Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader

National Review, Oct 27, 1997 by Matthew Scully

Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, by Dinesh D'Souza (Free Press, 304 pp., $25)

Mr. Scully, formerly NR's literary editor, was later a speechwriter for Vice President Quayle.

WE are still waiting for the definitive biography of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris, the Kenyan-born biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris was set up as in-residence historian at the White House in 1985. He followed Reagan back to California, and at last report was wrapping things up. His New Yorker essay a few years ago reflecting on Reagan's farewell letter to America ("I now begin the long journey into the twilight of my life . . .") showed a nice touch. A C-SPAN interview last summer raised hopes still higher, confirming my own sense that it takes an outsider to really size up so big and familiar and thoroughly American a character. It has been nearly nine years since Reagan left office, twelve years since Morris's project began, but masterpieces take time and I don't want to add to the pressures and expectations he already faces. Let's just say it had better be good.

As an entree, Dinesh D'Souza's Ronald Reagan is recommended reading. Best known for his 1991 Illiberal Education, a critique of political correctness, and his 1995 The End of Racism, a case against affirmative action, D'Souza has a calm, reasonable style that seems to land his books in that much more controversy. He displays that style here, too, and the subject can use it. So far, most Reagan books have come from people with too big a stake in his reputation one way or the other, typically adoring, exploitative, back-biting, patronizing, ungrateful, or a little of each. D'Souza, who was a domestic-policy advisor in 1987 - 88, is the rare former aide concerned that Reagan himself be given his due.

The economic growth of the Eighties and the end of the Cold War were, we now hear, "inevitable." They would have come about anyway. Ronald Reagan just happened to be there when the economy took a sudden upswing unlike any other in history. And of course: We paid a big price for it and the rich got richer and it was a decade of greed and trickle-down theory and $800 toilet seats and what about the deficit and voodoo economics and tax breaks and people were living in cars and Milken and sleaze and the shrinking middle class and Reagan napping while senior citizens were eating dog food and cruel budget cuts and what kind of people were we anyway?

As for the end of the Cold War, we're just lucky Reagan didn't muff it and blow us all to kingdom come. Thank God for Gorbachev, the Man Who Changed the World!

We shall be hearing this bit for all eternity, but Mr. D'Souza has done a great service by going back to collect the warnings and prophecies of Reagan's critics before the greatest peacetime economic expansion ever and victory in the long twilight struggle were understood, Revelation-like, to be inexorable. Arguments for inevitability are always more convincing if aired before the Inevitable has occurred. In the event, D'Souza reminds us, only Reagan himself truly believed they could happen, pursuing both with equal disregard for derision from the Left and second-guessing from the Right.

"The stench of failure," said a 1983 New York Times editorial, "hangs over Ronald Reagan's White House." This was after the tax cuts during the "Reagan Recession," which even now somehow never gets paired with the "Reagan Recovery." Unless the President abandoned this madness we faced imminent ruin. "A new, completely different strategy is needed," volunteered MIT's Lester Thurow, and let it begin with a massive public-works program.

Abroad, we were staring into the abyss. Here D'Souza's account fills one with nostalgia for those days of massive "nuclear freeze" rallies; panic in Europe over the Pershing missile; ABC's The Day After; "Nuclear Countdown" clocks on every American college campus, the hands set at five minutes before annihilation; Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth; the American Catholic bishops' pastoral letter all but urging unilateral disarmament. And all the rest of it.

Ronald Reagan "is the most dangerous person ever to come close to the Presidency," warned The Nation. "He is a menace to the human race." His "confrontational style," yelped Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, was "terribly dangerous." "In the real world . . . there is no escape from the hard work of relating to the Soviet Union."

The Soviet Union, declared Seweryn Bailer in a 1982 Foreign Affairs essay, "is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true economic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."

"Those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse," cautioned Arthur Schlesinger Jr., are "wishful thinkers" merely "kidding themselves."

The President, said Time's Strobe Talbot (who now heads up Russia policy for the Clinton State Department), "is counting on American technological and economic performance to prevail in the end." This was foolish, for if the Soviets were in any kind of crisis "it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the USSR has learned to live."