By Reagan And His Times
Post
Sunday, April 17, 2005; BW13

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan quoted Thomas Paine as saying that Americans had the power to "begin the world over again." Did Reagan really change the world? His admirers argue that he dismantled the welfare state, destroyed the philosophy of communism and led a "Reagan Revolution" that spread liberty to the ends of the Earth. "God always has a man for the hour," the Rev. Jerry Falwell once said grandiosely of Reagan. "Without firing a single shot," his former domestic-policy adviser Martin Andersen has argued, Reagan helped end the Cold War and bring about "an extraordinary intellectual change" that saved free-market ideas from a communist onslaught. But other authors describe Reagan as more of a pragmatist than a revolutionary -- a politician who gauged the public mood and refused to cling dogmatically to right-wing notions about the role that government should play in Americans' lives. The biographer Lou Cannon, for instance, has argued that Reagan's much-celebrated economic policies, based on his first-term budgets, amounted to "mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to 'rebuild the foundation of our society.' " And even the man himself had mixed feelings about whether or not he had led something that could properly be called a revolution. "For me," Reagan told Americans in his January 1989 farewell address, "it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense." Three new books take up the question of whether Reagan drastically altered American politics or pushed ahead a cautious conservative consensus through his forceful personality and penchant for compromise.

Craig Shirley chronicles Reagan's first run for the White House in Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (Nelson Current, $25.99), a vividly written tale of this largely forgotten campaign. In 1976, Reagan's "revolutionary challenge" to the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, enhanced Reagan's stature in national politics, setting the stage for his victorious 1980 presidential campaign. Furthermore, the former California governor's campaign demonstrated that conservatism was increasing in power as a force in the Republican Party, inspiring the "soldiers and captains and generals" to become active in "Reagan's Revolution" after his '76 campaign ended.

In the GOP in 1975-76, two camps warred with each other: conservatives, who were a smaller faction, and moderates, who dominated the White House and the party's machinery (including such aides as the young Dick Cheney). Siding with the party's conservative wing, Reagan argued that Ford had proposed raising taxes on Americans, pursued a morally obtuse live-and-let-live policy of détente with the Soviet Union and signed the Helsinki Accords, which conservatives condemned as "the new Yalta" for including, as one critic put it, "a de facto recognition of Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe." And conservatives were further infuriated when First Lady Betty Ford told CBS News's "60 Minutes" that -- in Shirley's words -- she "condoned abortion, marijuana use, and extramarital affairs."

Reagan's campaign got off to a rocky start. By mid-March 1976, he had lost the first five primaries, including key states like New Hampshire and Florida. So, in the friendly confines of the South, he decided to excoriate the president. Reagan launched an "ideological holy war" against Ford in North Carolina in a last-ditch effort to save his candidacy, charging that Ford had appeased the Soviet Union, handed out so much federal largesse to North Carolinians that Reagan nicknamed him "Santa Claus" and virtually given away the Panama Canal to Panama. "It's ours! We built it!" Reagan thundered. "We paid for it! And we should keep it!" Reagan's tough talk energized the influential Sen. Jesse Helms and many less prominent supporters. The rhetoric paid off; Reagan won the North Carolina primary by more than 12,000 votes.

He had saved himself from "political oblivion," Shirley argues. Reagan went on to win primaries in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, California and other states, most of them in the conservative Sunbelt. But he ultimately fell short, losing to Ford at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City by a mere 117 delegates.

Reagan's Revolution describes its hero in rapturous terms. Shirley, a Washington-based Republican political consultant, credits Reagan with almost single-handedly winning the Cold War and ensuring that "democratic capitalism" became "the accepted governing model the world over," assertions that only Reagan's legions of fans will find persuasive. Shirley also describes Reagan in heroic terms, hailing him as "a successful Governor . . . a loving father [and] a devoted husband who was deeply religious." This smart study of a key moment in Reagan's career would have been stronger without the overkill.

Unlike Shirley, John Ehrman undercuts the Reagan-as-revolutionary idea in The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (Yale Univ., $27.50). The author of an earlier book on neoconservatism, Ehrman argues that Reaganism was above all an economic philosophy anchored in a pragmatic governing approach. Some in Reagan's corner hoped that he would lead an ideological revolution in the White House, but he never did. Instead, as Ehrman ably argues in this well-researched book, he cut taxes and negotiated with non-conservatives on budget issues. To the dismay of those he called the "die-hard conservatives" in a 1985 interview, he refused to "jump off the cliff with the flag flying . . . if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I'm trying to get." In August 1981, Reagan signed into law the largest tax cut in U.S. history, slashing income taxes for those in the highest bracket to 50 percent, down from 70 percent. But when he faced a recession, "exploding" deficits and rising interest rates in late 1981, he proved that conservatives had what it took to govern effectively. He agreed to enact three tax hikes, including a measure that accelerated a previously scheduled increase in the Social Security payroll tax.

Ehrman argues that a conservative political consensus overturned its post-World War II liberal predecessor during the Reagan years. By presiding over a period of sustained economic expansion, Reagan defined conservatism through his economic policies, and an American public demoralized by stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis applauded him for it. Living standards improved, consumption dramatically increased, and the number of shopping centers increased by two-thirds with "real benefits [flowing] to real people." Americans flocked to the suburbs; "content" and "optimistic about the future," they felt "pleased with [Reagan's] performance."

Ehrman's narrative, though provocative, downplays the dissent and conflict that rippled throughout the Reagan era. The author too quickly dismisses post-Carter liberalism as having simply run out of ideas -- providing "only visions of despair" and plagued by such less-than-scintillating candidates as Walter Mondale -- without explaining how those supposedly politically impotent Democrats could have won the White House four years after Reagan left it. Ehrman frames Reagan as an unquestionably positive economic force without fully exploring the divisive or destructive parts of his record, including his staggering federal budget deficits.

Finally, in Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton Univ., $29.95), Gil Troy finds an American society that prospered in the 1980s even as it was caught in the grip of an identity crisis. Reagan was not a revolutionary leader in any ideological sense. Rather, argues Troy, his administration was a "cultural and political phenomenon" that inspired Americans to feel "better about themselves and their country," ushering in "an Era of Good Feelings" and "capitalist renewal" that prized materialism and "untrammeled individualism" more than other values. Troy writes that Reagan's rhetorical skills, coupled with his image-making abilities, allowed him to forge a bond with Americans. And he was shrewd in backing off his goal of upending the '60s-era social gains that women, African Americans and other groups had achieved.

Troy, a historian at Montreal's McGill University, nicely describes how American culture in the '80s tore at the national social fabric. Outrageously materialistic TV shows like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" enjoyed wide audiences, but they also exposed the underbelly of a country where pearls, junk bonds and Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" became touchstones of the times. And Troy also reminds us that issues like AIDS and affirmative action roiled debates on campus and in the White House. Morning in America provides a year-by-year account of a changing society and roams the landscape of American culture and Reagan's connection to it. But Reagan is often out of focus, alternatively caricatured as "the Wizard of America's Id," "a maestro of materialism" and "the saber-rattler."

Troy also uses a literary device that falls flat: He inserts a fictional couple, the Smiths, in the introduction and the last chapter as a typical family embodying the era's changes in the middle class. It's not nearly as egregious as Edmund Morris's insertion of fictional characters into Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan , but it still undermines good research and distracts readers from the more serious arguments about Reagan's influence on American culture.

In the end, then, the issue these authors face boils down to a question of causation. Reagan helped alter the balance in the GOP, rejiggered the national debate over taxes and deficits, and steered U.S. culture toward materialism. He also helped unleash lasting and revolutionary forces inside the Republican Party. But, as these three books together reveal, the question of whether Reagan was primarily responsible for the dramatic changes in America's culture, economy and politics that happened on his watch remains highly debatable. That argument will not be settled anytime soon. ?

Matthew Dallek is the author of "The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics."