A Mix of Insight and Bromides

The author refuses to demonize nor canonize Ronald Reagan.

The Age of Reagan

By Sean Wilentz

Published by HarperCollins, New York,

Available at Kinokuniya Books

Reviewed by James Eckardt

Special to The Nation

Sean Wilentz has produced a massive tome of American political history called The Age of Reagan (HarperCollins, New York, 2008, 458pp) which covers the years from 1974 to 2008. His contention is that just like the Age of Jackson or the Age of Roosevelt covered decades past their presidential terms (Roosevelt's political legacy spanned 1932 till 1968 or from the New Deal to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society), so Reagan's influence stretched from the Ford to the George W. Bush administration.

      Reagan's political ideology was simple: cut taxes and the role of the Federal government while boosting military spending. Abroad, confront the Russian Evil Empire wherever it reared its ugly head.

       "How successfully Reagon accomplished what he set out to do is one of this book's basic themes," Wilentz writes in his Introduction. "Another theme concerns how much these successes and failures actually had to do with conservative ideology about supply-side economics and confronting the Soviet Union and its proxies around the globe (the heart of what became known as the Reagan Doctrine).

      "The conclusions I have reached differ greatly from those advanced with increasing fervor in recent years by Reagan's admirers. They differ from those of his most vociferous critics. And they differ in several ways from the conclusions I would have expected myself to draw about Reagan's presidency and about much else when I began work on this book several years ago."

        Most valuable is the author's account of the rise of conservative ideology. Once considered a fringe movement with only a few respectable bastions like William F. Buckley's National Review magazine, As the Democrats disintegrated into squabbling special interest groups which helped doom Jimmy Carter's presidency, The Republicans were getting their act together. Think tanks, neoconservative magazines and radio shows, political action groups that brought together disaffected evangelicals, Southern resisters to school desegregation and the northern largely Catholic working class, all came together in a movement that revolted again the excesses of the 1960s. Their takeover of the Republican Party from the moderate wing was swift.

      "The new right would not have to slog through the party trenches to win national power; instead it could engineer a corporate funded takeover that, in time, would turn the Republican Party into a wholly owned subsidiary of conservative movement," the author writes. "The major requirement for advancing the takeover was for the new right to unite in 1980 behind a national candidate - a relatively simple matter, given the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan."

       Wilentz quotes Reagan saying at the beginning of his term that his overall strategy derived from show business: create a great entrance, slack off a bit, then rally for a slam bam finish. So his term turned out: initial years of great success in turning the country around, a nadir during the Iran-Contra scandal, and a rousing finish with his cooperation with Russia'sl Gorbachev to reach agreement and end the Cold War. In the process, Reagan ditched his hard-line advisers for more moderate pragmatists - a process that would repeat itself in the administration of George W. Bush.

      There are any number of keen insights in this book but also a huge amount of boilerplate as the author trudges through 34 years of American policy making. Alas too, he is not a particularly gifted writer.. A long section on the Clinton years is just boring old news but is included to show how the conservative movement against him turned rancid, taken over by fierce, shrill,. and often corrupt, ideologues.

        To his credit, the author refuses to demonize nor canonize Ronald Reagan. His genius was his sunny good humor coupled with a shrewd pragmatism. This was something he learned during his two terms as governor of California.

        "Reagan displayed his greatest skills as a behind-the-scenes, bipartisan negotiator - listening as well as preaching, compromising when necessary with Democratic legislators, then taking the lion's share of credit for whatever was achieved."

         This was a skills set, Wilentz notes, that Bush junior utterly failed to put to use, thus marking the end of the Age of Reagan.