Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years

National Review, May 27, 1991 by James Bowman

IF KITTY KELLEY's book on Nancy Reagan is the sleaziest of recent exercises in Reagan revisionism, Sleepwalking through History is perhaps the most typical. Miss Kelley writes, however, odiosly, for the gossip is all of us; Haynes Johnson writes only for people who think in cliches, and especially that complete set of them that every liberal seems to possess on the subject of Mrs. Reagan's husband. The book is also a warning--what its author's slipshod prose describes as a "cautionary warning"--about what can happen when daily journalists attempt to transform thamselves into historians.

On a daily newspaper, the conviction that civilization as we know it is on the verge of extinction is a useful habit of mind. Like the cliffhanger ending in the old Saturday-morning movie serials, it keeps your audience, forgetful that the impending catastrophe never seems to arrive, coming back for more. Books of history, however, tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and readers of this history of the Eighties will be puzzled that the doom predicted in the beginning and middle is in the end deferred to another decade.

Hence the title. Johnson is forever telling his readers that they don't know even now what hair's-breadth scapes they have had from what horripilant dangers and disasters--or what even greater disasters may yet result from the errors and the evils of Reaganism. That American voters could have been wide awake and in full possession of their senses and twice have elected Ronald Reagan by landslides is a thought unthinkable to him. It therefore follows that they have only managed to negotiate the decade in question as the sleepwalker in the old Saturday-morning cartoons (was it Olive Oyl?) did the skyscraper girder-work: by blissful ignorance of how close to the edge they were. It is Haynes Johnson's mission in life to wake them up.

Such firecrackers as he is able to set off in this feeble volume are unlikely to do the job. How, for example, can anyone go on believing that the 1987 stock-market crash was a disaster for the economy and evidence of all that was wrong with Reaganism? How is it discreditable to Ronald Reagan that his response to the crash was to assert, in words that remind Johnson of Herbert Hoover, that "the underlying economy remains sound"? Have not subsequent events proved his assessment perfectly correct? Why should we be "outraged" at the sudden loss of half a trillion dollars of national "wealth" (like most of his persuasion, Johnson confuses money and wealth) when, in a matter of months, we had it all back again and more?

A real fizzler, you think? Your reckon without the Saturday-morning fabulist's ingenuity. "How close the New York Stock Exchange, and with it the world's financial system, came to extinction then," he tells us, "was never appreciated by the general public." But Haynes Johnson, the gimlet-eyed intelligencer whose task it is to watch out for that public, did appreciate its peril and cites the opinion of "a number of experts," none of whose names he can remember, who believe that the market's recovery "was the product of deliberate manipulation by a few major firms in a desperate attempt to save the markets by inducing a rise in the Dow." Even if the more common explanation for the rebound, the Fed's easing of credit, be credited, he says, it amounted to a surrender of Reaganism to Haynesian economics: it was "the very hand of the Federal Government that Reagan and the supply-siders had railed against."

I wonder what the "extinction" of the world's financial markets would have entailed exactly. Would they have closed their doors forever like so may failed dry-goods stores or ice-cream shops? Once they were no longer worth trading, would shares in the equity of GM of IBM have been handed out as souvenirs to people taking the factory tour? Johnson does not attempt to imagine his unimaginable future, nor does he explain why, if "major firms" have the powers of manipulation his unnamed experts attribute to them, they do not use them all the time to "induce" rises in the Dow; why, indeed, should the average ever decline? And if the Federal Reserve counts as the "hand of the Federal Government" which consistency demanded that Reagan oppose, was he also a hypocrite for accepting Secret Service protection? Does Johnson acknowledge any middle way between Haynesianism and no government?

The melodramatic muse is untroubled by such questions. Like the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers, Haynes Johnson whispers: "I wants to make your flesh creep." Complex economic issues are thus reduced to cartoon-drama hyperbole in a way that both distorts them and misrepresents basic facts. So, for instance, Johnson tells us at one point that "by 1989, the budget deficit represented a debt of about $45,000 for every family in America." Either he is assuming forty-member "families" here or he is off by a factor of ten. Could it be that Johnson has confused the budget deficit with the national debt?