Cannon Salutes Governor Reagan / How Reagan Changed My Life
Cannon, Lou & Robinson, Peter
BOOKS IN REVIEW Cannon Salutes Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power by Lou Cannon (Public Affairs, 592 pages, $30) How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins/Regan Books,...
...The result is a book of considerable charm that could easily have gone wrong...
...Reagan] arrived at the White House pretty much a finished product...
...Precisely, says Robinson...
...It is because Reagan had overcome the unlucky episodes in his life that he retained his optimism and imagination...
...An indirect approach to Reagan may prove more promising, which is how Peter Robinson goes about the task in How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life...
...But a funny thing happened on the way to the Coolidge-Harding oblivion into which liberals intended to send him...
...Robinson, the speechwriter who composed Reagan's 1987 Berlin Wall speech ("Mr...
...Reagan could quote pessimists like Whittaker Chambers from memory, but he himself was not a pessimist (though ironically, Reagan's most lauded movie performance—Drake McHugh in King's Row—came from a tragic role...
...Cannon's great virtue is that he always took Reagan seriously, from the first time he saw him on the hustings as candidate in 1966...
...Regardless of whether Cannon concealed his private sympathies 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 for Reagan while at the Washington Post, the new evidence and his own fair-mindedness now allow him to offer a revised look at Reagan...
...No one has ever discussed how Reagan affected life on an individual level...
...transforms Reagan into his mentor with this thematic memoir of his White House service...
...Even the media have come around...
...With Governor Reagan, Cannon now offers an impression that is miles more positive...
...One way of avoiding this suspicion was to "balance" his work with harsh judgments about Reagan...
...While Cannon affirmed Reagan's intelligence and the importance of his principles as the inspiration of his administration, he nonetheless sometimes lapsed into the same vocabulary and formulas that the rest of the media employed to reinforce the usual anti-Reagan clichés...
...Reagan's critics said his imagination stemmed from his Hollywood experience...
...Gorbachev, tear down this Wall...
...In Governor Reagan, Cannon has come around, with fulsome acknowledgment that Reagan's fidelity to the Constitution was not only central to his purposes but also explains why Reagan was not an anti-government simpleton...
...At every point of Reagan's life where his progress might have ended, he made for himself a new story line...
...For example, one typical passages reads: "His biggest problem was that he didn't know enough about public policy to participate fully in his presidency...
...Robinson turns this on its head, and in so doing puts his finger on why Reagan differed from most other conservatives...
...Cannon had already begun to back away from some of his harsher judgments of Reagan in the revised edition of Role of a Lifetime that was published in 2000...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW cumstances of his childhood and mid-life divorce...
...Most conservatives are tragedians at some level, just as the outlook of most politicians is path-dependent to a large extent...
...Every-one understands that Reagan changed the nation's collective mood in the 1980s...
...Cannon offers a picture of a successful governorship, refuting many of the criticisms made of Reagan's California record...
...Governor Reagan is the first complete accountof Reagan's governorship of California, filling in the gaps in his earlier accounts (Ronnie &Jesse, 1970, and Reagan, 1982) and adding new details to well-known episodes of Reagan's years in Sacramento...
...The final irony of Ronald Reagan is that in the end tragedy did overtake him in the form of Alzheimer's disease...
...But as the world knows from his famous letter announcing his end, Reagan reaffirmed his non-tragic outlook on life...
...He is presently at work on a second volume, The Age of Reagan: Lion at the Gate, 1981-1989...
...Ronnie is no longer the "amiable dunce...
...In the postWatergate adversarial media culture, Cannon was frequently under suspicion by other journalists who intimated that he was a shill for Reagan the way some journalists had been for JFK...
...Several factors explain the difference between Cannon's accounts...
...This, from the same people who never tired of referring to Reagan as the "three-by-five card candidate" (he actually used four-by-six cards) who only read Reader's Digest and Human Events and depended on his staff to tie his shoelaces...
...Cannon never went in for the condescension that typified most media attitudes toward Reagan, such as was found in the chronicles of the Washington Post's Haynes Johnson (Sleepwalking Through History) or CBS News' Bob Schieffer (The Acting President) or Time's Lawrence Barrett (Gambling With History), nor did Cannon ever indulge the genteel malice of Garry Wills (Reagan's America...
...As such, Governor Reagan stands as a worthy prologue to Cannon's exhaustive account of Reagan's presidency, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime...
...Cannon generously confesses: "What the critics, myself sometimes included, failed to realize was that Reagan often was aware of what he was doing" with many of his oft-decried habits and practices...
...His independence from the media pack created a problem for him when he covered Reagan for the Post in the 1980s...
...He devotes the first quarter of the book to a concise biography of Reagan from childhood through his Hollywood years, a necessary remedy to Edmund Morris's incompetent and absurd Dutch, and ends the book with an account of Reagan's successful drive to the White House in 1980...
...Instead, he is now recognized as a giant among modern statesmen...
...Reagan especially envisioned a non-tragic end to the Cold War, the single most audacious expression of his imagination...
...Despite his fair-mindedness toward Reagan, there are still some aspects of Role of a Lifetime that rankled...
...In analyzing Reagan's underappreciated First Inaugural Address, Cannon wrote in Role that "the source of Reagan's inspiration was less the Constitution than the movies...
...Steven F Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 19641980...
...Governor Reagan is Cannon's fifth book on Reagan, and one hopes it is not yet his last, because it is his best and shows some important subtle revisions of his previous Reagan work...
...What Reagan saw as a real potentiality for winning the Cold War, conservative tragedians and conventional political thinkers saw as a flight of fancy...
...Starting with the onset of Bill Clinton's decay, esteem for Reagan began rising, even among many liberals...
...Tony Dolan, Reagan's senior speechwriter, pointed out to Robinson that "Actors get used to alternate endings...
...Along the way to describing how Reagan's example affected his outlook on life, Robinson delivers some fresh insights into Reagan as well...
...This is fair enough in the abstract, but Cannon also tended to rely for his main inside sources on the White House pragmatists whose relentless leaking served their own agendas and who had reasons for conveying a less flattering image of Reagan...
...Reagan would never say it—and neither does Robinson directly—but why can't the rest of us be as big a person as he was in the face of trouble...
...The book is as much about Robinson as it is about Reagan, though conducted with a self-effacing and self-deprecating tone that is exactly like Reagan himself...
...Consider Robinson's treatment of two of Reagan's best-known personal traits—his optimism and his imagination...
...Robinson also gives full credit to several of his colleagues, usually quoting them at length, for revealing Reagan's attributes, unlike many memoirists who claim all their observations arise exclusively from their own genius...
...Reagan transferred this from his personal life to his political outlook...
...But as the evidence of Reagan's canniness and grasp of what he was up to continues to mount alongside the gradual vindication of his policies (Cannon himself remarked to Larry King that Reagan's huge deficits now appear more like the wartime deficits of the last campaign of the Cold War, and therefore a historical bargain), the image of Reagan the lightweight guided by his staff is less and less sustainable...
...This could hardly be more wrong...
...Reagan's modesty and intense privacy— extraordinarily rare traits in a politician—may make it impossible to resolve the mysteries and contradictions of Reagan's character...
...Reading Lou Cannon's body of work is one way to trace Reagan's progress...
...He has recalled many times telling his editor at the San Jose Mercury-News, "I couldn't understand why anyone would want to run against such a self-assured and friendly man...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Cannon Salutes Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power by Lou Cannon (Public Affairs, 592 pages, $30) How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins/Regan Books, 263 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Steven E Hayward N THE FIRST FEW YEARS after Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, his popularity nosedived...
...OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 BOOKS IN REVIEW For all of his original insights into Reagan's character, Cannon at times failed in Role to understand Reagan as he understood himself...
...Reagan's relentless optimism and imagination is sometimes ascribed to having participated in the superficiality of Hollywood, or to some psychodrama involving the suppression of or escape from the pain arising from the unhappy cirReagan's modesty and intense privacy may make it impossible to resolve the mysteries of his character...
...Alter-native endings to a drama require positive acts of imagination that must nonetheless be rooted in reality...
...Reagan, it turns out, talked about the Constitution more than his five predecessors combined (according to a study by the University of Denver's Professor Andrew Busch...
...That title is now reserved for President George W. Bush, except without the "amiable" modifier...
...The new executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote back in January that "Reagan's principles were developed over decades and fortified by a selective but extensive reading of history...
...Audacity, to paraphrase an old cliché, consists of knowing the difference between potentiality and flights of fancy when no one else around you can...
...While no one is better placed than Cannon to offer revisions of our understanding of Reagan, one suspects that we still haven't found the rest of him...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
