A Liberal Throws in the Towel on Reagan
Reeves, Richard
BOOKS IN REVIEW A Liberal Throws in the Towel on Reagan WENTY YEARS AGO BOOKMAKERS would have give n very long odds against ever seeing a liberal grandee like Richard Reeves using the...
...None of these exemplary leftists, i however, could claim Churchill's breadth, and all i have suffered embarrassment at the hands of their i more recent biographers...
...In 1979 Reeves wrote a long feature in Esquire with the self-evident title, "Why Reagan Won't Make It...
...he looks like the past, he talks about the past...
...I haven't found any record that Reeves accepted the idea at the time, and of course most liberals hooted at Reagan when he said in 1982 that it would be the Soviet Union that would end up on the ash heap of history...
...Reagan was larger than he seemed, indeed larger than life, even if our historians do not quite get it yet...
...By 1999 Reeves's capitulation was complete: "Reagan, in fact, is still running the country...
...Throughout the Bush I years Reeves filed column after column embellishing the liberal campfire ghost stories that Reagan favored the rich, reduced the middle class, and saddled our children with endless debt...
...60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 these eight years," but Reeves was ready to judge them right away...
...I thinkAmericans are different," Reeves writes, pointing to his own interest in Tocqueville...
...It is a pleasure to watch this president work," Reeves wrote in early 1994...
...T ODAY I THINK MOST HISTORICALLY minded people would agree that of all the public figures of the 20th century, Winston Churchill is the i most absorbing and impressive...
...probably it was the recognition that Bill Clinton had more testosterone than ideas...
...This book was born during a luncheon in the White House with Karl Rove and various other Bush administration aides just before the President departed for London in 2004 to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair...
...Yet he still sets imaginations aglow i among some liberals...
...In 1985 Reeves published The Reagan Detour, in which he suggested that the voters had made a ghastly mistake because of Reagan's skillful use of symbolic ideas...
...Castro reportedly gave up his Cubanos i years ago in deference to the World Health Organi ization...
...Reeves notes that "[w]hen my first pages arrived at Simon & Schuster, one of the bosses there (not Alice Mayhew) said, 'My God, Reeves sounds sympathetic to Reagan.'" Of course, for most Manhattan editors a portrayal of Reagan as anything less than a meretricious idiot along the lines of Chauncey Gardiner or Forrest Gump will be regarded as "sympathetic...
...A year later Reeves wrote of Clinton: "Wittingly or not, the Democrat who ran as the agent of change gave BOOKS IN REVIEW up after a couple ofyears and joined the Reagan revolution...
...Reeves has come nearly full circle...
...Only as a jailer and torturer has Castro suri passed Churchill...
...the money going to tax breaks and defense may have cost decades of lost opportunities for better education and health care...
...than other people and that God meant it to be that way, Affairs that "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties...
...It has long been noted that one of Reagan's greatest strengths was the way in which his political opponents consistently underestimated him, and few pundits have a greater record of underestimating Reagan than Reeves...
...He was a man ofconservative principle and he damned near destroyed American liberalism...
...Not even Castro can match i Churchill as an erudite writer and orator, a political i leader and military strategist, a soldier, a gardener, a i bricklayer, a traveler, a wit and bon vivant...
...Moreover Churchill is one great man who attracts other great figures, for instance great historians and biographers...
...One cannot put it down without a deeper appreciation of Churchill's greatness and ebullient personality...
...He never really reckons seriously with the substance of conservatism...
...When Reagan left office in 1989, Reeves wrote in his syndicated column that "It will be quite a while before historyjudges Steven F. Hayward is the F.K...
...Reeves belongs among the older school of patriotic liberals who wanted the U.S...
...is the founder andeditor in chief i of The American Spectator...
...the raw material is simply too prodigious...
...who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink, are only kidding themselves...
...Much more typical of liberal opinion was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who, flesh from a visit to Moscow in 1982, wrote that "Those in the U.S...
...Starting in 1996, Reeves began to upgrade Reagan's status: "I was no fan of Ronald Reagan, but I think I know a leader when I see one, even ifI do not want to follow where he is leading...
...Set aside Reeves's deliberately crude presentation in this sentence of Reagan's belief in America's providential mission (which Lincoln and FDR, among other presidents, fully shared...
...The Reagan presidency will turn out be a brief interlude in the inexorable march ofliberalism: "ideas and issues.., will inevitably bring liberalism and the Democrats back into fashion and power-sooner rather than later...
...During the American Revolution more ofhis relatives fought on our side than Britain's...
...The discussion turned to British antiAmericanism, as that virus was in season, and Gilbert noted that Churchill had opposed it all his life...
...When an old liberal lion like Reeves changes his tune so dramatically, it is worth noting the circuitous course he took, as it offers some insights into the destitution of liberalism today...
...With the coming of Bill Clinton, Reeves thought he found vindication...
...Att all-American Original Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert (THE FREE PRESS, 528 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...T HROUGH CHURCHILL'S LONG LIFE he was indeed deeply entoiled with his mother's country, America...
...At 503 pages Churchill andAmerica is certainly a book, and for my money it is as informative a book on the man as I have read...
...The result is The Reagan Main Road...
...Reagan thought Americans were simply better than other people and that God meant it to be that way...
...Whatever else he has done in his first year, Clinton has shown he has both ideas and testosterone-and maybe he thinks that will be enough to move the nation off the Reagan detour and back into more caring directions...
...er, sorry, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination...
...This warming to Reagan came because "we did agree on some important things, particularly that the Soviet Union and communism itself were collapsing of their own weight and contradictions, hardly an accepted idea in the late 1970s...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW A Liberal Throws in the Towel on Reagan WENTY YEARS AGO BOOKMAKERS would have give n very long odds against ever seeing a liberal grandee like Richard Reeves using the words "Reagan" and "triumph" in the same sentence, let alone in the title of a book...
...But then something seemed to snap...
...Of them the greatest is Sir Martin Gilbert, who replaced Churchill's son, Randolph, as Churchill's official biographer upon the son's death in 1968...
...MAY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 BOOKS IN It was of course the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s that became the anvil against which Reagan smashed the liberal New Deal coalition, and which saw a large number of liberals abandon their old faith and become conservatives or "neoconservatives...
...Fidel Castro...
...Instead we get bromides like this: "None of us can be certain of the 'opportunity costs' of Reaganism...
...In the next wave of history, when Americans have forgotten some of his failings, Reagan will probably be classed as a 'near-great' president...
...Reagan seems to be a nostalgia figure whose time has passed," Reeves concluded...
...atop the right-hand page is Churchill's age...
...In addition, Gilbert has written over 70 other books on world history...
...Shortly before the 1994 election I suggested to Reeves in a debate in Santa Barbara that if the imminent election went as the polls suggested it would, he might need to reissue The Reagan Detour under a new title, The Reagan Main Road...
...He had vast talents and, as i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...This will not last...
...Late in life the last Edwardian was still i lighting up...
...Liberals should relax, Reeves argued...
...For four decades Gilbert has gathered documents, hunted down facts, and interviewed witnesses in chronicling his principal's life through six volumes of the eight-volume official biography and several additional books, a particularly interesting one being In Search of Churchill, a book about Gilbert's adventures in writing the official biography...
...ONSERVATIVE READERS will rightly bristle at this kind of judgment, and although some of the cynicism of the liberal salon appears throughout tleeves's narrative, his book lacks the venomous bite of most previous liberal approaches to Reagan...
...And so Reeves belatedly took up the challenge of capturing Ronald Reagan's entire presidency in order to complete a triptych along with his previous presidential studies of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon...
...His interests and I attainments ranged more widely than those of any of i his competitors...
...the enemy ofthe working man is no longer big business but big government...
...President Clinton is governing in his shadow, trying, not without some real success, to create a liberal garden under the conservative oak...
...It is difficult to write a bad book about Churchill...
...Gilbert has adopted a print technique that assists the reader in easily following the long chronology of his narrative...
...Certainly Reeves takes care to reassure his liberal friends that he has not given up on his traditional liberalism, or that he has changed his mind about what he sees as the class-based bias of Reagan's domestic policy...
...In 1895, age 20, Churchill makes his first visit to America, taking a proper measure of our...
...on the other hand, his growing appreciation for Reagan might be taken as a sign that Reagan's magnetism is still strong, and that with another decade, we'll pull over the few remaining old liberals who also believe in American exceptionalism...
...Liberalism's weak-mindedness about the conduct of the Cold War was of a piece with its inability to stand up to the challenge of the openly anti-American New Left that has very nearly taken sole ownership of the Democratic Party today...
...At the top of each left-hand page there is the year of the chapter's events...
...ht Ameri"-' we "~ ns re 5i m ply . . . . . . . . ( ~ . . . . . . . . . . ~. Z$,i...
...Reeves here puts his finger on the most fundamental division between left and right today...
...Our fascinai tion with Churchill will...
...I knowthat throughthe decades our friends on the left have had their own favorites: Chairman Mao Zedong and, more briefly, Marshal Joseph Stalin and the perdurable Dr...
...It is hard President Reagan: The Triumph of imagination by Richard Reeves (SIMON ~, SCHUSTER, 592 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Steven F. Hayward to imagine America turning to a candidate whose standard pitch is 'I told you so!'" Two Reagan landslide victories did little to shake Reeves's faith in the liberal verities...
...At first Reeves shared in the liberal denial, writing that the 1994 election was a populist revolt by white men who wanted to be back in control again...
...The "Sovietologist" Seweryn Bialer wrote in Foreign tl,,,nk Ame, are d " Reeves .oes pointing to his own ntt: 0 .,..st in .. Tocqu lte, Reaga thoL...
...To this day some of the true believers still hang on to Fidel--not so long ago Oliver Stone joined the long list of Hollywoodians making a pilgrimage to Castro's progressive isle...
...Reeves might appear to be a slow learner...
...to win the Cold War...
...i 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 REVIEW the book under review reveals, a big heart...
...Reeves points to another area of agreement with Reagan that is more important and genuine-the idea of"American exceptionalism...
...I am not i even clear that Castro has matched Churchill as a i cigar-smoker...
...And although Reeves notes that Reagan was "a man of ideas" and acknowledges the importance of the conservative intellectual movement that aligned itself with Reagan, he displays all of the usual liberal obtuseness about conservatism...
...Reagan gave it his best shot, but he failed...
...Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders...
...From the music of his language to the whiff of his cigar, I think I now have the old boy down pat...
...far from being a mere hiatus in liberalism's long march, Reagan "made [the GOP] the dominant party in the country by turning the political populism of Franklin D. Roosevelt on its ear...
...That I did not doubt, but was there really enough information to write a book on the subject...
...I am a detractor...
...He is justly recognized as one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, and here he is still at work in the new century...
...Most contemporary liberals are deeply uncomfortable with, if not opposed to, the idea of American exceptionalism...
Vol. 39 • May 2006 • No. 4
