Reagan: His Life and Legend

By Max Boot

Liveright 2024

Since Ronald Reagan was a life-long adept of self-mythologizing, and since he encouraged everybody around him to mythologize, and since he’s been one of the most intensely mythologized figures in US history in the years since his death, his biographers are confronted with a choice and a task. Will they indulge in the same kind of mythologizing, or will they spend time in their books pulling ivy off walls in order to present the man without the mythology? 

Max Boot’s long-awaited 800-page new book, Reagan: His Life and Legend is formidably researched, with 50 pages of notes, a bibliography that’s nearly 20 pages long, and plenty of original interviews. It joins Bob Spitz’s 2018 Reagan: An American Journey as one of the 21st century’s few genuine attempts to position Reagan squarely on the stage of history, watching the ivy-growth of the man’s mythology but never actively contributing to it. 

Boot often seems to court that mythology, mentioning at one point that Reagan’s life “in a sense” seems to typify a core Horatio Alger bit of the American success story: “poor boy makes good.” But Boot’s account of Reagan’s early years sets the tone for the rest of the book in being an appealingly controlled combination of investigative rigor and a frankly open sympathy with the man himself.

Like many US Presidents, Reagan would have merited a biography (though not a thousand) even if he’d never reached the White House. Boot’s book doesn’t get Reagan elected until the half-way point, spending a wonderfully atmospheric amount of time on Reagan’s years as a Hollywood actor and governor of California. From an early start and running throughout the book is Boot’s underlying characterization of his subject, described as “congenitally incapable of deception.” Reagan’s “superpower,” according to Boot, was his ability to reshape his own reality to conform to how he wanted it to be, rather than how it was. This allowed him “to avoid any second thoughts and always convinced him that he was acting in conformity with his highest ideals – even when he was not.”

This is shrewd but obviously worrying, since it certainly seems on the surface to be intent on the favorite sin of Reagan biographers: absolution. Boot’s central claim that Reagan’s “pragmatism was always sheathed in the armor of moral certitude” too often looks like a defense instead of the damning condemnation it actually is. When writing about Reagan’s posturing surrounding the Iran-Contra scandal, for instance, Boot writes, “He genuinely believed it, even though it wasn’t true.” 

This tack, the naturally unprovable excusing of some historical figure from imputations of guile or evil, is the typical starting point for biographers intent on cleaning monuments rather than tearing them down. Luckily, Boot doesn’t follow it down the path to hagiography; he’s clearly fond of his subject (an uncanny number of people in Reagan’s personal life felt an almost irresistible urge to like him), but this is even so a fundamentally clear-headed and even sometimes sharp-edged account of one of the most significant presidencies in US history. 

As readers of his earlier books will know, Boot is excellent at writing nonfiction that’s as smart as it is page-turning. His characterizations of the personalities surrounding Reagan are all vivid, from Secretary of State General Alexander Haig (“thin-skinned, turf-conscious, and self-aggrandizing” doesn’t feel harsh enough, but it’s actually quite fair) to Soviet leader Gorbachev, “an unusually decent and intelligent person who perceived the failures of the Soviet system and was determined to do something about them even if it meant diminishing his own power.”

And always at the center of things is the man himself, who was a smiling mystery even to people who’d worked with him or known him for years. Boot quotes from quite a few of these people as they politely recount how baffled they could be while wondering if there was actually anything going on beneath the jokes and anecdotes. Like many earlier Reagan biographers, Boot seems comfortable with the idea that the only person who actually ever knew Reagan was his second wife, Nancy. Karen Tumulty, Nancy Reagan’s great biographer, provides an appreciative blurb for Boot’s book.

Ultimately, Boot mostly exonerates. When his subject is directly involved in some wrongdoing, he’s sheathed by his own sincere belief in what he’s doing. And when there’s no possibility of self-deception, his subject is conveniently therefore not involved. “Reagan’s inattention to management and his general hostility to government allowed chaos and corruption to run rampant at many agencies,” Boot writes. “The Reagan team was not consciously trying to appoint incompetent or corrupt leaders, but it frequently did — and thereby helped discredit the government it loathed.” It’s a neat, dangerous arrangement: hate the Presidential sin, not the Presidential sinner. 

“Reagan was far from ordinary,” Boot writes, “but he had an innate understanding of ordinary Americans, at least ordinary white Americans, that carried him a long way in his storybook life.” Parts of this are predictably wrong: Reagan had no “innate” understanding of “ordinary” Americans, and he hardly had a “storybook” life, as Boot himself demonstrates in the course of his book (which, if anything, consistently shows a stunningly ordinary man). But even so, Reagan: His Life and Legend represents a significant advance on most Reagan biographies offered to a general readership. There’s affection, yes, but there’s a massive amount of documentation as well. Future biographers working outside the glow of the man will need to read this book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News