Ronald Reagan is an icon for conservative thought in America — but he didn’t always deliver on his lofty ideals. Max Boot is a historian and foreign-policy analyst, a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for the Washington Post. And he’s a lifelong conservative. He joins guest host John McCaa to discuss why Reagan’s policies weren’t always right-of-center as his legacy claims, and the lessons we can learn from his presidency decades later. His book is “Reagan: His Life and Legend.”
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Transcript
John McCaa [00:00:00] From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m John McCaa in for Krys Boyd. As the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan promised to bring change to Washington, reduce the size and influence of government, give voice to conservative ideas championed for decades by those on the right, like Barry Goldwater. But a generation after he left office, a new book asks if the former president’s practices really were as ideologically right of center as many of its supporters claim. The award winning essayist, writer and historian Max Boot is the Jeane Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a columnist for The Washington Post. He spent more than a decade writing his new book, “Reagan His Life and Legend.” He joins us this hour. Max, welcome back to Think.
Max Boot [00:00:51] It’s a pleasure to be with you.
John McCaa [00:00:54] You know, this was no quick turnaround for you. You started this in 2013. What prompted that?
Max Boot [00:01:02] Well, when I was launching those in 2013, I was thinking about what boycott right next. I observed that Ronald Reagan was a very consequential president, one of the most important presidents of the 20th century. And while there were a lot of books written about Ronald Reagan, there was no great biography. There was no definitive work that really encapsulated his life and his presidency and kind of a definitive and objective matter. And so that’s what I sought out to do more than a decade ago to write a book that was neither a hagiography nor a hit job, but something that was actually much more balanced and neutral and objective. And that looked at both Reagan’s strengths as well as his weaknesses, his successes, as well as his failings. And so I was very gratified to see The New Yorker review of the book, which said that Reagan, his life and legend, aims to be the definitive biography, and it succeeds. I felt like that was kind of my mission accomplished moment.
John McCaa [00:02:00] I read years ago the Edmund Morris Reagan book Duch, which many people say left a lot to be desired. So was your goal to give us as full a picture of Ronald Reagan as we possibly could get?
Max Boot [00:02:17] You know, that was my goal. And Edmund Morris, as you know, was Ronald Reagan’s official biographer. But he produced this very weird book called Duntsch, in which he inserted himself as a fictional character in Reagan’s life. And so I kind of the way I look at it is, you know, Edmund had this opportunity to write the definitive biography and he failed. And so that, you know, that created the opportunity for me to step into the breach many years later. And that’s that is certainly what I tried to do.
John McCaa [00:02:43] The one thing that that I think people hear again and again when they’re talking to someone who’s trying to tackle the subject of who exactly Ronald Reagan was, is that he was elusive. You found that to be the case as well, right?
Max Boot [00:02:59] Yeah, No, absolutely. I mean, I think it was objectively the case that he was hard to know and which was kind of unexpected. I think if you only knew him at a very superficial level from watching him on TV or seeing him in public appearances. He seemed very genial, affable, you know, very, you know, easy to to know and to like. But in fact, when I talked to people who were the closest to him, they often talked about how aloof he actually was, how distant, how remote, how hard he was to know. Even Nancy Reagan said, you know, there were parts of of him that were closed off even from her. And Jim Baker, who was his first term White House chief of staff, said, you know, with Reagan, you could never forget that we were all hired hands. And, you know, he could be very happy to rely on us one day, but then we’d be gone tomorrow. And he’d never even remember that we were here to begin with. So, you know, he’s somebody who was I mean, it’s kind of paradoxical because, again, he seems so general and friendly, but he was really a loner, an introvert who had very few friends, almost none, really. So, you know, at some level, he was kind of inscrutable. And one of the things I posit in the book is that could have been part of his appeal, in fact, is very inscrutability, that, you know, people could kind of project whatever they wanted onto him. And and, you know, he was many things to many people.
John McCaa [00:04:17] Let’s go back a little. Ronald Reagan’s dad was an alcoholic. He moved the family quite a bit. Do you think that that had something to do with Reagan’s reluctance to really let people in to know who he was?
Max Boot [00:04:31] Absolutely is There’s no question about it. I was a huge influence. And, you know, his dad, Jack, moved the family all the time, kept losing one job after another. He was an alcoholic. And yeah, I mean, the Reagan family had this, you know, deep, dark secret which, you know, little Dutch Reagan, as he was called, didn’t want to share with the world. And also because they were moving around so much, he didn’t really get close to the other kids at school because he was constantly being uprooted. And so he didn’t develop a lot of close friends at an early age. And so for all those reasons, I think he had kind of a very remote personality. And I would add also, again, kind of paradoxical because he was kind of known for being a controversial politician who was not afraid to do hard things like, you know, firing the air traffic controllers or confronting Gorbachev or other things. But in his personal life, he was very non-confrontational. And again, I think I traced a lot of that back to the fact that his parents were often in conflict because obviously, you know, his mother, Nellie, would not be very happy with Jack Reagan when Jack went off on a multiday bender and, you know, spent the the family rent money on booze and they would come back and he would come back and they would have arguments. And so Reagan really shied away from personality conflict throughout his life, never wanted to confront his kids or his aides or anybody else.
John McCaa [00:05:50] You know, a lot of people know about the time that he spent as a sportscaster. He gets to Hollywood and in Hollywood, he’s actually made over by Warner Brothers because they thought he looked he looked Filipino.
Max Boot [00:06:05] Well, I mean, there was a change in his hairstyle and some other things, but that’s kind of expected when you’re when you’re signing up as a as an actor with the movie studio in those days. But the irony of it was that, you know, normally in those days, you know, they changed people’s names when they became Hollywood stars, right? You know, Archibald Leach becomes Cary Grant and so forth. But in Reagan’s case, they were trying to figure out, you know, what to call him. And he and, you know, he was known in the Midwest as a sportscaster, as Dutch Reagan. That was his name up through his late 20s. I mean, he was born Ronald Reagan, but everybody called him Dutch. And so they were experimenting with other names. And he suggested while they were doing this thing, like, well, how about just calling me Ronald Reagan? And I said, okay, yeah, that sounds good. So basically, ironically enough, Hollywood gave him his actual name back.
John McCaa [00:06:54] A lot of people don’t realize this. Anytime I see something in the media about Ronald Reagan, they say, well, he was in Hollywood, but he was a B actor. But actually, before the Second World War, his star was pretty bright in Hollywood, wasn’t it?
Max Boot [00:07:07] Yeah. I mean, it was funny with Reagan because, you know, if you insulted his political positions, he didn’t really care that much. But if you insulted his acting prowess, then that God is standing up and, you know, he did not like it when people scoffed at him and said, you know, bedtime for Bonzo to say that, you know, reminding him at the time he played second banana to a chip, a chimpanzee in a movie after the war. But you’re right. Before the war, before World War Two, he was becoming a pretty substantial star for for Warner Brothers, you know, making movies like Newt Rockne, All American and Kings Row. I mean, he was, you know, right before the war, he was getting equal billing with Earl Flynn, who was one of the biggest stars on the Warners lot.
John McCaa [00:07:51] You know, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood. He’s a big union supporter with the Screen Actors Guild. He’s going to rise to become through the ranks to become the president. But his politics at that period of time, they’re not the politics with which most people are familiar with him later in life.
Max Boot [00:08:08] Yeah, he was a New Deal Democrat. He was an ardent supporter of FDR, voted for FDR four times, idolized FDR. He was you know, that was that was part of his his father’s influence because his father was Irish-American at a time when the Republican Party was full of native. A sentiment, I guess you can argue that some things never change. But certainly a lot of you know, you know, newly arrived immigrants and the Irish and others didn’t feel comfortable in the Republican Party in those days and became Democrats. And that certainly included the Reagans, even though they lived in a Republican region in Illinois. They they were diehard Democrats. And, you know, the the the New Deal was very important to the entire family because Jack Reagan, like millions of others, was unemployed during the Great Depression. And the New Deal provided work for him in administering relief programs and in their home town of Dixon, Illinois. So Reagan had lots of ideological as well as personal reasons to be very passionately attached to FDR.
John McCaa [00:09:10] Reagan’s movie career doesn’t return to him as an A-list after rather after the war. He he doesn’t go overseas because of some health issues. But I’m curious, what is it that moved his politics from where he was to where he was later? Was it a quicker, gradual thing or and what exactly was it?
Max Boot [00:09:32] Well, that’s a great question, and it’s one to which he always offered a very deceptive answer, because Reagan liked to say, I didn’t desert my party. My party deserted me to imply that the Democrats had suddenly veered to the left, which was not true at all. In fact, in 1960, John F Kennedy ran to Richard Nixon’s right on defense policy and foreign policy. So it wasn’t the Democrats who had changed. It was Reagan. And I you know, in the book, I trace the transformation, which I did beginning to World War two or as a highly paid movie actor, Reagan was very upset at paying 90% tax rates on his income. And then that transformation accelerated after World War Two, largely because of his involvement in union politics and battles over communism and Hollywood. You know, he became convinced that there was a made in the Kremlin plot to take over the movie industry, which I think looking at it objectively, based on the evidence was a vast exaggeration. Not really true. That was just basically something that that was Reagan kind of imbibing the FBI paranoia in the days in the days of McCarthyism. But, you know, Reagan came to believe it and thought that he was, you know, standing on the at the bulwark, preventing the reds from taking over the movie industry and then his you know, his. Political transformation was really complete in the 1950s when he went to work for General Electric as host of General Electric Theater and as a spokesman for GE and GE. And those days was a very right wing company because they viewed spreading free market propaganda as an inoculation against union troubles. And so, you know, Reagan, as a good GE employee, read all this propaganda and all these materials that that, you know, that the head office recommended and that and then he gave speeches espousing a lot of those themes so that that really completed his ideological transformation so that by the early 1960s, this one time New Deal Democrat was was pretty far to the right.
John McCaa [00:11:29] You talk about him getting at least some of the material from places like the John Birch Society.
Max Boot [00:11:35] No, absolutely not. Something I document, I think for the first time in this book that he was repeating a lot of the propaganda from the John Birch Society who were, you know, the biggest right wing extremist in American politics. And as I show, even as late as the early 1970s, he was reading some of their cooking literature and repeating many of its themes. I mean, you know, he claimed in his famous time for choosing speech in 1964 promoting Barry Goldwater’s candidacy, he claimed that the Democratic Party, his old party, which had once marched under the banners of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland, was now marching under the banners of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. So he was basically accusing the Democrats of, you know, trying to communist America and claimed that social welfare legislation like Medicare and Medicaid, was part of this communist plot to take over America. So, you know, he sounded pretty extreme at that time.
John McCaa [00:12:30] Considered the material that he was using. Was he concerned about them being statistically factual?
Max Boot [00:12:37] He was not. And he had a really cavalier attitude towards factual accuracy. He repeated a lot of made up quotes attributed to communist leaders explaining their supposed plot against America. And those quotes were really just made up by the John Birch Society. And you also had a bunch of statistics that he cited which were not really accurate. I mean, he loved to say at that time in his speeches that no nation has ever survived a third of its national income going to the government. And so a graduate student actually contacted him in the mid 60s and said, Governor Reagan, can you please substantiate the statement that you keep making? And his reply was, well, you know, some economists said it a while ago, I don’t have that quotation anymore. I don’t have that citation anymore. But he just kept on saying it even though he couldn’t substantiated. So his view was basically like if something was emotionally true, if it rang true to him, the actual facts do not matter so much.
John McCaa [00:13:27] One of, if not the most memorable quotes from Ronald Reagan as president took place in June of 1987, he went to the Brandenburg Gate, which at the time separated East and West Berlin, and there separated by the Berlin Wall, which the Soviet Union erected in 1961, dividing the city. So that was the backdrop of where Ronald Reagan makes this famous speech.
Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall! [00:13:51] General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Robert. John. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
John McCaa [00:14:44] So you put forward in the book, a lot of misconception surrounds Ronald Reagan and his time in office. But one of the biggest is that Reagan had this plan to bring down the evil empire and that it was his pressure that led to the U.S. victory in the Cold War. That’s not quite accurate, right?
Max Boot [00:15:03] No, that’s a myth. And I actually asked George Shultz, secretary of state, I said, you know, Mr. Shultz, did the Reagan administration have a secret plan to bring down the evil empire? And he said, no, we didn’t. We just had a general, you know, peace through strength, attitude, but we didn’t have any plan. And that’s just a historical misconception. There’s a tendency by Reagan’s supporters to to credit him with the collapse of the Soviet Union and point to his defense buildup in his first term, his support for solidarity and Poland or the Afghan resistance in Afghanistan, or, you know, his rhetoric about calling out the evil empire is starting launch of SDI, the the Strategic Defense Initiative. And so there’s a claim that all of that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in fact, all it really led to was a series of war scares in 1983, where the U.S. and the Soviet Union were closer to conflict than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Reagan understood that there was this was a dangerous moment and he wanted to reduce tensions. He wanted to meet with the Soviet leader. But as he said, you know, they kept dying on me. And he had to deal with these series of elderly, infirm Soviet leaders. And things only really began to change in 1985 when Chernenko kicked the bucket. And Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union. And Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader. He was really a black swan, somebody who rose to the top of this dictatorial system while losing faith in the dictatorship and wanting to radically reform it. And his, you know, desire to change the Soviet Union was not caused by Ronald Reagan. He wasn’t trying to keep up with the American defense buildup. He wanted to end the arms race altogether. But I think what Reagan deserves credit for is not for bringing Gorbachev to power or causing his reforms. What Reagan really deserves credit for is recognizing that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, somebody we could do business with, as Margaret Thatcher advised him, and for cooperating with Gorbachev to peacefully reduce the levels of nuclear weapons into peacefully in the Cold War. That’s not something anybody would have expected from somebody like Reagan, who was such an inveterate anti-communist throughout his political career. But it’s a tribute to his streak of pragmatism, that he was able to adjust his ideology to reality and work with the world’s number one communist.
John McCaa [00:17:27] Is it possible that this that the defense buildup that was taking place at the time that that gave some of the Soviet hardliners a little more influence, at least at the beginning?
Max Boot [00:17:40] Yeah. No, I think there is evidence of that. There was certainly no evidence that the defense buildup was causing a relaxation of the Soviet posture. In fact, you know, things got better one, in the second term when Reagan worked with Gorbachev and reduce tensions. And that in turn enabled Gorbachev to sideline the the hardliners in the Soviet military to reduce their influence, because he could say, look, the threat is being reduced. We’re getting along with the Americans, so we don’t need to spend as much on defense. And so that was that was that was really the critical turning point.
John McCaa [00:18:14] You know, something that gets lost in a lot of this is. And you’ve mentioned this. Ronald Reagan was concerned. Did become concerned about causing some kind of a nuclear exchange. I remember a. Korean jetliner, civilian jetliner was shut down during this period by the Soviets at. Something like that affect his rhetoric.
Max Boot [00:18:43] Though absolutely. That was that the shoot down a Korean Airlines flight 007 over the Soviet Union occurred in 1983. And that was a very dangerous year because not only was there the shootdown of this Korean airliner killing everybody on board, but there were also a couple of war scares where at one point at the Soviet command center, all the screens showed that that the United States was launching nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. And and the Soviets only had about half an hour to decide whether to retaliate or not. And so that could have easily been World War three right there if it hadn’t been for the Soviet watch officer, Colonel Petroff, who took time to check to make sure that this American launch was actually going on. And it turned out, no, this was just a technical glitch. But, you know, we were very close to a nightmare scenario in 1983. And I think Reagan realized that. And he watched this very influential television movie called The Day After about what would happen to Lawrence, Kansas, during a nuclear war. And I think that really sobered him up, as did some of this intelligence about how we were blundering into hostilities with the Soviets. And he really tried to pull back from the brink and gave his what became known as the Ivan. And on your speech in early 1984, basically talking about how much ordinary Soviet citizens had in common with ordinary Americans and how imperative it was to work for peace.
John McCaa [00:20:06] You say that for the longest time, and I’m old enough to remember this for the longest time. If Ronald Reagan did want to ease tension. Every time. And I think it started with Brezhnev. Every time you turned around, the Soviet leader was dying because Brezhnev he was followed by Yuri Andropov for I remember, right. And a guy named Konstantin Chernenko. So these were individuals who were he? This is when you say there was no one for him to talk and sit across the table from and talk about these issues until Gorbachev.
Max Boot [00:20:43] Right, Exactly. He was in his first term. He was just dealing with these ailing infirm, not projects, these these Soviet hard liners. There wasn’t much to negotiate with them. And it was really only with with Gorbachev coming in and his reforms of perestroika and glasnost that dramatically changed the situation, both internally in the Soviet Union and also in Soviet relations with the West.
John McCaa [00:21:08] Yeah. Publicly, Ronald Reagan, he’s calling the Soviet Union the evil empire. But quietly, he’s talking to the secretary of state, George Shultz, and asking him to keep up his dialog with the Soviet ambassador.
Max Boot [00:21:21] Yeah, I know, right? Reagan was. Yeah, he was much more he was not as consistent hard line as people remember. There were a lot of complexities, like the fact that he didn’t want to talk to them. And while he increased pressure on the Soviets, in some ways he also decreased pressure on others. For example, he lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union that Jimmy Carter had imposed after the invasion of Afghanistan.
John McCaa [00:21:42] Yeah, I was going to ask you that, because there have been some writers who have criticized that, saying that Jimmy Carter’s policy toward the Soviets was tougher than the Ronald Reagan’s.
Max Boot [00:21:53] No, I mean, you can make that case. I mean, I actually it was funny. I actually unearthed an article, I think it was from 1983, written by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of commentary, the Bible of Neoconservatism, where Podhoretz was attacking Ronald Reagan for turning out to be a dove on the Soviet Union and saying that Reagan was not even as tough on the Soviets as Jimmy Carter had been. That’s, you know, that’s certainly contrary to all, you know, all the impressions that we have today. But that was certainly the view of a lot of people at the time Reagan was.
John McCaa [00:22:23] And you’ve said this about that things before he became president, that he wasn’t really that concerned about being accurate in terms of the numbers and statistics. Even at times he would he he would not even listen to his own advisers when they would say, no, that’s not what we want to do. If it’s what he wanted to say, he went ahead and said.
Max Boot [00:22:47] He definitely did have a tendency to very strongly believe in things that were not empirically true. I mean, for example, and I think two of his biggest beliefs, one was in favor of tax cuts, the other was in favor of missile defense. And in both cases, he went well beyond what any expert would have said. I mean, in the case of tax cuts, he kept insisting that you could dramatically cut taxes and increase government revenue, which no serious economists believed. And so Reagan was shocked when he cut taxes, raised defense spending and wound up with bigger budget deficits than ever. I mean, I don’t know why he was surprised, but he was because he really believed in what George H.W. Bush called voodoo economics. And then on on missile defense, you know, he he believed that you could, you know, have the space based missile defense with some kind of lasers orbiting in space and providing the space shield to render, you know, ICBMs useless and to defend America against nuclear strikes, where, again, no serious defense experts really believe this, though. I mean, people knew that missile defense could work in certain circumstances, as we’ve seen with the Patriot missile system and other things. But nobody really believed in this. No serious experts really believed in the space shield. But Reagan believed that because he wanted it to be true. So he kind of assumed that it could be true.
John McCaa [00:24:11] In the book, you posit really the question on some issues. Can we really consider, when you think about Ronald Reagan on the budget, on the growth of government, on gun control, even abortion, Can we consider him a conservative?
Max Boot [00:24:26] And he was conservative, but I think he was a very flexible and pragmatic conservative who was willing to compromise. And he had nothing but contempt for conservatives who insist on going over the cliff with their flags flying. That was a term that he often used. He often talked about how, you know, he’d he’d rather, you know, compromise and get 80% of what he wanted and come back for more tomorrow rather than insist on 100% today and get nothing. So he was very flexible in his application of his ideology. And just even on the tax cuts, which was, you know, one of the his core belief systems, he thought taxes were too high. He did cut some taxes. But then when it raised budget deficits, he also raised some other taxes. So, you know, he showed a willingness to compromise and to moderate that, I think, you know, caught a lot of people off guard who had this caricature of him as just being this inflexible, you know, right wing ideologue.
John McCaa [00:25:21] Going through the book, it seems that what what he’s really pushing is, is his moral vision of America, that it’s an idea of being anti-communist, free trade, small government and Asia, that he’s not really that fond of the counterculture of the 60s and 70s.
Max Boot [00:25:39] Yeah, No, he was definitely, you know, culturally conservative, as you would expect from somebody who grew up in small town America in the 19 teens and 20s. But, you know, he was not he was not engaged in culture wars. That’s not what he wanted to do. I mean, he signed as governor of California, he signed one of the most liberal abortion bills in the country and later said he regretted and said that he was pro-life, but he didn’t do much about abortion and appoint, in fact, two justices to the Supreme Court who voted to uphold Roe v Wade. And I quote in the book from one of his aides who said to him, you know, Mr. President, you keep talking about how abortion is murder. Well, why don’t you try to do something about it? And, you know, Reagan’s reply was, you know, politics is the art of the possible. And and abortion and other social issues were just not the priority for him. His priorities were reviving the American economy, reviving the American military and ending the Cold War. Those were the priorities that wasn’t engaging in all these culture issues that animated so many people on the religious right who were his supporters.
John McCaa [00:26:43] Yes, certainly. You could argue that symbolism even before Ronald Reagan took office is important in politics. I’m thinking of John Kennedy, both of the Roosevelt presidents. Did it play a more important role during the Reagan administration than than previous years?
Max Boot [00:27:02] Yeah. I mean, Reagan was a master of of the bully pulpit. He was a master. The symbolism of the presidency, as you would expect from somebody with a show business background, I mean, he was also very influenced by FDR, his idol as a young man, because he was influenced by how powerfully FDR communicated. And, you know, he borrowed some of his communication techniques from FDR and in some of them from, you know, Busby Berkeley and the Hollywood directors of his heyday. But yeah, I mean, that was kind of the way he saw the presidency. I mean, he was once asked, you know, how an actor could be president. And his reply was he didn’t understand how anybody but an actor could be president because he thought the showmanship was so important. And in many ways it was. And that was really became kind of a hallmark of his presidency. These high profile speeches, the visuals every day, which were carefully coordinated by the White House, Mike Deaver in particular, one of the top White House aides, and the first term was a master of of television backdrops. And what he figured out was that it almost didn’t matter what the president was saying. If you had the right backdrop, it would communicate the message on TV so effectively that, you know, the anchors or correspondents could say anything they wanted, but the message still got through. So he was certainly, you know, became known as the great communicator. And he was very, very good at that. He just wasn’t as focused on the actual managerial side of the presidency.
John McCaa [00:28:26] Some people referred to him as the Teflon president at the time because no matter what he said, the film was accurate, inaccurate. The allegations never seemed to stick to him.
Max Boot [00:28:38] That’s true. That was a coinage from the from Pat Schroeder, who was a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado. And it seemed to fit Reagan because, yeah, he he was he was, you know, could could say a lot of things that would get other politicians into trouble or have, you know, not be able to explain his policies or preside over various setbacks. And it didn’t seem to matter. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact of his personality, which was just very likable, very winning. He was a master of humor. He had a very self-effacing manner, and he just bonded with the American people. And this is something that that wasn’t a new phenomenon. It really went back to his time in the 1930s as a sportscaster and then as an actor. He knew how to win over his audience. And, you know, he became very good at that as governor and as president. And, you know. People were willing to excuse a lot with Reagan because they liked Reagan. And it was he was just a very hard guy not to like.
John McCaa [00:29:32] Let’s talk a little about Nancy Reagan. We knew that she had a lot of influence on him. What are the strengths that she brought to him as president and as a person?
Max Boot [00:29:43] Nancy Reagan was a very different personality type from Ronald Reagan, because Reagan was kind of very trusting, almost naive, kind of assumed everybody had the best of intentions and everything would work out for the best. Whereas Nancy Reagan was kind of very jittery. She was a worrywart. She kind of assumed that everybody was out to get him unless proven otherwise. And so she was very integral to his rise because she really looked after his interests in ways that he was not able to do. One of the Reagan aides I talked to said that Nancy Reagan was basically the H.R. Department of Reagan that she hired and fired on his behalf. And I think every successful politician needs that kind of enforcer. And that was that was Nancy Reagan.
John McCaa [00:30:28] Ronald Reagan left office in January 1989. In his final address to the nation, he said something that at the very end that it is indicative of the changes we see in Republican politics today. This is a clip from Ronald Reagan’s farewell.
Ronald Reagan: Shining City [00:30:46] I’ve spoken to the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it, but in my mind, it was a tall, proud city building rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace. A city with reports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.
John McCaa [00:31:24] And when it comes to immigration, which is today an extremely hot issue in our world and in our country. What it seems that I hear Ronald Reagan encouraging people seeking a better life. Get there any way you can. It does not sound like something we might hear from today’s Republican Party.
Max Boot [00:31:45] No, I think this is one of the biggest differences between Reagan and the current Republican Party, that Reagan was very much pro-immigration. I mean, he actually one of his campaign themes in 1980 was Make America Great Again. But if you listen to what Ronald Reagan actually said, he said it was immigrants who made America great. And he talked about lowering barriers to trade and travel to Mexico. And that led to the signing eventually of NAFTA. And, you know, in his 1989 farewell address, he paid tribute to the way that immigrants had made America. And he talked about how, you know, if you if you move to Britain or France or Germany, you don’t necessarily become British, French or German because, you know, you don’t have ancestors who live there. But in the United States, anybody can come here and become American instantly just by joining our country. And he thought that was really the genius and the strength of America. And of course, as president, he signed the the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, which legalized millions of undocumented immigrants. What what today Republicans would call an amnesty bill. That’s something he happily signed.
John McCaa [00:32:52] The changes in today’s Republican Party from from the Reagan era is this something that popped up with Donald Trump or has this been something that’s been evolving over time?
Max Boot [00:33:02] I mean, I think it has been evolving over time. But I do think that there you know, Trump has kind of accelerated the transformation and now the transformation is not complete. I mean, you can still see some continuity, some through lines. I mean, both Trump and Reagan were populists. Both of them denigrated the federal government. Both of them engage to some extent in white backlash politics. So, you know, you can still see some some some continuities. But the changes, I think, are much greater than the resemblances and especially on issues like free trade, immigration, support for alliances, opposition to Russian expansionism. Those are all, you know, huge dramatic transformations. I mean, if if Reagan were alive today, I mean, I can’t imagine that he would be criticizing aid to Ukraine. He would be embracing it because that was what the Reagan doctrine was all about, was was fighting rebels against Soviet expansionism.
John McCaa [00:33:55] Now, we hear from many that the United States should use the Reagan Soviet template in our dealings with China. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs magazine saying you might want to hold on. And you questioned that the logic behind that approach.
Max Boot [00:34:12] Yeah, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense because I think it’s really based on a historical myth that we talked about, the myth being that Reagan somehow bankrupted the Soviet Union, which wasn’t true. And it’s even less of a possibility with China, which is much more powerful economically than the Soviet Union ever was. I mean, China is the number two economy in the world. I’m not even sure what it means to defeat China. We’re certainly not going to bankrupt China. But I think there, you know, we certainly have to contain China and deal with the Chinese threat. But I think we need to be wary of just ratcheting up tensions willy nilly, because we need to be very concerned about the possibility of an accidental war breaking out with another nuclear armed superpower. So, you know, I would not, you know, buy this prescription for our China policy, which holds, you know, let’s just, you know, do what Reagan did and bring down the evil empire. Well, as you know, as shown in the book, that’s not really what Reagan did. And it’s not it’s not really a policy which is well-advised for dealing with China today.
John McCaa [00:35:13] So what do you think that Ronald Reagan would think of today’s Republican Party or even Donald Trump?
Max Boot [00:35:19] I mean, I’m sure he would be very puzzled by it. I’m sure Nancy Reagan would be outraged and outspoken. I imagine Reagan probably would just kind of shake his head and and probably not say much. But it’s a very different party from the one that that he led. Although I suspect if you around, he could, you know, like George W Bush or other senior Republicans, he might very well maintain his tribal loyalty to the Republican Party. But there’s no question that the substance of the GOP has changed radically since Reagan’s day.
John McCaa [00:35:51] Yeah, I mean, I remember one of his famous phrases was he would preach about the 11th commandment being Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. You think he would embrace that even now with, say, Donald Trump or some from the far right?
Max Boot [00:36:11] I, I suspect he probably would, although Trump himself has no problem speaking ill of fellow Republicans or anybody else. So it’s it’s kind of one sided. But yeah, I mean, Reagan was certainly, you know, very loyal to the Republican Party.
John McCaa [00:36:26] Some used to call Reagan’s views simplistic. But in the book, you do really say that he’s far from a simple person.
Max Boot [00:36:36] Right. I mean, I think there are just so many paradoxes that characterize Ronald Reagan, a lot of which we’ve talked about, including the fact that he came across as so genial and friendly and yet was actually kind of cold and aloof, or the fact that he could engage in confrontational policies and yet was personally, you know, very reluctant to engage and in personality conflicts. So there are a lot of depths to you have to really study to understand who Reagan was. And and ultimately, it’s you can’t always reconcile the paradoxes. I mean, that’s that’s that’s just the complexities of human nature.
John McCaa [00:37:10] Perhaps Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement when when you read through the book is this ability to unify so many different kinds of conservatism. That right. And that’s which now seems to be unraveling.
Max Boot [00:37:26] He was definitely a unifying figure within the Republican Party, but even outside of the Republican Party, I mean, he was. Remember, Republicans never controlled that House when he was president. So he had to deal with Democrats all the time to get anything done. And he was able to do that. He was able to work very effectively with Tip O’Neill as his political adversary. He was able to reach out to people who weren’t Republicans because, you know, Republicans in those days are a minority party. So he needed to get Democratic support and he didn’t. You know, I remember in 1984, in his reelection campaign, when he was proclaiming it was morning again in America, he won a 49 state landslide. I mean, that seems like science fiction today. But he pulled it off because he was he was not a divisive figure. He was somebody who believed in being a unifier and and reaching across the aisle.
John McCaa [00:38:17] You’ve always championed conservative causes, but you’re not a Republican any longer. Did writing the book have something to do with it?
Max Boot [00:38:27] No, Donald Trump had a lot to do with that. I mean, I, I reregistered as an independent the day after the 2016 election. And I think that was actually helpful to me for the process of writing the book because, you know, I grew up a Reagan fan. I became a conservative and a Republican, and I was an adviser to Republican presidential candidates. And so I think if I had stayed in that kind of Republican mindset, I wouldn’t have written a very good book because I would have just written another Mash note to Ronald Reagan, of which there are many. I think I was able to write a much more fair, objective and balanced account because I’m, you know, now entirely independent. I think that’s been kind of intellectually liberating for me to be able to to see Reagan and the Republican Party with with some objectivity and distance. And I think that really, you know, underpinned the writing of this book.
John McCaa [00:39:16] What exactly was it for you that brought you to Ronald Reagan? I realize that you’re conservative. He’s conservative. What was what were the ideas behind Ronald Reagan that made Max Boot say, yeah, this is me?
Max Boot [00:39:31] I think a lot of it was the way that he championed freedom and democracy and human rights. You know, and I was you know, I was born in the Soviet Union, came to the U.S. with my family when I was six years old and 1976. So, you know, like a lot of immigration communist countries, I was drawn to the right side, the the most anti-communist side of the political spectrum. And so I thrilled when he called the Soviet Union the evil empire or said, you know, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. So that was I was a lot of the appeal of Ronald Reagan for me. And it’s it’s been heartbreaking for me to see so many Republicans abandoning the the freedom agenda and, you know, see to see Donald Trump praising Vladimir Putin. That’s that’s something I could never imagine Ronald Reagan doing.
John McCaa [00:40:18] You call Reagan. I’m going to try to quote you here, a pragmatic but flawed president whose soaring vision made his presidency a success, but whose inability to manage the government and aversion to uncomfortable realities inflicted heavy costs on his administration and the country as a whole. What feedback are you getting from scholars and historians that forget the politician? They realize that they’ll have anything but the Collins and the Scarlet in Historian. What are they saying?
Max Boot [00:40:48] I’ve been getting great feedback. I mean, I’m really getting pretty much 100% positive reviews, the most positive reviews of my career, including from, you know, professional historians writing and the front page of The New York Times Book Review or the front page of The Washington Post Book World. They’re telling me that I got it right. And I would add in some ways, the the the feedback that mattered even more to me was from Ron Reagan and Patty Davis, Reagan’s children who read the book and told me that they approved. And even though a lot of it was uncomfortable to read, but they they thought I got it right. And they even they said they told me they learned some things about their father from the book, which I took to be really high praise.
John McCaa [00:41:31] You know, one of the things that you give Ronald Reagan credit for and and a lot of this. I think in the media, we we seem to miss. And that is there has to be successful. There must be a difference between campaigning and governing. Ronald Reagan, you say, understood that there had to be that difference between the campaign and now you actually govern.
Max Boot [00:41:56] That was yeah, I think that was the most important ingredient of his success. I mean, again, one of the complexities of Reagan was, as we’ve been discussing, he was he sounded very, very conservative on the campaign trail. And he won the support and the trust of conservatives. Republicans, the Republican rank and file, thought he was one of them. And so paradoxically, because. You know, he had so much support on the right that gave him freedom to maneuver. You know, it was kind of like Nixon going to China because Reagan was known as this hardline conservative. He could actually make compromises without losing his support in the Republican Party.
John McCaa [00:42:37] And when you look back at the years and the progression of politics in America, Reagan seems someone who you would more likely compare, even though he didn’t win his election for Barry Goldwater, as opposed to other Republicans who’ve been running.
Max Boot [00:42:55] Yeah. I mean, Reagan really got his start in national politics as a very, you know, committed supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964, which was the candidacy which really began the right word transformation of the Republican Party. But the funny thing is, when Reagan was campaigning for Goldwater in 64 and and people heard them speaking on the same platform often were much more impressed by the way Reagan spoke than by the way Barry Goldwater spoke because the message was basically the same. But Goldwater deliver that message with a scowl. And, you know, he was he was very hard edged and not very lovable. Whereas Reagan, you know, a writer who watched him speak in the 60s said Reagan’s personality is like soothing, warm bath water. He made the hardline message go down much more easily. He did it with a wink and a smile and a and a quip. And so his likability was kind of his his secret sauce that that made it easy for him to espouse these conservative themes without turning off his listeners.
John McCaa [00:44:00] So no matter what your opinion of Ronald Reagan, he remains, you believe, a central figure for unders. If you want to understand America in the 20th century and even in the 21st century.
Max Boot [00:44:13] Yes, absolutely. I mean, he was one of the most influential presidents of the 20th century, and he certainly had a lot of failures and setbacks, including, you know, he ignored the Aids pandemic. He had the Iran-Contra scandal on his watch. A lot of things went wrong. But he got two big things right. And the first of those was he helped to revive America after the malaise of the 1970s, the decade of Watergate and Vietnam and the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation, gasoline lines. He helped to America to recover its self-confidence after those very difficult days. And then in his second term, as we were discussing, he worked with Gorbachev to peacefully in the Cold War. And I think it’s really because of those two achievements that he is rated so highly by historians. In one recent survey, for example, he was rated number nine out of out of all the U.S. presidents, though not the Mount Rushmore level, but kind of like the next level down on your grade level. And I think that’s that’s a that’s a fitting judgment on a pretty successful presidency.
John McCaa [00:45:16] Max Boot’s new book is “Reagan His Life and Legend.” Max is an award winning author and writer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a columnist for The Washington Post. Max, thanks very much for being with us today.
Max Boot [00:45:30] Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me on.
John McCaa [00:45:33] Think is distributed by PRX, the public Radio Exchange. You can follow us on social media. Just look for KERA Think. Once again, I’m John McCaa, in for Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
