An American Life

...Reagan seems to have published this memoir out of a sense that this is what ex-Presidents do...

...I didn't find much...

...Reagan has proved more thoughtful over the years in interviews than he does in these pages...

...T his memoir does have the trade- ' mark Reagan humor ("I've been accused of majoring in extracurricular activities at Eureka...

...Few Presidents have made judicial philosophy central to their selection process, and none has ever established the kind of institutional procedures Reagan did to ensure that the judges selected shared his philosophy...

...His book on the Reagan and Bush presidencies will be published later this year by the Free Press...

...Kennedy can, at least, take consolation in the fact that his name is not got wrong in this volume...

...A rush job means less time to check basic facts or to ask Reagan associates to read appropriate passages...

...But these opportunities are mostly passed by...

...Still, the memoir is a poor one—it is bland, uninformative, and even inaccurate...

...How could Reagan—or his wife—have let this sentence survive...

...One would have thought these reasons good enough for Reagan and his publisher to have taken more care 1=1...

...There are any number of subjects he mentions (as well as many he does not) and could usefully have pursued...

...There's nothing about Reagan's pre-presidential life not available from other sources, including an earlier autobiography...

...This one falls short...

...Antonin Scalia, merely Reagan's best pick for the Court and who is mentioned fleetingly by Reagan on two pages, is entered in the index as John Scalia...

...technically, that wasn't true") and is never unseemly (the paragraph on his first marriage to Jane Wyman shows him as the gentleman he is...

...Regarding Robert Bork, Reagan says only that he "had to battle" Congress "for approval of my nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork...

...It isn't...

...they "drank" it...

...The cynic THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 47 will say that Reagan wanted to cash in, and the only answer to such a charge is he would have commanded the money he got even if he had written a good book...

...For $24.95, you might think this book a real bargain...

...This business of "experimenting" is a post-sixties phenomenon associated with illegal drugs...

...I read all the way to the end in the hope of finding some new and important fact about Reagan or his presidency or else some interesting thoughts about politics or government or America or the cosmos...

...I also did some brief experimenting with alcohol while I was in college," Reagan, well . . . writes at one point...

...it's good to have this kind of material on the record...

...The first covers everything from Ronald Reagan's boyhood in Illinois to his Hollywood days to his two terms as governor of California...

...But that happened not on the first but on the last day of the summit, and it wasn't a zero-zero proposal but one leaving both sides with about a hundred missiles...

...not one for history's sake, and certainly not one for the conservative movement he once led...

...Would it not be important for him to use this occasion to say what he thought of the fight over Bork, an event without precedent in American political history...

...he is the most successful and influential President since FDR and will rank, if not in the top five of all Presidents, in the very next level...

...T here is something else lacking in An 1 American Life: original thought...

...One other thing: Reagan misses an opportunity to comment on why he named William Rehnquist Chief Justice...

...But students at Eureka College in the 1920s did not "experiment with" alcohol...

...Anthony Kennedy, whom Reagan eventually placed in the seat intended for Bork and who helped produce important conservative majorities in 1989, is not even mentioned...

...Lindsey, says Reagan in acknowledgments that I think were written by him, "was with me every step of the way...

...But I'm hard pressed to point to much else that wasn't already known about Reagan's involvements in foreign policy "In this book I have set out to describe everything I remember about the Iran-Contra affair," Reagan writes at one point, before he proceeds to remember very little, confessing (yet again) that he's Terry Eastland, TAS's Presswatch columnist, was director of public affairs in the Reagan Justice Department from 1985 to 1988...

...Reagan does not tell the reader that the Bork nomination was rejected, nor does he discuss how he "battled" for Bork—which, in fact, he did not, failing to make even telephone contact with key senators until the vote had hardened against the nominee...

...He says, as he has before, that his "biggest disappointment" was failing to cut federal spending and balance the budget...

...Ultimately, however, the buck (nopun intended) must stop with Reagan himself...

...The third and largest of the three books concerns foreign policy: the Middle East, Lebanon, Grenada, Iran-contra, the Soviets, and arms control...

...Unlike his wife's memoir, My Tirrn, the book shows no bitterness, no Scuds fired in revenge...

...Notably, Anderson's chapter in Revolution on Reagan as a public speaker is better on the subject than the speaker's own account here...

...Ronald Reagan was the first President in fifty years to redirect both domestic and foreign policy while achieving re-election and maintaining party unity...

...If a presidential memoir does not give us much new information, it should at least meet a high standard of accuracy, for the sake of historians and biographers...

...To his credit, Reagan is not afraid of confessing his belief in God or his need to pray, or expressing patriotic sentiment...

...N.B.: there is no mention of "abortion" in this volume, or of Reagan's education secretaries, or of William Bradford Reynolds, his chief civil rights enforcer, or of Warren Brookes, his favorite economics columnist...

...My guess is that they did not care enough to read the draft closely...

...he could have discussed ways in which the defense budget might be sensibly cut in the post-Cold War era he did so much to create...

...Some of the responsibility lies with Simon and Schuster, which paid $6 million for this book and a previously published collection of Reagan speeches, and wanted the book out as fast as possible...

...Reagan fancies himself a Foreign Policy President, and I'm prepared to believe that history will bear him out in this regard...

...Alas, this huge topic is dismissed in a few unremarkable paragraphs, a tremendous slight to Reagan's achievement...

...Of course, Reagan has said these things before...

...I doubt it...

...R eagan of course had a ghost, Robert Lindsey, author of The Falcon and the Snowman...

...In Reagan's chapter on the Reykjavik summit, for example, he recounts how on "the first day" Gorbachev "accepted in principle our zero-zero proposal for the elimination of nuclear missiles in Europe...

...He is especially proud of the INF treaty negotiated during his second term, and he includes lengthy excerpts of letters he exchanged with Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as many of his own diary entries...

...Contrary to the assessments of some reviewers of this book, it is always a mistake to judge a presidency by a presidential memoir...

...It also means less time for the book to ripen into something interesting...

...And he remains in this volume of the same (wrongheaded) belief as he was in the 1980 campaign, that excessive federal spending is largely a matter of waste, fraud, and abuse...

...Surely his experiences trying to reform some aspects of Social Security (which he only notes here) taught him otherwise...

...Reagan makes a stab at explaining why spending wasn't adequately cut by pointing to the special interests that work their perverse influence upon Congress, and he endorses a line-item veto and a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget...

...generally at a loss on the subject...

...This, evidently, is the kind of book he wanted to write...

...I just didn't deliver as much to the people as I'd promised...

...The second deals with Reagan's presidency, with particular attention to the first year of his first term...

...As for his Supreme Court picks, Reagan says much less than was already known about his efforts to name the first female Justice in 1981, when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor...

...Reagan could have reflected on Social Security and other "entitlements" (the word isn't mentioned) that suck down larger and larger portions of the taxpayers' dollars...

...The treatment of Reagan's presidency doesn't add to what's already known by way of public documents, media accounts, and the memoirs of various Reagan Administration figures such as Martin Anderson, David Stockman, and William Niskanen...

...Reagan also could have reflected on what may prove his most enduring domestic legacy—his 372 appointments to the federal bench, including four to the Supreme Court...