President Reagan / Revolution
Cannon, Lou & Anderson, Martin
BOOK REVIEWS T he good fortune that Ronald Rea- l gan enjoyed throughout his remarkable career failed him when Lou Cannon emerged as his Boswell. Cannon, a veteran journalist who covered the Reagan...
...Originally published in 1989, Anderson's book is now available in an expanded paperback edition that includes a new 29-page opening chapter describing Reagan's take-charge strategy in dealing with the Soviets and his indispensable guiding hand in SDI...
...But what about Reagan's tour de force in changing the course of American government and foreign policy...
...On one level, they are so enamored of Jimmy Carter-style workaholism that they are blind to other methods of leadership, which have a rich historical tradition of their own...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 35...
...He quickly adds: " . . . because he believed in happy endings obtained with too little sacrifice, this revived confidence became such an end in itself that Reagan rarely sought to focus on high goals...
...Or: "Not even the most devout of Reagan admirers considered him a hard worker, and even aides who thought he put in enough hours in the Oval Office regarded him as intellectually lazy...
...Then there is Cannon's assertion that Reagan simply did not perform whatshould be a President's real job...
...It proved too big for his talents...
...Iknow and like Lou Cannon, and am sure that he would pass a lie-detector test proclaiming his ideological neutrality...
...Indeed, who doesn't...
...Let's go, George...
...He blames the contras for forcing the Sandinistas to suppress internal dissent...
...Passage of the 1981 tax cut is disposed of in one footnote, while Iran-contra takes up 149 pages...
...The Reagan Legacy is a partial antidote to the Reagan-bashing books by Cannon, Kitty Kelley, and Haynes Johnson, author of Sleepwalking Through History...
...I t is remarkable that Cannon's assess- mentt has been labeled even-handed and objective by reviewers, who perhaps worried that a reporter who enjoyed exceptional access to the Reagans for over twenty-five years would wind up producing a gushy account...
...24.95 REVOLUTION: THE REAGAN LEGACY Martin Anderson/Hoover Press/500 pp...
...The 1986 tax reform is dismissed, while the Bitburg cemetery incident ("a catastrophe") is described in every detail...
...But even this obsession pales beside the liberal intelligentsia's implacable hostility to Reagan's ideology, which twists reality in such a way as to make it impossible to appreciate any of his accomplishments...
...Thus, in the face of prolonged economic growth, Cannon views the Reagan economic record as a failure...
...He denies the very existence of a Reagan Doctrine and gives the contras no credit at all for the fall of the Sandinista dictatorship...
...Behind the warm geniality lay a calculating, imaginative mind governed by a steely will," Anderson writes...
...In the many areas of the office where ideology did not apply or the performances had no bearing, Reagan was at a loss...
...Reagan developed his Kremlin game plan on his own: "He didn't ask for a lot of advice...
...But he is in bed with the liberal Democrats in journalism and academia who compose the jury now delivering a guilty verdict on the Reagan presidency, supposedly on performance but actually on policy...
...Had Reagan cared more about governance," his administration would have had a better ethical record, Cannon writes—forgetting the transgressions of congressmen deeply immersed in government...
...A nother inconsistency arises when Cannon, who uncritically quotes Reagan aides as they belittle their former boss on page after page, takes issue with one-time domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson because he "attributed to Reagan a greater grasp of issues than he had...
...If you had gone into a coma the night Reagan was elected in 1980 and awakened to read The Role of a Lifetime, you would be convinced that here was another failed President...
...Unfortunately, Anderson too often strays from his intention: to establish Reagan's revolutionary place in history...
...11.95 (paper) Robert D. Novak 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 else in the White House had given up on them...
...The view held by Soviet reformers that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was the father of perestroika is not even entertained...
...But as their relationship nears an end, Cannon finds it easier to identify with the journalistic establishment's reflexive contempt for both the public figure and his principles...
...Too often," Cannon writes in establishing his familiar theme, "Reagan was a performer and presidential leadership an empty shell...
...We're leaving...
...Or: "The nation paid a high price for a President who skimped on preparation...
...His administration was characterized by "naivete...
...Reagan was always one to leave the work to others whenever he could," Cannon offers...
...He complains about Reagan speeches "crammed...
...Marty Anderson's Reagan is a breed apart from Lou Cannon's...
...Part and parcel of his devotion to "governance" is his blind faith in the sanctity of taxes, and so naturally Cannon dismisses the Reagan tax cut as a fiasco and their architect as a credulous fool: "He never ceased believing in the eventual vindication of his economic policies, when [David] Stockman and nearly everyone PRESIDENT REAGAN: THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME Lou Cannon/Simon and Schuster/948 pp...
...Ex-national security adviser McFarlane was "often discouraged by the President's inattentiveness and thin grasp of issues...
...Thus, we see a President who is adamant about cutting taxes, who refuses to put a ceiling on defense spending, who presses for the zero option in arms negotiations, who says no to Nancy when she first demands Donald Regan's head, who insists on supporting an embattled Helmut Kohl by going to Bitburg, who presses the missiles-for-hostages deal with Iran...
...You'd have no clue that Reagan was the most successful chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt and someone who perhaps changed the course of world history...
...He aged little in the presidency and took his role too lightly in the end...
...But continual nagging over Reagan's inattention to his briefing books obscures what really bothers Cannon: Reagan's ideology...
...questionably likes Ronald Reagan as a person...
...Even Cannon is a bit disturbed by staffers—his sources—who "told stories about presidential lapses that would have invited instant dismissal in other administrations...
...Cannon unRobert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist a television commentator, and publisher of the Evans and Novak Political Report...
...Iwasn't surprised when several Rea- gan aides praised Cannon's book, both in public and in private, to me...
...Better to have dropped it from the paperback edition...
...Or: "Reagan knew little about how any federal program operated and was largely uninterested in matters of process...
...But for someone who has devoted most of his professional life to Reaganology, he winds up echoing the platitudes and conventional wisdom you can hear from any member of the liberal news media...
...This book, then, reveals why the liberals cannot understand the Reagan presidency...
...But he is too good a reporter not to record examples of presidential decisiveness (naturally, overpositions Cannon finds deplorable) that contradict the image of an old, lazy, and occasionally addled actor playing a part scripted for him by aides...
...Had it not been smothered by the simultaneous release of Kitty Kelley's screed on Nancy Reagan (which left Cannon in the unlikely position of having to defend Reagan as a hands-on executive), The Role of a Lifetime would be leading the parade in the popular deconstruction of the Reagan presidency...
...Cannon is at one with the Washington establishment's stubborn belief in government, despite the historical record of this century...
...This is Cannon's third and presumably final book about Reagan, a far-toolong account of his presidency that concentrates on what it regards as one fiasco after another...
...On his publisher's advice, he devoted some 100 pages, based on secondary sources, to Iran-contra, which he sees as the inevitable by-product of Reagan's management style...
...He gets distracted by the petty bureaucratic infighting in which he took part...
...Reagan gets it coming and going from Cannon...
...with gaudy certitudes about democracy and moralistic warnings about the evils of Communism...
...He didn't even set up committees...
...As it is, Cannon marches in lockstep with his liberal brethren...
...Anderson's Revolution will help that future chronicler, but Cannon's The Role of a Lifetime is more likely to confuse him...
...Cannon is particularly dependent on the poisonous remarks of two former aides, Mike Deaver and Bud McFarlane, who were totally unsuited for the high positions they held...
...What Ronald Reagan now needs is a bona fide historian who will stand back from the turmoil of Washington and appreciate what this extraordinary leader accomplished...
...Cannon probably doesn't recognize his own inconsistency...
...Cannon, a veteran journalist who covered the Reagan White House for the Washington Post, is certainly a skilled and diligent reporter...
...Cannon is headed down a blind alley if hemeans to imply that Reagan's micro-managing Democratic predecessors—Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter—were better leaders, notwithstanding their failed presidencies...
...In other words, Reagan did not work hard enough, and sought the wrong objectives, anyway...
...Ex-White House impresario Deaver, for instance, "believed strongly that Reagan had a dark side to his nature that could be roused by fervent anti-Communism...
...That's a Hollywood actor playing a role...
...He is blamed for almost everything that went wrong—such as the Lebanon fiasco, which Cannon's own reporting shows to have been a failure on the part of Secretary of State George Shultz...
...The Role of a Lifètime purports to deal with process but in truth is most concerned with agenda...
...ignorance and undisciplined internal conflict" His image-makers drew a political caricature that depicted him as "a masterful decisive president, a Reagan who never was...
...As Cannon moves from one disaster to the next, Reagan's legislative triumphs barely receive mention, while such events as the undeniably inept handling of MX missile deployment are treated at length...
...Far worse than the blindness of a Boswell who cannot appreciate his subject is the cheap disloyalty of aides eager to score points in Washington, many of whom are featured throughout this long account...
...For pages at a time, he lets on that Reagan was lazy, ignorant, or stupid...
...Eight hundred pages of Reagan-bashing later, Cannon settles for another liberal cliche when he pays lip service to Reagan's success in "reviving national confidence, when there was a great need for inspiration...
...Yet Reagan aides are described as having been "largely responsible for his first-term success'this in a book that recognizes precious few successes...
...Anderson's Revolution...
...Reagan "never would again fully recapture the high moral ground he had sacrificed at Bitburg," just as he "never again would bask in the unquestioned trust of the American people" after Iran-contra ("a greater catastrophe...
...He says Reagan was wrong in decontrolling oil prices, wrong in talking about the "evil empire," wrong in opposing "traditional deterrence" (mutual assured destruction), wrong in not listing South African terrorists as freedom fighters, and wrong in lacking "even elemental understanding of what private developers would do to irreplaceable national treasures...
...In like fashion, he sees no connection between Reagan's hard-line policies against the Soviet Union and our victories in the Cold War...
...Apparently without fully realizing its implications, Cannon cites a memorable incident from Reagan's own memoirs: When at the Reykjavik summit Shultz looked as though his dog had died because the President would not surrender SDI, Reagan told his secretary of state, "The meeting is over...
...If "inattentiveness" hurt Reagan's presidency, it was in his failure to pick aides whose views conformed to his own...
...Cannon explains that "it depended totally upon others for all aspects of governance except his core ideas and his powerful performances...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
