Much has been written about Ronald Reagan our 40th president his small town met Midwestern upbringing his fame as a Hollywood movie star the charisma that catapulted him to a career in politics but a new account shows a man of profound contradictions and dispels some of the myths around the man the book is Reagan His Life and Legend by Max Boot [Music] i'm Anne Bocock and welcome to Between the Covers my guest is author and historian Max Boot he is a Pulitzer Prize finalist senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a columnist for the Washington Post his latest book Reagan His Life and Legend has received the highest praise I can remember adjectives like superb definitive fascinating essential and it made the New York Times 10 best books list of 2024 max welcome and I'm going to add another adjective and that's balanced because Ronald Reagan is this larger than life figure i suspect that finding balance when you're writing this book was not easy would you talk about that you're right i mean Reagan could be a very polarizing figure i mean a lot of people loved Reagan some people hated Reagan and when I began this book in 2013 there were a lot of books about Reagan but there was really no definitive account nothing that offered a balanced objective perspective on on the president and so that's what I set out to do to produce a book that was neither heography nor hit job but rather a book that looked at both Reagan's strengths as well as his weaknesses his successes as well as his failures and I've been very gratified by the critical reaction which would which suggests that I succeed in that ambition a as you should be i I'm curious about the research it had to be phenomenal with all of the archive materials that you went through any clue how many actual interviews you did i did roughly a hundred interviews and spent a lot of time in the Reagan library looking at a lot of documents many of them once once classified or unavailable and I've in terms of research I kind of feel like I hit a sweet spot uh with with this project because certainly you know there's stuff being declassified all the time the US government is very slow about declassifying documents and so you know historians writing in the future will probably have access to even more declassified information than I had but what they won't be able to get is the ability to talk to many of these people who work so closely with Ronald Reagan and I interviewed so many of them and quite a few of them frankly are no longer around folks like Coen Pal or George Schultz or many others I interviewed at the beginning of this project a decade ago and are now sadly gone and so I feel like I was able to kind of get that that that sweet spot at the intersection of oral history and archival history and to make use of both resources to really present this first in-depth portrait of of the 40th president my my take is that this was such a fresh insight now his presidency has been viewed through any number of lenses as as unifier this conservative icon the great communicator what your book shows are his strengths and his flaws but I I'd like to start with what you think he got right well in terms of his presidency I think he got two big things right which is why if you look at polls of historians he's generally rated as a top 10 president somebody who's around 8 n 10 in the in the pantheon of US leaders and I think the two big things that he got right his first term he helped a nation to recover from the turmoil and and the terrible times of the 1970s the decade of stagflation the Iran hostage crisis Watergate the Vietnam War a lot of things went wrong in the 1970s and when Reagan took over in 1981 there had been one failed president after another and a lot of people thought that America's de best days were behind it and that the country was virtually ungovernable and I think his big achievement in his first term was that he restored America's confidence in itself because he never wavered in his belief that America was a shining city on a hill and because he had this boundless optimism about America and this ability to communicate that optimism he helped to lift the nation's spirits and once we recovered from this terrible recession from 1981 to 1983 he was able to run for re reelection in 1984 on a slogan of it's mourning again in America and people believe that and then that set the stage for his second term and the big achievement of a second term was helping to peacefully end the cold war working with Mikall Gorbachoff the leader of the Soviet Union to ratchet down tensions to reduce the level of nuclear armaments and to end this conflict that could have easily resulted in World War II and that's something that for which I think Reagan deserves tremendous credit and people often look at his hardline firstterm foreign policy of raising defense spending and funding antis-siet guerrilla movements and calling the Soviet Union an evil empire and they they focus on that and what they ignore is that he actually shifted in the second term once he had a Soviet leader in Gorbachev that he could work with and he was actually able to put aside a lot of this anti-communist dogma that he had been uh you know espousing for decades and to work with the world's number one communist uh for a better and more peaceful world and I think that was the ultimate tribute to his pragmatism and his second major achievement there were a couple of other things on the other side that stood out to me and one I get was his response to the AIDS epidemic or actually really not much of a response at all what do you think about that well that was definitely I think one of the one of the biggest failings of the of the Reagan administration and it's oddly enough something that he was not criticized much for at the time democrats in the 1980s were criticizing Reagan for running up budget deficits which in hindsight don't look that bad because our budget deficits today are much higher than they were in the 1980s and Re and Democrats were not really calling Reagan out for ignoring the AIDS pandemic but when you look at at at his at his presidency from the vantage point of history that seems like a massive failure the fact that tens of thousands of Americans were dying from this horrible new disease and Reagan didn't even mention AIDS until 1987 until his presidency was almost over he didn't fight for funding for for AIDS research he basically just ignored it and I think that's that's a huge failing for which he is rightly criticized uh by by historians including my book for many Reagan was this transformative president he was an icon i think your readers might be surprised about this white backlash in politics because his civil rights record as you point out was not stellar it really wasn't i mean I would say he was he was kind of a man of contradictions because on immigration he was actually very pro-immigration and he signed a bill that legalized millions of undocumented immigrants he often celebrated the contributions of immigrants to America in fact he said it was it was immigrants who made America great and we're at the root of American success but at the same time that he was celebrating immigrants he was also throughout his career uh catering to white backlash politics and people may not realize that in the 1960s he opposed all the major civil rights legislation whether it was the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1965 Voting Rights Act or in California the Rumford Fair Housing Act and he often uh you know kind of engaged in in in in dog whistle politics talking about welfare queens talking about law and order in 1980 he gave an infamous speech in Mississippi talking about states rights and you know trying to roll back civil rights laws so yeah that's that's a record that uh you know I I think he should be criticized for that's that's something he got wrong even as he got some other things I think very much right that that is why I look at your book is being so absolutely fair and and showing all these sides the farther away from history we get I I think the more perspective we we can give it for instance when he was governor in in California and there were these campus protests I think 1969 the people's park deadly force was used and did he benefit politically and and at the same time how do you think he would fare with campus protests today well he did benefit politically from his tough response to campus protests particularly at UC Berkeley uh but you know looking at it objectively from the from the vantage point of history I think it's fair to say that he overreacted and he kind of gave campus radicals what they wanted which was a confrontation with the establishment i mean nothing made radicals uh more mad than being ignored or uh you know not being able to provoke a response but Reagan was you know kind of escalated and talked about uh he would be willing to to undertake a blood a blood bath if necessary to restore order on campus he sent the National Guard to put down the People's Park protest uh you had uh you know one person who was killed another who was blinded it was clearly an excessive use of force and it it stands out in contrast I would add to much of his governorship which was actually very centrist and and down the middle i mean he did a lot of things that displeased his conservative base and pleased a lot of Democrats like he signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country you know he expanded the amount of land protected from development in the state of California he actually expanded funding for higher education so in many ways he was a very moderate and centrist governor but this was you know his hardline response to the campus protest was a deviation from that but one for which he actually reaped considerable political reward because you know it was it was it was a political winner to be cracking down on on on on these beatnicks and hippies on college campuses who were seen as being this kind of privileged snobbish elite and most Californians at the time had not gone to college and it was whether it was you know working-class Democrats or working-class Republicans they appreciated his tough stance even though I think in the end it actually backfired and and you know created more confrontation than than it ended we're familiar now with politicians asking "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

Was Reagan the first to use this this line i think he was he used it in 1980 to devastating effect and that was one of the ways that he beat Jimmy Carter i mean there was in 1980 there was still a lot of concern i mean many voters had concerns about could we entrust the presidency to this one-time former actor it seemed like you know was he really up for the job but you know he spent much of the 1980 campaign convincing voters that yes he was going to be a credible president and at the same time really hammering Jimmy Carter's record and of course you know the record was that we had you know doubledigit inflation double-digit interest rates uh you know unemployment was very high so just on the economic record that Carter was running on it was a very poor record and Reagan was able to hammer that home including with that memorable question that he asked in the one debate that he had with Carter which was "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

And very few Americans could could answer yes to that question and that's what with the economic policies of trickle down economics correct well that was that was Reagan's response to the economic turmoil was to was to cut taxes uh at the same time he was expecting that he would eliminate the budget deficit so it didn't really add up and in fact his tax cuts led to much higher budget deficits which surprised him but really didn't surprise any economist i mean this is why his own running mate George HW Bush had called his economic program voodoo economics because it didn't add up but I think what really was critical in the in the nation's recovery from this severe recession uh from 81 to 83 it was less Reagan and his tax cuts and it was more Paul Vulker the chairman of the Fed raising interest rates to really ring inflation out of the economy and so by 1983 inflation which had been running you know at double digits uh had been defeated and was uh you know at a very low level and that allowed the nation's economic recovery and Reagan was able to take credit for that and win this smashing re-election in 1984 when he won 49 states which today in our divided country seems almost unbelievable but it actually happened 49 states does seem unbelievable you mentioned a couple minutes ago that there is a rating system for presidents and Reagan is right up there i think maybe number nine why do you think he rates so high what do you consider his finest attributes well as I said I mean I think in terms of what he actually accomplished in his two terms I think you know bringing America back from the the dark time of the 1970s and helping to peacefully end the Cold War but I think you know a lot of a lot of the affection that he won from voters and eventually from from pundits and historians I think had to do with his kind of sunny upbeat nature he was somebody who was very good-natured was very difficult to dislike even if you disliked his policies he was hard to dislike him personally because he was such a gentleman he was always so courteous he he he you know he never engaged in invective or name calling against his opponents and he always uh you know seemed to have the nation's best interest at heart whether you agreed with his policies or not I think you would have to people would have to admit that he was motivated uh by devotion to the country by patriotism uh that he was willing to break with his own party when necessary and I think all those things made him somebody who was able to bridge uh the partisan divide and remember in the 1980s Democrats were still the majority party but Reagan was able to win over a lot of Democrats uh and uh you know I think as as as his presidency has receded into history he's in many ways looked even better and that's I think part of the reason why historians rate him so high is because after he left office the Berlin wall came down the the Soviet Union fell and you know people also looked back on on the Reagan presidency with some nostalgia as a time of bipartisanship and and and the way that Reagan was able to work with Tip O'Neal the speaker of the house to get things done and I think that stands in contrast to the partisan ranker which has characterized American politics in more recent years he was so likable this comes across in your book he was charismatic and charming and he was an actor i mean today in this age of social media and 247 TV don't you think he would really be in his element i mean I don't doubt it i mean he was a master communicator although his medium of communications it was you know movies it was radio it was television I don't know how he would do in the world of social media and you know uh 26word uh social media bites or whatever but I'm sure he would adjust because he was he was truly a master at communicating and one of the things that he was very good at was compressing his message I mean he didn't compress it into social media but he certainly compressed it into sound bites and you know in the 1970s when he was between the governorship ship in the presidency he was giving regular radio addresses many of which he wrote and which were really masterpieces of concision where he could boil down his message into very simple stark language that was very understandable to people and I think that's you know that's the secret to effective communication whatever medium you employ max we used to have something in TV called the fairness doctrine and that's when both sides you know TV had to show both sides reagan wrote this back do you look at that do you draw a straight line from that decision to how media operates today yeah I think that that there is a lot of cause and effect and I think that is one of the unfortunate legacies of the Reagan administration it was the Reagan FCC in 1987 that threw out the fairness doctrine congress tried to revive it but Reagan at the behest of the radio broadcasters vetoed that legislation and that's what I think helped to lead to this very fragmented media landscape with MSNBC Fox News and others i think I mean a lot of it as to be fair is has nothing to do with the fairness doctrine a lot of it has to do with with the internet and social media things that didn't exist in the 1980s uh but there's no question that repealing the fairness doctrine uh has you know contributed to this partisan polarization we see in America and you know Daniel Patrick Moyahan used to say that everybody is entitled to their own views but not people are not entitled to their own facts whereas today people have their own facts quote unquote and so it's very hard to have a commonly agreed upon narrative and I think that's that's part of the reason why uh we're so polarized uh in partisan divisions are so deep [Music] you do write about how well he worked across the aisle how good he was at compromising what do you think he would feel about where we are today what the state of politics well it's hard for me to speak for a president who's been dead for all these years but I'm sure he would be unhappy by the level of partisan posturing uh because he really believed that there was a difference between campaigning and governing and he was able to move beyond a lot of his campaign rhetoric and and do deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington to pass big pieces of legislation to get things done and you know Reagan himself often said that he had you know nothing but contempt for conservatives who want to go over the cliff with their flag flying that was a term he often used and what he often said was "I'd rather get 80% of what I want today and come back for more tomorrow than get nothing."

And he was really somebody who believed in the art of of the possible in politics the art of compromise and I think that's a lot of the reason why he was such a successful governor and and president he wasn't just playing to the base he was actually trying to pass legislation and get things done you write about the assassination attempt that nearly ended this presidency and I I'm quoting from your book you say this was Ronald Reagan's finest hour and this really was grace under pressure wasn't it it really was i mean it was an amazing moment and remember Reagan was somebody who had never seen combat before he was he was in the Air Force in World War II but he spent the entire war on a Hollywood backlot so you know he he didn't have any chance to exhibit bravery under actual fire until he was shot at the very beginning of his presidency and he almost died and came much closer to dying than uh most people realized at the time and yet uh you know when when Nancy went to see him at the hospital where he was literally at death's door and he was joking with her saying you know honey I forgot to duck and then later when he was going to be operated on uh he was joking with the doctors saying you know I hope you're all Republicans i mean that was the quintessential Ronald Reagan even when he was literally dying he was still trying to put people at ease and making jokes and try to make people feel better and when you know a few days later when when the public heard about how he had behaved after being shot it provided a tremendous popularity boost for him because this was really an an example of real life heroism i mean he was really acting a lot like these Warner Brothers heroes of the 1930s when he had worked at Warner Brothers but but those Warner Brothers heroes that was that was movies that was made up that wasn't real life he was actually exhibiting that kind of grace under pressure in real life after having been shot and so I think that really cemented his bond with the American people this bond that was never really broken they people just admired him for the way he behaved and in extreme adversity he was absolutely impressive in that moment but you also write that four-star General Hey not so much well this was Yeah i mean the the Ronald Reagan's shooting was ultimately wound up redowning to his political favor uh but it was the downfall of Al Hey who was the secretary of of state at the time and and you know hey after Reagan was shot hey rushed into uh the White House briefing room and told reporters I'm in charge here which was not true uh because he was the secretary of state was not next in line to the presidency and he just looked like this power mad general who was trying to seize power in this in this moment of national crisis um and that was really the beginning of his downfall and the following year he would be fired by by President Reagan one of the few people he actually fired there's something about time space looking back at history i'm wondering if you could have written this book decades ago or would it have been a totally different book it would have been a totally different book i mean I think I I've really benefited from having the the advantage of of hindsight being able to look at at Reagan through the lens of history in a way that was just not possible right after he left office and that's why it normally takes many decades for good biographies uh to emerge of a president and you know frankly it's it's also it's not just the sweep of history it's also you know changes in in my own life because I was as I write in the book I was somebody who grew up as a as a Reagan supporter i was a young Republican you know re Reagan really helped to make me a Republican and if I were still a Republican I don't think I would be able to look at Reagan's life and record with the kind of objectivity that I I think I've been able to achieve and and so I think it was helpful in that regard that I wound up leaving the Republican party in 2016 becoming an independent i think that gave me you know kind of the the the distance and the neutrality to be able to really assess Reagan with with his strengths and weaknesses in a way that I think would be very hard to do if you if you view yourself as a as a Reagan partisan what qualities do you think are essential for effective leadership what did he show us well Reagan was was once asked how an actor could be president and his reply was "I don't see how anybody but an actor could be president."

And that was kind of the root of his ability to communicate uh he was really that was a hu that's obviously a huge component of the presidency being able to use the world's biggest bully pulpit to to get your message across and he was a genius at that what I write about in the book is that he was a great leader but he was a poor manager because while he was great at inspiring the nation and and giving these wonderful speeches uh he was not really involved in the nitty-gritty of governance and he often didn't know what his aids were doing that's why there were so many scandals during his presidency Iran Contra being the worst one of those and he was often you know very remote from the actual process of of running the government or passing legislation so more than most presidents he was really dependent on having good aids and when he had good aids for example in his first term when he had Jim Baker as his White House chief of staff he got a lot done because Jim Baker was one of the most effective chiefs of staff in in in in US history but then his second term he got into trouble right away because he allowed Jim Baker to switch jobs with Don Rean the Secretary of the Treasury and and Rean turned out to be a terrible chief of staff because as Jim Baker said to me you know Don's problem was he liked the chief part of the title but he didn't understand that he was staff and so he he he got a very you know swollen head and thought that he was the president and he did not really advise the the actual president very well so you know Reagan's governorship and presidency were kind of up and down depending on whether he had effective aids around him or not but he was always an effective communicator no matter what else was going on and he always knew how to how to inspire the nation the book is Reagan his life and legend the New York Times has listed it in its top 10 books of 2024 max Boot what an honor thank you so much for spending your time with us truly a pleasure to be on thank you i'm Anne Bok please join me on the next Between the Covers [Music] heat heat [Music]