to the top of a dictatorial system while losing faith in the dictatorship that he presided over.
Max Boot: It wasn't like Gorbachev wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. He wanted to reform the Soviet Union. The key thing that he did was he basically said he was not going to keep the Soviet empire together by force, and once he said he wasn't going to go out, send tanks into the streets to keep himself in power, that's when the system completely fell apart, and he didn't understand the system was going to fall apart. But that's what happened.
Gorbachev’s reforms set in motion a tectonic shift in the repressive, dissent-crushing, Communist dictatorship and lifted the Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe. His ‘restructuring,’ known as perestroika, liberalized the Soviet political and economic system, and his glasnost, meaning openness, relaxed state censorship and allowed more free expression.
Max Boot: The reason why he launched perestroika and glasnost was not because he wanted to surrender to Ronald Reagan. The reason he did that was because he was disgusted with the Soviet system. He wanted to provide a better quality of life for Soviet citizens, and he wanted to end the arms race. He wanted to end the Cold War. That was his mindset going in, and Ronald Reagan's genius was that he actually came to understand that, and this is actually, I think, one of Reagan's most remarkable achievements, and this is something that his fans don't seem to understand.
Max Boot: His real achievement was that he was able to put aside decades of anti-communist ideology at a time when many hardliners, they thought Gorbachev was a phony. They thought he was just another wily communist who was going to dupe us into surrendering, and Reagan considered that possibility. He wasn't naive. He thought about that. But then when he actually met Gorbachev in Geneva, in 1985, they had the summit that changed the history of the world, because Gorbachev and Reagan, after spending time together, came to like each other. They came to understand each other.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: We do not mistrust each other because we're armed, we're armed because we mistrust each other. I spoke those words to General Secretary Gorbachev at our very first meeting, in Geneva.
Max Boot: Reagan came to believe that Gorbachev was sincere about his reform efforts, and so, therefore, Reagan decided he should support Gorbachev instead of trying to undermine him, and that was really the shift that allowed the Cold War to end peacefully, and again, Reagan deserves a ton of credit for that, but it's credit for a very different strategy than the one that he's credited with by many of his admirers.
Reagan and Gorbachev met four more times during Reagan's presidency, and their 1987 nuclear deal broke new ground.
Max Boot: The first arms control treaty that didn't just limit nuclear weapons. It actually abolished an entire class of intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Missiles in Europe could still hit Moscow. Soviet missiles could still hit Paris and London, and so it was a tremendous achievement to abolish those weapons, and that was only made possible because of the degree of trust that Gorbachev and Reagan had in each other by 1987.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: I think I could sum up my own position on this with the recitation of a very brief Russian proverb: доверяй, но проверяй. It means “trust, but verify.”
Peter Bergen: He was a staunch anti-communist, and yet he has this change of heart, where he trusted Gorbachev. What was the cocktail of reasons that Reagan did this pretty unpredictable 180 that many of his aides and cabinet officials were against?
Max Boot: A lot of people now argue that Reagan had this grand strategy with the Soviet Union, and he was expertly applying pressure and at the same time offering conciliation, doing all these things in this kind of Machiavellian way. Just looking at the historical record, that's not accurate, and I think what really happened is that Reagan was not a systematic thinker, and he was really moved by anecdotes and by images, and I think, in dealing with the Soviet Union, he had two kind of competing data points that shaped his thinking.
Max Boot: One was the terrible misdeeds committed by the Soviet Union. He would meet with Soviet dissidents, and he was appalled to hear about the gulag and the horrors that they endured, and so that made him a very staunch anti-communist, who talked about the Soviet Union as the evil empire. But at the same time, he participated in war games in which they showed him what would happen if there was a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He saw much of the United States going up in flames. That was also dramatized in that very powerful 1983 TV movie, The Day After, about a nuclear explosion in Lawrence, Kansas.
ARCHIVAL The Day After: [AIR RAID SIRENS]
ARCHIVAL The Day After, Speaker 1: This is not an exercise!
ARCHIVAL The Day After, Speaker 2: Roger. Understand. Major Reinhart, we have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. Over 300 missiles inbound now.
ARCHIVAL The Day After: [NUCLEAR BOMB EXPLOSION]
Max Boot: So, seeing the horrors of what a nuclear war would cause made him want to try to negotiate with the Soviets to reduce the risk of war and to end the Cold War. And so he had these competing thoughts, one, of standing up to the Soviets, and one, of trying to work with them. And he tried to do both in the first term, and it didn't accomplish very much. It was only when Gorbachev came into office that he had a very different kind of Soviet leader that he could do business with.
Sensing an opportunity with this surprising Soviet leader, Reagan issued a bold challenge to Gorbachev, in 1987, as he stood at the Brandenburg Gate, on the democratic, western side of the Berlin Wall.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! [APPLAUSE]
Peter Bergen: Was that kind of rhetoric helpful? And did Reagan, in a sense, win the Cold War?
Max Boot: Well, from what I've seen, I don't think that, you know, saying 'tear down the Berlin Wall' is what led the Berlin Wall to be torn down. I think Gorbachev had basically fundamentally made the decision that he was not going to keep the Soviet empire together by force. That's what enabled the Berlin Wall to be torn down.
Max Boot: I don't think that particular bit of rhetoric from Reagan was as consequential as a lot of people think it was. You know, in terms of whether he won the Cold War, you could argue that in some ways, but I think it's more accurate to say that he ended the Cold War. He helped to end the Cold War, because winning suggests that he accepted the surrender of the Soviet Union, and that's really not what happened. He actually worked with Gorbachev peacefully to lay down their arms and to end this conflict.
[MUSIC]
Peter Bergen: One of the themes of the book that comes across very strongly is the sort of passivity of Reagan when he was president. What was the kind of source of this passivity, and was it a strength or a weakness or what?
Max Boot: I think one of the paradoxes of Ronald Reagan was that he was in many ways a great leader. He was certainly known as The Great Communicator. Communicated this very strong message, and he had core beliefs that he wanted to advance. But while being a great leader, he was a poor manager, and he really depended on his aides to do the managing for him.
Max Boot: He basically saw his job as being like a movie actor, where you give the speeches, you inspire the folks, but he's not going to be the gaffer. He's not going to be the lighter. Not the people working behind the scenes. That's somebody else's job, and so he depended on other people to do their jobs, and sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn't, and, of course, you know his first term was so successful in part because of his choice of Jim Baker, and Baker turned out to be one of the great White House chiefs of staff in history.
Max Boot: But then the second term in many ways was much more deeply troubled, because at the beginning of the second term, Reagan acquiesced when Jim Baker and Don Regan, the Treasury Secretary, they decided it would be nice to switch jobs, and they basically presented this as a fait accompli to Reagan, and in a half-an-hour meeting he said, 'Oh, okay, fine.' I mean this is just such a massive shift, and he basically didn't have any input in it, and it turned out to be a disaster, because Regan, Don Regan, was a horrible chief of staff. As Jim Baker told me, ‘Don Regan liked the ‘chief' part of the title, but he didn't understand that he was ‘staff.’
Peter Bergen: This model that you say that Reagan had actually being the chief communicator, sort of actor-in-chief and trying to get a few big things right, I mean, actually, that sounds like a pretty good model for being a president.
Max Boot: It's not a bad model, but it's really heavily dependent on having aides who will fill in his deficiencies, and he had that largely in the first term, but then he didn't have it in the second term, and the result was the Iran-Contra affair, this horrible scandal.
Peter Bergen: If you're summarizing it for my 12-year-old son, what was the Iran-Contra affair?
Max Boot: The Iran-Contra affair was basically sparked by the fact that the Iranian regime and their proxies in Lebanon were taking all these Americans hostage, and Ronald Reagan was anguished by that. He met with the relatives of the hostages. He wanted to do anything possible to get them released.
So, high-ranking members of the Reagan administration hatched a hard-to-believe plan. They decided to secretly sell weapons to Iran, a major enemy, in exchange for the release of those American hostages kidnapped and held by an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Lebanon. But that was only half of the scheme. The administration then funneled millions of dollars in profits from those arms sales to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, known as the Contras. And this was after Congress had explicitly banned any U.S. government funding for the Contras.
Max Boot: And that was a potentially criminal and potentially impeachable offense, which caused the worst scandal of the Reagan presidency. But ultimately, he survived, because at the end of the day, there was no evidence that he knew about the diversion of funds.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: 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.
Max Boot: That was an example of how his inattention to detail and his aversion to management got him into the worst scandal of his presidency, but it also saved his presidency, because if he had been more on top of things, he certainly would have known about the diversion, and he could have gotten impeached over it.
Peter Bergen: So, he had this flexibility and this pragmatism, but at the same time, you look at the record in Central America, as you write in the book, he believed and other people on his staff, they truly believed that there was a domino theory of the communists taking over Central America. They really believed that that was plausible.
Max Boot: That was certainly one of the areas of his policy in the 1980s where he was more ideological. And I don't mean to suggest that he was 100-percent pragmatic. I think he was more pragmatic than people realize, but he could also be very ideological. And I was interested in this conversation that Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian prime minister, relayed to me that he had with Ronald Reagan, because Mulroney was actually one of Reagan's closest friends among world leaders.
Max Boot: He was a fellow conservative. He got along very well with Reagan — but he couldn't understand why Reagan was so fixated on El Salvador and Nicaragua. And he had a conversation with Reagan one time about this, and he said, 'Ron, you don't have to worry, they're small countries. They're not going to threaten you.' But Reagan was convinced. He kept saying, like, 'If we don't stop them down there, they're going to come to Galveston next.'
Peter Bergen: In Texas.
Max Boot: In Texas. And Mulroney was like, 'No, Ron, don't worry about it. These are tiny countries. They're not a threat to the United States.' He couldn't see why Reagan was so exercised.
Peter Bergen: And also, a lot of these countries were run by very brutal right wing dictatorships. I mean, the reason that they had a communist or left wing insurgency was, they were incompetent, right wing, authoritarian.
Max Boot: Oh, no, exactly. This is, again, one of these myths that he propagated, that he actually said that every bit of trouble in the world is made in the Kremlin. Everything he ascribed to Kremlin machinations, whereas you're absolutely right, if you actually look at what was going on, the reason there were insurgencies in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, had a lot to do with local conditions, with corrupt regimes, abusive landowners, vast income disparities, all these local things. That's what was really driving it. And sometimes, admittedly, Cuba or the Soviet Union would take advantage of local conditions to make trouble for the United States, but they didn't create the trouble in the first place. That was really based on local conditions, but Reagan could never see that or believe that.
Peter Bergen: What would Reagan make of Putin today?
Max Boot: I suspect that Reagan would be very anti-Putin, as kind of Reaganite Republicans are today. I could have seen Ronald Reagan trying to reach out to Putin in the way that George W. Bush did and the way that Barack Obama did when they thought that Putin was somebody they could conceivably work with. But by this point, the evidence is pretty clear: you can't work with a guy who invades his neighbors and launches this horrific war with no provocations and creates a complete dictatorship in Russia. So, it's just mind boggling to me that anybody in American politics could have a good word to say about Putin at this point, and I'm sure Ronald Reagan would not if he were still around.
[MUSIC]
One of the oddest chapters in the Reagan saga was the tale of Joan Quigley.
ARCHIVAL NBC Tom Brokaw: New reports of Mrs. Reagan’s reliance on an astrologer raise new questions about national security.
Who was effectively the administration's court astrologer. She really worked for First Lady Nancy Reagan, but her impact on the conduct of the Reagan administration was wide-ranging.
Max Boot: Very bizarre story. She was this kind of celebrity astrologer in San Francisco, very well educated, had these great scientific pretensions, and the Reagans had actually had an interest in astrology, as I show in the book, going back to the 1960s. It wasn't as fervent as it became after Reagan's near assassination. At that point, Nancy Reagan, she was deathly afraid that somebody else was going to hurt her Ronnie, that he would not survive the presidency, and so to basically save him, she turned to Joan Quigley, this astrologer, for advice on scheduling events.
Max Boot: And so as a result of that, almost everything that was scheduled for the president, was first run by Joan Quigley, and this was like top secret, because obviously they understood it would be highly embarrassing if this came out. And this was actually Don Regan's revenge, because Nancy Reagan convinced Ronald Reagan to fire Don Regan, and Don Regan was steaming mad. And I actually found in his personal papers at the Library of Congress, he actually has a folder labeled 'Revenge.' And he got his revenge by releasing his memoir while the Reagans were still in office, in which he revealed Nancy's reliance on this astrologer, and it made her a laughingstock, basically.
Peter Bergen: I mean, it was more than you should go to dinner at this time with this person. In the book, you have a great scene where, I think, Gorbachev signs a treaty at a particular kind of time of day.
Max Boot: That was the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty where normally when you have a summit, you sign the treaty at the end of the summit, not the beginning. But then Colin Powell, who was then the National Security Advisor, was told they needed to sign the treaty at such and such a time in the afternoon, and he couldn't figure out, like, why do we have to do it exactly like that?' And basically it gradually emerged that this was what the astrologer had said.
Peter Bergen: I don't think any other American president has had an astrologer on the payroll, as it were.
Max Boot: I will speak up in defense of Nancy Reagan, because, I think, on balance, although she certainly had her foibles, she was a huge asset to Ronald Reagan. She was suspicious. She was fearful. She doubted everybody's good motives unless proven otherwise. And so she was kind of the chief administrative officer of Reagan Inc. So, she hired and fired on his behalf. She was brilliant at taking her social network, which she had cultivated for a variety of reasons, and helping to turn that into his political network.
Peter Bergen: And speaking of social networks, you know, one of the big themes of the book is Reagan's kind of inscrutability, the lack of friends he had. There was a bit of a family man mythology, but he didn't really deal with his kids very much. To the extent to which he had a friend, it was Nancy Reagan, but everybody else was like staff, help, and he had two guys that he worked with on his ranch in California, who he bonded with pretty closely. But this is a friendless guy even though he was a very friendly man.
Max Boot: I think that's actually very well put. Stu Spencer, who was, you know, his longtime political consultant going back to 1966, one of the things that Stu said to me was Ronald Reagan would have made a pretty good hermit. One of the paradoxes of Reagan is that he was this great communicator, he was warm and friendly to everybody he met, and yet he was basically fairly shy and introverted.
Max Boot: All he wants to do is go home at the end of the day, change into his PJs, sit down with Nancy in front of the TV, eat their dinners off the TV trays, watch Bonanza or Mission: Impossible, read a book, some articles or something, and go to bed. That would have been like a perfect evening for Ronald Reagan. He was actually, you know, a very self-contained person who didn't need a ton of human interaction, didn't need validation from a lot of other people. He was very inner-directed.
Peter Bergen: The other thing that he was, was very conflict-averse.
Max Boot: Yes.
Peter Bergen: He couldn't fire people, even if they were acting against his own interests. You know, his father was a very serious alcoholic, and anybody who knows about alcoholism, the kids of alcoholics, they've had a lot of conflict in their life, right? Dealing with somebody who's extremely mercurial and difficult to deal with, and as a result, they themselves seek to avoid conflict as they become adults, is that kind of part of the Ronald Reagan story?
Max Boot: Oh, that's a huge part of the Ronald Reagan story. That actually explains a lot of his personality, absolutely, because he did have this very troubled, itinerant childhood where his father, Jack, was this alcoholic shoe salesman who kept losing his job. They kept moving from town to town in small-town Illinois, never had much money. Jack argued with his wife, Nelle, their mother. You know, it was a tumultuous upbringing, and he tried to, in his memoirs, to put a happy face on it. One of the big things that he did, as you suggested, was to develop this intense aversion to personality conflict, which is kind of ironic, because he's known as a very confrontational politician who says stuff like, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' But one to one, he was not remotely confrontational.
Early on in my career, I worked as a researcher for ABC News anchor Barbara Walters, who interviewed the Reagans soon after they’d left the White House, in 1989.
Peter Bergen: So, Barbara Walters said to Ronald Reagan, 'Is your conflict aversion a fruit of the fact you had an alcoholic father?' And he just didn't seem to understand the question, and she asked him this question four times in different ways. It was like she was talking in some foreign language, and at a certain point, Nancy just sort of leaned over and touched his knee and said, like, 'We're going to have to move on from this question.' That also indicated to me that Nancy's very much in charge.
Peter Bergen: As you say in your book, he might have been having cognitive decline by the time he left office. Obviously, we've had a discussion in this current political environment about the cognitive decline that Joe Biden may have, as a result of which he has stepped aside. Whether he has real cognitive decline or not, he's seen as 'too old.' Are there echoes here with Reagan in his second term?
Max Boot: There's definitely some echoes, because up until Joe Biden came along, Ronald Reagan was the oldest person ever to be president.
Reagan was 69, just two weeks shy of 70, when he first became commander-in-chief. Biden was almost a decade older, at 78 and two months. Trump is older than that now. Running for re-election, Reagan was asked about his age and stamina in a debate with 56-year-old Democrat Walter Mondale.
Max Boot: Obviously, age was a major issue, which he put to rest in the 1984 campaign with his famous quip.
ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
Classic Reagan. But all joking aside.
Max Boot: There was no question he was slowing down in his second term, and some aides worried that he was kind of out of it. He was certainly not as involved in writing speeches and doing other things, as he had been earlier on, and of course, in hindsight, we know that in 1994, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and so it's natural to ask, and a lot of people have asked, 'Did he have Alzheimer's while he was in office?' I think it's very hard to answer that question definitively. It's very hard to separate out the normal aging from actual dementia. But I would say there's no question that he was slowing down considerably, as you would expect from a man in his late seventies who was President of the United States.
[MUX SHIFT]
Peter Bergen: Did he make America great again?
Max Boot: I think you can argue that Reagan did make America great again, or I think, a more accurate way to put it would be to say he presided over America becoming great again. He lucked out in the fact that he took office at a time of a deep economic recession, but then he was lucky enough to run for reelection in 1984, by the time the economy was bouncing back, and that mostly was not his doing.
Max Boot: That was mostly the Fed holding interest rates high to get rid of inflation, and then the economy kind of reviving on its own. But he took advantage of that, and I think he deserves a lot of credit for not trying to challenge the Fed's autonomy, but also for inspiring people and keeping them going. And I think this is really where he deserves credit, because the nation was really so run down after the 1970s, the decade of Watergate, of America's defeat in Vietnam, of the Iranian hostage crisis, of stagflation, so many disasters and defeats, and Reagan was this quintessential optimist who spoke about America as a shining city on a hill, and so I think he revived America's confidence in itself.
Max Boot: He certainly revived the armed forces with a massive infusion of spending and ultimately helped to peacefully end the Cold War. So, I think those are monumental achievements that place him among the more successful presidents in our history.
###
If you want to know more about some of the stories and topics in this episode, we recommend by Max Boot, which is available on Audible. And the four-part documentary series, The Reagans, which is currently streaming on Paramount+.
One bit of Reagan trivia that gets a mention in Boot’s book: Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio was among the celebrities who obtained a coveted invitation to the 1987 state dinner for Gorbachev, in Washington. Joltin' Joe actually brought a baseball for President Reagan and Gorbachev to sign. Which they did. After DiMaggio died, his estate sold that ball — at auction, in 2006 — for $24,000. It would certainly fetch a lot more today.
CREDITS
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.
This episode was produced by Phil Hirshkorn with help from Nathan Ray.
Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.
Katie McMurran is our technical director.
Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Luke Cregan, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.
Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.
Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.
Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.
Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.
And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.
Audible’s Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiazza.
Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah.
Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt.
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi and Allison Weber.
Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC.
Sound recording copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC.