The Lucky One

Inauguration Day 1981 dawned with a message from the White House. At 6:47 AM Jimmy Carter phoned Ronald Reagan, the president-elect, who was staying across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House, to update him on negotiations to free the fifty-two American hostages held in Iran. Carter, who had been up the previous two nights working on the deal, was appalled that Reagan was still asleep and didn’t return his call for almost two hours.

It set a chilly tone for their joint ride to the Capitol in the presidential limousine—a tradition that endured until 2021, when Donald Trump declined to attend his successor Joe Biden’s swearing-in. On the drive, Reagan tried in his accustomed way to cut the tension with jokes and old Hollywood stories. “He kept talking about Jack Warner,” Carter complained to an aide. “Who’s Jack Warner?”

That anecdote, recounted in Max Boot’s definitive and fair-minded biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend, tells you a lot about the man who became the most important figure in postwar conservatism. Unlike Carter, Reagan wasn’t going to be up nights sweating the details. During his first term, the fine points of management fell to a capable troika of trusted aides who ran the White House: James Baker, his silkily effective chief of staff, and two trusted California hands, Edwin Meese, who handled policy and appointments, and Michael Deaver, who managed the media and PR. In contrast to his beleaguered predecessor, Reagan time and again showed himself to be uncannily lucky. The hostages were released in the first minutes of his presidency—too late to help Carter but ideally timed to confer an aura of strength on the incoming administration.

For all his confrontational rhetoric, the new president loathed personal conflict and would, in moments of stress or awkwardness, escape into a dreamworld filled with old actors and cinematic plotlines. Who was Jack Warner? Jack Warner was the vulgar and ruthless mogul who ran Warner Bros. and launched Reagan’s movie career when he signed him to a $200-a-week contract in 1937. Reagan regarded Warner as the all-powerful god of Hollywood, bestowing success when he smiled and bringing ruin when he glowered. It was Warner who turned the “hick radio announcer” from Des Moines into a bona fide star.

Reagan gave Warner no headaches, unlike the rake Errol Flynn, who would turn up on set late and hungover, forget his lines, and refuse to work past afternoon. Reagan, who was cast opposite Flynn in Santa Fe Trail (1940), believed dependability always beat genius. Acting was a job like any other: it demanded that you show up on time, know your lines, hit your marks, and be pleasant to deal with. Politics was not so different. Warner, though, misjudged him as an eternal supporting man. When Reagan declared his candidacy for governor of California in 1966, Warner was said to have quipped, “No, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronnie Reagan for best friend.”

Reagan’s film career fizzled after World War II as his first wife Jane Wyman’s took off, a factor in the dissolution of their marriage. While he remained on the Warner payroll until 1952 and continued to work as an actor into the 1960s, he left his real mark on Hollywood not as a performer but as a union official, elected an unprecedented six times as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Labor politics was a primary driver of Reagan’s shift from Roosevelt-admiring New Deal liberal to hardline anti-Communist and right-wing voice within the GOP. (Another factor was the 94 percent marginal tax rate he was theoretically subject to on income above $200,000, though in reality Reagan, like other actors, was able to pay a 25 percent capital gains rate by receiving his earnings from “temporary corporations” set up for each movie.)

Reagan the politician was formed by the Red Scare, when unions were riven by intense battles over accusations of Communist ties. He emerged as a leader of his fellow actors during one of the first of the strikes that overtook the movie industry in 1945 and 1946. In Hollywood two unions wanted to lead the painters, carpenters, and other backstage workers: the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). IATSE was larger and more powerful but mobbed up and corrupt. The smaller but more militant CSU was led by the set painter and former boxer Herbert K. Sorrell, who welcomed Communist support but was not a party member himself. The studios preferred to deal with IATSE because it included movie projectionists, and they feared its power to shut down not just production but theaters around the country. In March 1945, before the war was even over, more than 10,000 CSU members went on strike over recognition, halting several productions. SAG’s decision to cross the picket line, which Reagan advocated at a pivotal union meeting, provoked a new round of violence in Hollywood. He later claimed he was threatened with an acid attack and on the advice of studio security began carrying a handgun.

With a disregard for truth that would become his trademark, Reagan romanticized the defeat of the CSU as a triumphant victory over communism. By 1961 he was giving a regular stump speech that turned it into both legend and lesson: “Ugly reality came to our town on direct orders of the Kremlin. Hard core party organizers infiltrated our business,” Reagan said. “The aim was to gain economic control of our industry and then subvert our screens to the dissemination of Communist propaganda.” This was pure mythology, and it has never gone away completely, resurfacing recently in the laughably awful biopic Reagan (2024), starring Dennis Quaid. In reality, the Communists didn’t control the CSU, and there was never a Kremlin plan to turn Hollywood into a propaganda factory.

But Reagan’s self-serving revisionism didn’t stop there. Though he helped implement the Hollywood blacklist at SAG, enforcing loyalty oaths and “clearing” actors suspected of Communist ties, he insisted for years afterward that there had never been a blacklist. This was despite the McCarthyite meet-cute story behind his connection with Nancy Davis, a contract performer at MGM who came to him to clear herself after being confused with a blacklisted actress of the same name. Swiftly and blissfully remarried in 1952, Reagan continued his political pilgrim’s progress. A “Democrat for Eisenhower” in that year’s presidential election, he spent much of the decade traveling the country as a spokesman for General Electric, talking about socialism coming to America on little cat’s paws. By 1960, he later wrote, he had “completed the process of self-conversion” to conservatism.

That process carried him beyond even Barry Goldwater into the wider orbit of the John Birch Society. Reagan’s GE speeches drew on fake quotations he had picked up from Birch literature. He was still citing a pamphlet entitled “The Ten Commandments of Nikolai Lenin” at a press conference in 1983. His unintentionally ironic message was that Communists were willing to tell any lie to advance their cause. “It would not matter if three-fourths of the human race perished, the important thing is that the remaining one-fourth be Communist,” Reagan claimed “Nicoloi” Lenin said. Needless to say, no Lenin of any first name ever did. A version of the quote is stenciled on a wall at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, correctly misattributed to Vladimir Ilych Lenin.

Some of Reagan’s emerging views about the Soviets were downright peculiar—not just at odds with his friends on the right but embarrassingly naive. In a statement from the early 1960s, he predicted that the Soviet leaders might just throw in the towel once they recognized that “in an all out race our system is stronger.” To prompt them to concede, he suggested in a 1977 radio commentary, the United States might consider dropping millions of mail-order catalogs on Soviet cities. This, too, was an imagined movie scene. If only the Russian people could see Sears’s latest range of dishwashers and tumble dryers, they would all run out to vote for Jimmy Stewart. Still, Reagan turned out to be more correct than his neoconservative advisers in forecasting that communism was bound to collapse from its internal contradictions.

Reagan’s views on communism were a strange passel of incongruities. The Soviets were bent on world domination (more faux Lenin: “The last bastion of Capitalism will not have to be taken. It will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit”), but they were also on their last legs, selling rat meat in the markets. It was necessary to confront and challenge them everywhere but also to engage, make peace, and be friends. Victory would be a long and arduous struggle but also, like quashing communism in Hollywood, not that hard.

In his first term, Reagan’s rubbish quotes and orations about defeating communism helped to escalate nuclear tensions to their most dangerous point since the Cuban missile crisis. This upset and frustrated him deeply. How, he asked his aides, could Soviet leaders misunderstand his heartfelt desire for peace and disarmament? Yet listening to him, how could they not?

Horrified by an awareness that he was increasing the risk of nuclear war, Reagan decisively tacked toward détente in his second term. Guided by Secretary of State George Shultz, he sought engagement. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told him that Mikhail Gorbachev, expected to become the next Soviet leader, was a man they could do business with, though dangerously charming. Reagan couldn’t wait to make friends and tell Gorbachev about his great vision: the total elimination of nuclear weapons, starting with intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Boot takes advantage of declassified documents from the Reagan–Gorbachev summits that have been published in the last decade.¹ These verbatim transcripts provide a sometimes comical picture of their meetings. At the 1985 Geneva Summit, Reagan proposed a stroll in the woods. (It had all been prearranged of course.) Reagan told Gorbachev that he should inform the Soviet experts on the US that he had made “not only grade-B movies, but also a few good ones.” Well-prepped about the performance Reagan thought was his finest, Gorbachev said that he had seen Kings Row and “had liked it very much.” But if Gorbachev found some of Reagan’s erogenous zones, he was frustrated that the major concession he offered didn’t cut through Reagan’s fog. When Gorbachev proposed pulling his troops out of Afghanistan, Reagan missed the diplomatic opening and went right back to his talking points denouncing the Soviet invasion.

More than one biographer has despaired of finding the “real” Reagan behind the carapace of vagueness, self-delusion, and contradiction. Edmund Morris had the most catastrophic failure. Given unprecedented access to the president while he was in office, he discovered that it was of little use: private Reagan was the same as public Reagan. Morris spent a decade flailing before concluding that there was nothing beneath the surface. He novelized long stretches of Dutch (1999) in the voice of an imaginary friend.

Boot, a Russian-born military historian and conservative apostate, tells the life without reaching for an overarching thesis. His own political shift from Reagan Republican to centrist liberal has helped him make sense of Reagan’s evolution in the opposite direction. Boot appreciates that one doesn’t simply swap one worldview for another. Residues of the earlier politics inevitably remain. He finds no difficulty in continuing to admire Reagan the man while castigating his troubled relationship with reality and a management style that he aptly describes as behaving “as if he were a bystander in his own administration.”

Even for Democrats in Congress and others who saw him as dangerous, Reagan was awfully hard to dislike. Along with Lincoln and FDR, he was one of America’s few spontaneously funny presidents. In Santa Cruz a bearded demonstrator shouted, “We are the future!” at the governor’s limousine. Reagan scribbled a quick reply and held it up to the window: “I’ll sell my bonds.” In the White House, he was in on the joke about his nodding off at work (most embarrassingly at the Vatican with John Paul II): “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency—even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.” While distant and remote with his own children, Reagan was endearing to staff and strangers. He spent time each day answering letters, often enclosing a personal check when touched by a hard-luck story. Cast as a gangster in his final film, The Killers (1964), he fell flat—he just didn’t have any nasty in him.

At the same time, his baloney could drive you bonkers. (Faux Marx: the best way to impose socialism is “to tax the middle class out of existence.”) Boot dutifully fact-checks many of the tall tales that the press at the time let slide, a flow of falsehoods unrivaled in the White House until 2017. Reagan’s moral fables emphasized American virtue and his own, and he sometimes conflated scenes from World War II movies with actual events from the war.

A significant part of his self-mythology involved casting himself as Ronald Reagan, Friend to Black People. He included in this repertoire a likely true story from his Illinois days about inviting two Black teammates on the Eureka College football squad to sleep at his house after they were turned away at a hotel. More dubious was his claim to have opposed segregation in baseball during his time as a sports announcer. (There’s no evidence he ever did until after it had ended.) Upset by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall criticizing his civil rights record, he invited him to the White House to hear this farrago. “I think I made a friend,” Reagan wrote in his diary afterward.

That same Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and sometimes told racist jokes—including one, told to the Black Republican senator Edward Brooke, about African cannibals. Boot makes clear that Reagan fully understood the symbolism of launching his campaign as the 1980 GOP presidential nominee in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the spot where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered by Ku Klux Klan members sixteen years earlier. Reagan may never have made explicitly racist statements, but he expressed a belief in states’ rights that let nostalgic segregationists know he was on their side.

The gap between Reagan’s words and deeds was the culmination of a lifelong practice of using his imagination to remodel intolerable realities. His whoppers reflected the rich fantasy life of a poor boy dragged from home to home by an alcoholic father. Early on he developed idealization as a coping skill. His was not the fine mind that could hold opposing thoughts simultaneously and still function; it was the politician’s mind, good at believing that which serves and ignoring contradictory evidence. This didn’t end with his triumph over Hollywood communism or his fight against racism. It included the belief that he and Nancy were raising a happy family. (Three of his four children wrote memoirs about how miserable they had been.)

The hazards of his wishful thinking became clear with the confessions of his budget director David Stockman, published in a 1981 article in The Atlantic Monthly. Reagan’s economic goals—an enormous tax cut, an increase in military spending, and serious deficit reduction—were incompatible without what Stockman wanted: “a frontal assault on the American welfare state,” as he later wrote. It was time to choose, but Stockman’s attempts to get Reagan to acknowledge the need for choices were unavailing. While he only eliminated one federal program (revenue sharing with states and localities) and did not significantly reduce the tax burden overall, Reagan preferred to believe that he had stopped the rise of socialist big government. Nor could he face the fact that an aide had betrayed him. After the article came out, Reagan made a show of punishing Stockman, quickly forgave him, and blamed the whole mess on the press.

With the Iran-contra affair, the aging president’s idealism ramped up to a kind of dissociation from reality. The diary he assiduously kept was always numbingly literal. (“Back to the office—some desk work, mainly catching up with Photo signings. Then a haircut & upstairs. Exercise & shower. And now it’s dinner time.”) On November 22, 1985, the president recorded that an undercover operation was going to get American hostages held in Lebanon freed. A few pages later, he was denouncing this same arms-for-hostages trade he had just referred to as a “wild” and “unfounded” story. Confronted with the evidence that he had approved and encouraged Oliver North’s Iranian gambit, he was flummoxed. “I just don’t understand why they don’t believe me,” he told his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. “I wasn’t trying to trade arms.” One of the most poignant moments in Reagan’s presidency was his nationally televised apology. “A few days ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” he said. “My heart and my best intentions tell me that was true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” No longer allowed to believe the best about himself, he retreated into his shell, hurt and confused.

The core quality Boot rightly emphasizes as enabling Reagan’s success was his pragmatism, in many respects akin to that of his early political hero Franklin Roosevelt. As far back as a student strike at Eureka College, Reagan was posturing to audiences about standing up for principle while angling for compromise in private. On screen and facing the public, he was a conviction politician. But behind the scenes—as with the arms for hostages trading—the bazaar was open for business.

Reagan’s image of compromise came in large part from the strike and settlement he led at SAG, when he returned in 1959 for his sixth term as president. The issue was residuals for old movies that were being shown on television.² Reagan ended the six-week strike by getting the studios to agree to residuals for future films and to pay into an actors’ pension fund to compensate for the pre-1960 productions. Even his friend Bob Hope thought it was a lousy deal, but for Reagan it became a totem of successful negotiation. One of his favorite lessons—recounted in his pre-presidential autobiography, Where’s The Rest of Me?—was that an impasse is best settled during a bathroom break, when you can follow an intransigent counterpart into the men’s room and get down to brass tacks over a piss.

As governor of California, Reagan was always looking for such “urinal” moments with Democrats in Sacramento. “Anytime I can get 70 percent of what I’m asking for out of a hostile legislative body, I’ll take it,” he once told an aide. This produced a raft of bipartisan legislation and an unexpectedly moderate record. Reagan inveighed against the state university system and doubled its budget. He criticized environmental regulation while protecting rivers, augmenting the state park system, and implementing the country’s strictest emissions standards. He raised taxes and signed a bill in 1967 that effectively legalized abortion in California, pointing the way to Roe v. Wade. The Golden State political situation explains many positions of Reagan’s that today would be laughed out of a Republican convention. He supported gun control because the Black Panthers were running around with weapons (and later to honor James Brady, his spokesman who was gravely wounded when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan in 1981). He supported amnesty for undocumented migrants both out of natural sympathy and because farmers needed them to pick fruit and vegetables.

This practical politician’s mindset is at odds with our image of Reagan the ideologue. Yet it explains his major accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy—the tax cut in 1981; the restructuring of the Social Security system in 1982; tax and immigration reform in 1986; and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. These successes were made possible by his half-a-loaf mindset and through cooperation with Democratic congressional leaders who mostly shared it. When Reagan said he could not be moved, that was just a negotiating posture. (His commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile defense system he announced in 1983, which after more than forty years is still more concept than reality, stands as an exception.) Reagan kept theory and practice in separate, airtight compartments. That’s how the archfoe of communism made peace with the Soviets and the man who would never trade arms for hostages sent antitank missiles to Iran. It’s how the most antitax and antigovernment president of the modern era raised taxes more times than he cut them and increased the size of the federal government. As in California, there were vast wildernesses between what he said, what he did, and what he later believed he had done.

The theories if not the practices of Ronald Reagan continued to guide Republicans after the cold war and until the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, who seemed to take the party in a radically different direction. But a historical question hovers over Boot’s book: Does Trumpism represent the repudiation of Reaganism or its fulfillment?

It would be hard to find two politicians more different in temperament. The ingenuous son of the Midwest disliked hardly anyone, but he surely would have been offended by the boorish oligarch who replaced him as the GOP’s guiding spirit. Reagan was too prissy and politically cautious to even mention AIDS in public until 1985. Trump, by contrast, later told Howard Stern that fighting to avoid sexually transmitted disease during the AIDS era was “my personal Vietnam.”

In policy, too, the gap seems hardly bridgeable. Trump drove a truck through the rift between Reagan’s core beliefs and those of his white working-class supporters. His populism reverses Reaganism on free trade, immigration, international alliances, foreign intervention, and the role of government. Despite Elon Musk’s DOGE rampage, Trump doesn’t share Reagan’s philosophical aversion to big government. He simply wants to control it, the way other strongmen around the world do. Beyond the calculations of the cold war, Reagan didn’t feel any kinship with authoritarianism or authoritarians.

But these differences in outlook conceal real-world continuities. Like Reagan, Trump pursues incoherent economic policies that fuel inequality and tilt the playing field in favor of the wealthy. Trump’s huge 2017 tax cut without offsetting spending reductions was firmly in the Reagan mold. His latest budget proposals—not only extending his 2017 tax cuts but further reducing the corporate rate while eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, tips, and overtime—amount to Reaganomics without even a lingering care for fiscal responsibility. Another through line is the GOP’s political bargain with the Christian right, cemented by judicial appointments and the long fight to repeal Roe v. Wade. The rise and triumph of the Federalist Society spans the two presidencies.

Boot traces their commonalities to Barry Goldwater and the hard right turn of the Republican Party in 1964. Reagan followed Goldwater in depicting expansive government as a Hayekian “road to serfdom.” Trump frames the federal bureaucracy as a “deep state” conspiracy against him. Both versions have racial underpinnings: white voters’ suspicion that federal programs exist for the benefit of minorities. In 1980 backlash politics took advantage of the reaction to integration, busing, and affirmation action. With Trump, the backlash manifests as antiwokeism, defamation of migrants, and vengeance against political opponents. We are going to find out whether Trump’s version, in its second iteration, is substantively more severe than Reagan’s or merely nastier and noisier.

In other ways, too, Trumpism can be interpreted as Reaganism without restraint, conscience, or taste. The old laments about the B movie star bringing Hollywood stagecraft to the presidency now seem snobbish and quaint. Where Reagan employed communication skills he first developed as a radio announcer, Trump the reality TV star has reframed the president’s job as a nonstop competition for ratings. The one was a disciplined performer, the other is a cynic and charlatan.

Admiration for Reagan remains a rare point of agreement between Trump followers and the remaining never-Trump Republicans, who fantasize about someday restoring a party committed to personal character, limited government, and an internationalist foreign policy. But the new locus of Reagan nostalgia is, curiously enough, among Democrats. They properly remember Reagan as a decent guy who, for all his failings, presided over a legitimate party before it turned into a personality cult. Liberals lament the loss of a loyal opposition that practiced politics within the same rules and norms that they do. In the 1980s our fights with Reagan seemed like battles over basic values. We see now the deeper ones he shared.