What's A Good Biography of Ronald Reagan

Sean Willentz's The Age of Reagan (which I need to read) inspires this debate on Slate between Willentz and Tim Naftali.

What's A Good Biography of Ronald Reagan

A dead one?

While not strictly a bio, Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue provides a nuanced portrayal of Reagan's leadership style and the infighting among his top advisers, esp. as it relates to the "Star Wars" program.

I disagree with the Dutch dissing – the second half dealing with the adminstration is written with Morris' usual flair, and he gets off quite a few one-liners at the Gipper's expense.

Here's an article to forward to annoying relatives who are also Reagan worshippers.

alfred, did you ever get around to reading that wilentz book? i keep thinking of picking it up, but memories of wilentz's slimy anti-obama campaign back in '08 (and an awful, gloating 'i told you so' piece he did recently for the new republic) keep putting me off.

wilentz strikes me as a self-regarding idiot: one of those writers who sets off into a position i basically agree with and presents it so lousily i end up challopsing myself for a week

garry wills is always worthwhile, unless he's really fallen off a lot -- even his john wayne book has interesting stuff in it

(last thing i cold-read by wills was i think something i argued with momus about that he'd linked to on ile)

(i was right and momus wrong, obv)

Wills' Reagan book is one of the first and still illuminating.

Willentz's Age of Reagan is the sort of book you buy your dad on Father's Day: it tells you nothing you don't already know.

we ought to do a poll of nixon books -- wills's is one of the two or three best i've read.

the piece of wilentz's that pissed me off even more than the obama stuff was some review he wrote for the NYT, chastizing liberals for daring to think poorly of james polk and the mexican war. it takes a pretty dedicated party apologist to get worked up on behalf of fuckin' polk.

wait really? Have you a link?

haha am actually rereading wills's book on the gettysburg address right now -- he quotes not-yet-president lincoln (still a whig) schooling polk

right here.

rereading the review, he doesn't make a case for polk so much as use the subject as an excuse to sneer at other historians.

wills should write an essay on the posthumous reagan cult

i remember wills finishing a NYRB piece on reagan during his actual presidency with the one-word warning sentence: "Duck."

Also his excellent defence of Nancy's astrology-based white-house politicking.

(It was post-shooting: GW argued that Donald Regan and etc were eager to get the still quite poorly and elderly Pres back at his desk and before the public, and had all kinds of urgent rational-if-yr-a-pol reason why it mattered that he became super-active again. Rather than try and argue with them in the realm of politics, Nancy -- who actually minded about RR's health on a personal rather than a political-instrumental level -- very smartly retreated to the unbiddable realm of the Zodiac, and established days when "the stars" decreed the President must rest etc. The massed male ranks of high-political operators had no comeback on this level, and could only froth impotently.)

That grinning satrap Baker was chief of staff in Reagan's first term, a part of the infamous "troika" which acted as a palace guard.

The date of Reagan's two meetings with Gorby were planned far in advance with a little help from Jeanne Dixon.

J.D., if you're looking for an insightful "revisionist" bio, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan takes advantage of declassified NSA and KGB documents showing to what extent Reagan bucked the conservative establishment and his own advisers by hitting it off so well with Gorby.

oh yeah -- that one's been on my list for a while.

It gets better.

"It will be a highly visible feature of the airport as people drive onto the property for many years to come," Yingling said.

Read that as 'highly divisive'

As for Willentz, The Rise of Democracy is splendid.

This day can't come soon enough: http://www.amazon.com/The-Invisible-Bridge-Nixon-Reagan/dp/1476782415/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1A8HJ7QANMSFG244K8NX

from Michael O'Donnell's review of the new bio:

Conservatives have a line about standing “athwart” history and yelling stop. It seems ironic to do precisely this when it comes to the canonization of Ronald Reagan. He was not a great president. And the more the conventional wisdom holds otherwise, the more forcefully this must be said. Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War is without question his major achievement, and it was no small feat. Fifty years from now, nothing else about his presidency may matter. But Reagan was also the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society. His anti-government worldview created the no-tax-raised-ever mentality of today’s right. Our store of compassion for the less fortunate dwindled and withered under his smiling influence. Our willingness to undertake cynical and blatantly illegal acts abroad reached its crescendo with Reagan’s machinations in El Salvador and Grenada. We are a more polarized country because of the way Reagan brought right-wing politics into the mainstream. “Trust but verify,” Reagan endlessly said to Gorbachev. Historians must do the same.

lol @ this O'Reilly-Will feud. I finally get to side w/O'Reilly.

300 pages into the role of a lifetime, thanks alfred. pellucid.

partic welcome after the weird shallowness of dutch on the actual presidential years. before that i had hugely enjoyed it, even with its, uh, idiosyncrasies.

I actually preferred Dutch in the prez years: Reagan's last chat with Morris was spooky as hell.

well it's spooky every time he says "they never thanked me"

Just finished this: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/reagan-is-smoke-thomas-mallon-on-finale

I did share Morris' surge of warmth when Reagan says "Hey, Edmund" after actually recognizing him at the conclusion of his last address.

finally, he thought, i have come closer than michael

shoulda put this here... on RR and Alzheimers

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39561/bill-oreilly-reagan-alzheimers/

If it's Edmund we're talking about it's finally, he thought, je suis venu plus près de Michael.

I was gonna post the Pierce but I do too much of it.

But on February 10, the day before Reagan was to testify to the Tower Board a second time, it was obvious to Regan and Wallison that the president was still shaky in his recollections. Wallison drew up what Abshire called an "aide-memoire" to help the president recall what he had told them. At the top Wallison wrote, "On the issue of the TOW shipment in August, in discussing this matter with me and David Abshire, you said you were surprised to learn that the Israelis had shipped the arms. If that is your recollection, and if the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

The question, of course, came up... After a preliminary discussion about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and [Don] Regan's on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around his desk and said to Wallison, "Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?" Then he picked up the paper and began to read: "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

Tower's jaw went slack. It was, as Abshire put it, "a low moment."

ha -- in some of the other accounts he reads that statement from his cue cards, looks up, smiles brightly.

The Reagan Library's been releasing heretofore unseen press conferences and appearances. Here he is without a script -- and coherent!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hy24_iDG6E

oh boy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQaYVEpaoMo

Which Reagan books cover his entire life, without being a hagiography?

The offerings are pretty nauseating, but the critical books seem to be mainly about 80's policy. I'm looking for a real biography that includes his childhood and acting career, but not some Kitty Kelley crap.

I am looking at Bob Spitz's book - anyone familiar with this one?

I'd recommend Dante's Inferno.

Lou Cannon's bio is the standard, and it's not hagiographic.

If you get past the weird fictional armature, Edmund Morris' controversial '99 bio is the most stylish: he can write, and the conversations he records with Reagan get a sense of the president's weird banality.

James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is good on how the national security state and conservative commentariat opposed any rapproachement with Gorby, which Reagan, to his credit, fought against; it's clear that on this instance he was no puppet.

but, yeah, the Spitz one is solid. It's also the first one to address his immediate post-presidency years rotting in Carmel office space or whatever: walking to the park, realizing he needed to carry money for the first time in his life.

Thanks for the recommendations, Alfred! I'd do my own research, but the data stream is so clogged with eagle-clad rubbish that it's difficult to find decent material.

I'm in a Cold War frame of mind as far as my reading lately, thanks for the help.

not a fan of the morris one, boringly enough-- the insights it purports to need the weird fictional armature for are the same insights everybody else manages without it (namely "this guy's kinda off, huh")

lou cannon's stuff on him is excellent

have not read garry wills' book but the reagan material in nixon agonistes is good (+ beautifully written)

still the sections of the invisible bridge about his childhood + hollywood are prob my fave stuff on the subject-- however not sure how conveniently they can be extricated from the interwoven narrative about every newspaper headline of the 1970s.

This dude was so weird:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9nFajZtWpE

Surprised there's been no mention of J.G. Ballard's 1968 short story Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

Oh my, too bad my library days are behind me, I would track that down.