The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
By William Kleinknecht
324 pages, $26.95
Nation Books: New York
February 2009
The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War
By James Mann
Hardcover: 416 pages, $27.95
Viking Adult: New York, March 2009
The effects of the policies of the 40th president of the United States are currently reverberating throughout the economy in more dramatic ways than at any time since his departure from office. Deregulation, privatization and the glorification of corporate business interests over that of working citizens have led to the economic meltdown in which we find ourselves, and never has there been a more opportune time to revisit the impact of Ronald Reagan.
Of the two books on review today, William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World is by far the most condemnatory and the most sweeping in indictment—to the point where even the harshest of critics may become uncomfortable with the one-sided, black-and-white presentation on display for over 300 pages. A few thousand words of bitter broadside is one thing; tens of thousands is another. Still, it's a compelling work for Reagan critics to have on the shelf, handy for reference. Just don't plan on handing it off to a fence-sitter and have it persuade.
Kleinknecht's emphasis goes far beyond Reagan's effect on the economy. The Gipper also ushered in, according to the author, an age of vulgarity and selfishness unparalleled in American history. He was a culture warrior of the worst kind, he argues, lowering standards in every area he touched:
He laid the foundation for a new global economic order in which nationhood would gradually become meaningless. He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. This supposed guardian of traditional values was the architect of wrenching social change that swept across the country in the 1980s, the emergence of an eerie, overcommercialized, postmodern America that has left so much of the populace psychically adrift. Reagan propelled the transition to hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest and profit to seek to make a final rout of traditional human values. His legacy--mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization--helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and the sense of community.
Kleinknecht spends more of the book than one would expect making an argument—ultimately, a solid one—that the economic devastation wreaked by Reagan's policies isn't even the half of it. It has been in the cultural arena, and in how Americans think about themselves and their country, that the effects of his presidency have been the most deleterious. The crass materialism, the commodification of just about everything, the unabashed (even proud) elevation of personal selfishness over the communal good—all of this and more can be considered the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
"By discrediting government as a legitimate and meaningful presence in the lives of Americans," Kleinknecht asserts, "Reagan repudiated the very concept of national leadership." It is this aspect of the Reagan years, of course, that most sticks in the craws of liberals—that the man who wrapped himself in the flag and considered patriotism his private domain expressed the most disdain for his country's government. The insidious backwash of this attitude, as the author notes, has not been passed down only to the current generation of conservatives:
It has become received wisdom, even among many liberals, that the U.S. government, which waged war simultaneously in the Atlantic and Pacific in the 1940s, rebuilt the industrial capacity of Europe and Japan in the 1950s, developed railroads, the computer, the nuclear bomb and the Internet, and put a man on the moon, is a morass of inefficient bureaucrats that cannot be trusted to solve any of the domestic problems facing the United States in the twenty-first century.
Reagan's folkish appeal and down-home hucksterism managed to hit the perfect pitch just as the public relations industry was shifting its footing from Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, and it was a wedding of politics and PR that forever changed the political landscape of America. As the famous spokesman for corporate America as the voice and face of General Electric, Reagan entered the electoral arena—and especially the run for the presidency—with an army of flacks and hacks, the ancestors of the perpetual spinmeisters and bullshit artists that hang around every part of the presidential process today.
And so the pattern was set: Every president who followed Reagan would be squired by image consultants and pollsters; the Washington press corps would not be informed of the government's real activities but distracted and manipulated; speeches would be filled with meaningless drivel; and the public would come to regard politicians as no more worthy of trust than used car salesman.
Kleinknecht for the most part focuses on the big picture, the big bullshit, the big sell. There are occasional short-cuts he takes to zoom him from subject to subject via quick character assessments; he looks at Reagan's rootlessness, distant friendships and relationships, and early dysfunctional family life, but he obviously aims for, and hits, the big polemic "pow!" that he elucidates as his goal near the beginning of the book:
This book is an effort to tell the story that architects of the Reagan propaganda machine have so zealously tried to suppress, an account of what the political cynicism and free-market zealotry of our fortieth president have done to America; how his legacy has decimated small-town life and undermined values that were once at the core of traditional conservatism; how it altered the American character by implanting an exaggerated sense of self-interest in every one of us at the expense of communitarian values.
Given what Klein set out to do, his book should be counted an unqualified success, if the reader is already predisposed to share his attitude (as most on Daily Kos, one assumes, are).
James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan though is a horse of an entirely different color. Instead of the macro denouncing broad sweep, Mann looks in studious detail at the one seeming deviation in Reagan's presidency: his refusal to trust his fellow anti-communist conservative advisors when they uniformly warned him to avoid working with Mikhail Gorbachev. As the author documents, everyone from Nixon and Kissinger to James Baker and George Will voiced full-throated objections to Reagan's approach. Nixon even undertook a secret White House visit to give the new boy a talking to, a meeting that from Mann's account must have proved frustrating indeed to the reclusive former giant of foreign policy. On display in that meeting, told in loving detail near the opening of the book, are all the Reagan trademarks opponents of his policy would encounter over the ensuing years of attempted persuasion: deflection, non-commitment, seemingly mindless storytelling, apparent inattention to detail ... and then a president who would go ahead and executive exactly what he intended to execute all along.
It's clear from the outset that the subject at the heart of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a much more complex character than the one in Kleinknecht's book. Mann's tone is measured and less judgmental, and he delves deeply into the contradictions between the steadfastly combative anti-Communist rhetoric of Reagan over decades and his willingness to believe the best of a Communist leader once they came to grips.
Reagan was content to leave everyone with the impression that he was a man of simple principles, a leader utterly without cunning. He was often taken to be merely the instrument of others; at first of the political right and in later years, of a "moderate" group of officials, including [George] Schultz. These impressions sometimes seemed to make sense until the people thought to be controlling Reagan would unexpectedly lose a major policy battle (or occasionally, their own jobs).
Reagan's way of avoiding extended explanations was to offer a few deflecting phrases that would shut off discussion.... Reagan had an ego, but in his particular case, the ego wasn't at all in the words or justifications he uttered .... When his actions sometimes didn't seem to fit with the principles he had laid out, Reagan simply restated those principles and left it to others to wrestle with the contradictions. Because he was so opaque, Reagan could not be understood through his words alone or through his actions alone.
Mann carefully, incident by incident, leads the reader through the many diplomatic gates and hurdles Reagan took to get to the Berlin Wall speech and ultimately, to fruitful discussions with Gorbachev. The backtracking (and backbiting) of conservatives in their support for their hero is explored, as is the unusual embrace of Democrats as he not only gave Gorbachev on his side of the world public cover to pressure his country for change, but utilized back channels to keep communication open (such as pop culture Russian historian Suzanne Massie).
Driving all this unexpected, deflective stubbornness on Reagan's part—his absolute unwillingness to listen to the conservative foreign policy establishment—was that trait we learned to abhor in George W. Bush: reliance on "gut feeling" and reading of character. It's not a huge leap from Reagan's trust in Gorbachev to Bush's swoon over Putin's eyes, and these sorts of judgments obviously should give serious pause to fans of relying heavily on personal relationships for international diplomacy.
Still, there's an irony in that in Reagan's case, this kind of instinctual governing led to some of his most "liberal" stances. Not unexpected, of course, is his susceptibility to being swayed through the medium of entertainment.
In the fall of 1983, at the height of the nuclear freeze movement, ABC television produced the movie The Day After, an account of what would happen to a single town, Lawrence, Kansas, in a nuclear war. In the film, Kansas City was hit by nuclear missiles, and nearby Lawrence suffered from the fall-out of the attack. After viewing a tape before it was aired, Reagan wrote in his diary that it was "very effective and left me very depressed .... My own reaction: we have to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war." Not long afterward, Reagan was again briefed on nuclear war planning in the White House Situation Room, and he wrote that it reminded him of the movie. "Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was 'winnable,'" Reagan observed. "I thought they were crazy."
Yes, Ronald Reagan became an ardent advocate for the elimination of all nuclear weapons based on a made-for-TV movie. It's probably best to simply be relieved he came around to the view rather than dwell on the means of arriving there, but one shudders to think where we'd have been had 24 been airing during his presidency.
Of the two books under consideration, Mann's ultimately is the most satisfying—the technique of focusing on one area or incident and teasing nuances of character out from it seems to be one of the most successful in the genre of biographical assessment. Kleinknecht's, however, is a robust, unapologetically critical take that is a quicker read and heartier jolt of ammo for those seeking to trace back today's woes to the Reagan generation. Together, they combine as an interesting point and counterpoint of outrage and complexity that opens the door to thinking about the long-term effects of even the most casually undertaken policies in a presidential administration—food for thought even if one is totally supportive of any given president and his philosophy, something to keep in mind as the current administration governs.