'Reagan: The Life,' by H.W. Brands: Sober, balanced look at a legacy

Reagan

The Life

By H.W. Brands

Doubleday. 805 pages. $35

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Reviewed by

Bob Hoover

nolead ends With the return of a menacing Russia, H.W. Brands' biography of the man who occupied the Oval Office during the final days of the Cold War takes on added relevance - enough to push Reagan: The Life to the top of the Everest-like heap of books about the 40th president.

Brands, a University of Texas historian, acknowledges the Ronald Reagan bookshelf is sagging under the weight of numerous biographies, memoirs (including Nancy Reagan's), oral histories, official documents, and recordings of Reagan's performances as movie and TV actor.

More than previous books, however, Brands' work draws richly from Reagan's presidential diaries and other recently released sources that earlier biographers couldn't tap. Particularly revealing is the transcript of Reagan's testimony in 1992 before the commission investigating the Iran-Contra operation during his second term.

The former president's responses reveal the extent of his Alzheimer's disease, the mental confusion that led him to say, "It was like I was never president at all." Brands tactfully avoids conjecture that the disease's onset began while Reagan was in the White House - and might have caused his inattention to detail. Less tactful historians have suggested better attention might have prevented the illegal arms-for-hostages deals.

Though Brands agrees the inner life of Reagan was as shadowy as his memory, he is more interested in his subject's political record than in his motivations.

Perhaps he learned from the peculiar experience of Edmund Morris, the historian whose first installment of his Theodore Roosevelt biography granted him wide access to the White House when he signed on to profile Reagan.

The result was the 1999 work Dutch, a fumbling, almost desperate effort to capture Reagan's persona when the cameras weren't running. Morris was so frustrated, despite hours attending presidential meetings, that he fictionalized an alter ego called Dutch, invented dialogue, and "imagined" what Reagan was thinking.

Brands, instead, sticks to the record. After opening the book with almost perfunctory chapters on Reagan's life before the White House, he devotes 498 pages to his presidency, focusing on foreign policy, particularly with the Kremlin and the Reagan administration's massive defense spending, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as "Star Wars."

His history of the important meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is detailed and balanced, with the views of both sides given equal weight. These chapters are Brands' best writing, reinforcing the significance of those arms-reduction efforts and both men's insistence on ending the threat of nuclear weapons.

Facing the enormous amount of material engendered by the Reagan years, Brands steers a middle course, careful to qualify the views of friends and foes while avoiding judgment. This approach, however, produces a bland, straightforward account of a pivotal era in American history and smooths out the rough and sometimes darker moments of Reagan's behavior.

Rick Perlstein's 2014 book, Invisible Bridge, a history of Reagan's early presidential efforts, is far more fun reading, albeit a tad hyperbolic, about the country's political state in the 1970s, which gave rise to Reagan's success. Brands' unexciting chapters on that topsy-turvy decade pay little attention to the social and political forces after Watergate and Vietnam.

Reagan: The Life is a sober, slightly academic biography of one of the nation's most popular and controversial presidents whose 2004 funeral had all the trappings of royalty. Brands' Reagan remains as enigmatic and unknowable as always.