CFR Fellows' Book Launch Series: Reagan—His Life and Legend by Max Boot

From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained a man of profound contradictions, even to those closest to him. Never resorting to either hagiography or hit job, Reagan charts his epic journey from Depression-era America to “Morning in America.” Providing fresh insight into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

The CFR Fellows’ Book Launch series highlights new books by CFR fellows.

Please note that members will receive an offer to claim a complimentary copy of this book. 

LINDSAY: Welcome, everyone, to today’s Council on Foreign Relations Fellows book launch series. We are here today to launch Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend.  

I am Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I am delighted to say we have more than a hundred people here in New York for the event. We have another 200 Council members joining us online, and it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the man of the moment, one Max Boot.  

Max is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for national security studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Max is also a columnist with the Washington Post. He has written widely and well on defense and national security issues.  

He has six bestselling books to his name including The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography.  

But we’re not here tonight to look at Max’s past accomplishments but to talk about his newest one and that is his book Reagan: His Life and Legend. It’s the story of America’s fortieth president.  

Now, I had the privilege to read the book in manuscript form. It is terrific. Now, I know because I’m at the Council and Max is at the Council that maybe it’s a bit self-congratulatory. It’s not just me who thinks that Max wrote a great book but a lot of reviewers. I want to read three of them to you just quickly.  

The New York Times says that Reagan: His Life and Legend is a gripping new biography that stands out for its deep research, lucid prose, and command of its subject’s broad political and social context. The New Yorker says that Reagan: His Life and Legend aims to be the definitive biography and it succeeds. It’s a thoughtful, absorbing account. It’s also a surprising one.  

The Washington Post calls it a magisterial new biography and the first important Reagan biography of the post-Reagan era. I have six or seven other reviews like this but I think at some point let’s let Max talk.  

So I’ll cut it off right now and just ask all of you to join me in welcoming Max here tonight. (Applause.) 

BOOT: Before we get into the meat of the discussion if I could just say very briefly a huge thank you to the Council in general because this is a Council on Foreign Relations book and I could not have written it if I had not had this professional home at the Council, and I’m very grateful to Jim in particular, who actually gave it a very close read and made many valuable suggestion and, in general, was an extremely wonderful and supportive boss over many years as director of studies, and I’m very, you know, glad that Jim has an opportunity to focus on his own writing now. But very delighted also that Shannon O’Neil is going to be a very capable leader of the studies department, going forward.  

LINDSAY: OK. You’re buttering me up as the moderator—(laughter)—to make sure I ask you really nice questions. 

BOOT: Now you can’t ask those tough questions anymore. 

LINDSAY: Now I can’t, but I agree with you on Shannon. So, again, congratulations, Shannon. 

OK. Max, I was struck when you came and said you wanted to write a biography of Ronald Reagan because I remember when the great historian Edmund Morris was commissioned to write an authorized biography of Reagan he found his subject very frustrating and eventually wrote a quasi-biography, quasi-novel—biographical fiction, I think, was the term appended to it—in which he inserted fictional characters in the story of Ronald Reagan’s life.  

So why did you want to take on what looked to be a very hard topic?  

BOOT: I can see why you greeted this with some trepidation based on the Edmund Morris precedent. You must have been wondering if I would need psychiatric help at the end of this project and, mercifully, as far as I know I don’t. 

I think maybe my one advantage over Edmund, who was a very skilled writer, was that he actually interviewed Ronald Reagan and I did not and so I was—(laughter)—so he was very frustrated, I think, by trying to get Ronald Reagan to open up and gaze within and to offer, you know, deep thoughts and self-reflection, which was not at all the kind of thing that Reagan did and so it sort of seemed to drive him to frustration and to these horrible fictional devices.  

But I just thought that, you know, Edmund’s failure opened up—created an opening for somebody because there have been so many books about Reagan but there has not been to date a definitive biography, something that really gave a balanced overview of Reagan both good and bad, looking at both his strengths and as well as his weaknesses.  

And so that’s what I set out to do and that’s been my occupation for, like, the last decade. 

LINDSAY: Now, Max, some people have said that Reagan is a person who’s ultimately unknowable. Do you think that’s a fair characterization? 

BOOT: At some level, yes, because that’s not only Edmund Morris. It’s many others who have tried to—who tried to gaze into the psychological depths of Reagan and came away very frustrated because he was basically a very private walled-off person and this is a little bit at odds with the image that he cultivated, which was very avuncular, very genial, very warm, very open, and that was his personality as projected on TV.  

But when you actually talk to a lot of people who knew him well, as I did, they will inevitably say something along the lines of there was actually kind of a glacial reserve at the core of the man.  

As Jim Baker told me, he never let us forget that we were all, at the end of the day, hired hands and, you know, you could be very close to him and serving him one day and then gone the next and he would barely notice that you were gone. Probably true of just about anybody except for Nancy. He would have noticed if she was gone.  

And so I kind of trace this fascinating, paradoxical personality of his back to his childhood in small town Illinois where his dad was a(n) alcoholic shoe salesman and they were moving from town to town as Jack Reagan lost one job after another. And so little Dutch Reagan, as he was then called, never really had time to get close to the other kids and because he always knew that, you know, he couldn’t really make lasting friends because he was going to move on to the next town in a year or two.  

And so he kind of developed this great reserve, this keeping people at a distance, and what I figured out over the course of this book research was that he really deployed—he had this huge stock of anecdotes and stories and he was a master of quips, and those often charmed people but he really deployed them, well, A, to charm people but, B, also to keep people at a safe distance because he didn’t want to engage in really searching, probing conversations.  

He didn’t—he couldn’t stand personality conflict and he was always often pretty oblivious to what was actually going on around him with his own aides, the disputes that they had, or even with his own kids. I mean, just to give one random example, when he was president Michael Reagan wrote a book revealing that he had been sexually molested as a youngster. But this was the first time that President Ronald Reagan had heard this. It was many decades after the fact.  

So he was not close to a lot of people and that he was—you know, kind of kept the world at a safe remove with his sunny personality.  

LINDSAY: You talk about the impact that Reagan’s father, an alcoholic, had on him—the moving around, the aversion of conflict. Was there anything about the time and place that Reagan grew up in that shaped his outlook and maybe his later success? 

BOOT: Absolutely. I mean, we think of Reagan as being a Westerner because, of course, he was governor of California and lived in California for so many years but he was really a man of the Midwest. He lived in the Midwest until his late twenties. That was really where his personality was formed in these small towns in Illinois where he lived, and, you know, many years later Main Street USA would become a ride at Disneyland but Reagan was the denizen of the actual Main Street USA with all of the virtues and strengths as well as the weaknesses and foibles of that time and place because remember, you know, Walt Disney, who was the great mythologizer of American culture, he created Main Street USA as this very—you know, this very sunny depiction of what life was like in these small towns.  

But remember that—and Walt Disney was a Midwesterner—but remember Sinclair Lewis was also a Midwesterner and he presented a rather more dystopian version of Midwestern small-town life in books like Main Street or Babbitt or many others and, of course, both realities were accurate.  

Of course, Reagan himself, having a very sunny personality which he inherited from his mother always painted his upbringing in very nostalgic and rose-colored terms, talking about Dixon, Illinois where he went to high school as a town that was animated by love and neighborliness and all these, you know, good feelings.  

But I discovered in the course of my book research that Dixon, Illinois was also a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, the Klan—when Reagan was living there in the 1920s the Klan was holding massive rallies outside of town and marching through downtown in their white sheets.  

So safe to say not all of Reagan’s neighbors were animated by love and, you know, embracing fellow humanity. It was a complicated reality because there were certainly positive virtues that he gained of self-reliance and, you know, some of the positive things of community in a small town but there was also—you know, there was a seamier side of life, I would say, with the fact that there was segregation just like there was in the South, that—there was the KKK. 

So there was—it was—you know, it was like all countries at all times and places. There was a very mixed picture and the combination of good and bad. But he chose to emphasize the good in his memories of that time and place.  

LINDSAY: So was Reagan eager to leave the Midwest behind and go elsewhere? 

BOOT: Surprisingly, he was. This is one other—one of the other paradoxes of the man that he claimed to love the Midwest and to love his small town and so forth but he was pretty eager to get out of there, actually.  

He didn’t want to stick around because he had real ambitions and, you know, his—it’s actually extraordinary how far he went because remember, his parents, their education ended in grade school. Again, his father was an alcoholic shoe salesman.  

When he was graduating from high school in 1928 that was at a time when you can count on one hand the percentage of Americans who went to college and, yet, he set his sights on going to college and in fact did go to college—to Eureka College and graduated in 1932 and he graduated in 1932 in the midst of the worst economic downturn in American history.  

And, yet, he managed to find his way. While so many other people were losing their jobs he was gaining a job and he actually had these very starry-eyed ambitions of becoming a movie actor because he was an amateur thespian in high school and in college. But he didn’t know how to get from, you know, Dixon, Illinois to Hollywood, California. 

And so he had a brainstorm, which was that there are no movie studios in Illinois or in the Midwest but there’s lots of radio stations. So he thought this could be a way station towards a movie career and, in fact, he managed to land a job at a radio station in Davenport, Iowa, and he was so good at it, became such a skilled broadcaster, that before long he transferred to the much larger station in Des Moines and became known throughout the Midwest as the voice of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox.  

But still he was not satisfied. Even at a time when he was making way more than the average wage—he was already a celebrity in the Midwest—he still had higher ambitions, and so one year when the Chicago Cubs were doing spring training at Catalina Island off the coast of California he accompanied them and then snuck away to do a screen test at Warner Brothers and, lo and behold, he was hired by Warner Brothers.  

So, you know, this matte kind of a—he was kind of living a real-life Horatio Alger story, and he was—you know, he kept his ego firmly in check. It wasn’t his—you know, he always hid his ambition behind a carefully cultivated front of modesty, which was real as well. But there was a real ambition there.  

I mean, nobody goes from being the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman in Dixon, Illinois to a Hollywood star, governor, and president without a lot of drive to get them from one place to the other.  

LINDSAY: So tell me a little bit about Reagan’s Hollywood career. I mean, he was actually remade. They didn’t want him using the name Dutch. Changed his hairstyle. 

BOOT: Yes. Well, this is—the irony is that—of course, the movie studios in those days were famous, you know, for renaming their stars, right? So, you know, there was—Archibald Leach becomes Cary Grant and so forth and so on. Many examples.  

The irony in Reagan’s case was that they were trying to think of a good name for him and they couldn’t do that at a time—but they knew they didn’t want to bill him in the movies as Dutch Reagan, which was the way he was billed on radio in the Midwest.  

And he said, well, how about Ronald Reagan? And so huge irony— 

LINDSAY: His given name. 

BOOT: Hollywood actually gave him back his actual name. That was—nobody ever called him— nobody ever actually called him Ronald Reagan other than his mother until he was about the age of twenty-seven. He was always known as Dutch. But then thereafter he became—in Hollywood he became known as Ron or Ronnie and that was the beginning of his movie career in 1937, 1938. 

And initially, you know, he started off doing B pictures. He was a Brass Bancroft, T-man—Treasury agent—in these horrible movies which I would not recommend renting. Really unwatchable. I mean, the special effects— 

LINDSAY: Did you watch them?  

BOOT: I did watch them but I would not—but only out of professional obligation. (Laughter.) This was—these were not entertaining movies. I mean, if you’re used to, like, Mission Impossible style special effects you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.  

But he actually graduated on to better things and by the time, you know, the U.S. was getting embroiled in World War II he was making some much bigger movies including two of his favorites, Knute Rockne All American, where he played George Gipp, the Notre Dame football star, and his greatest movie probably, Kings Row, which was where he played a central role and the one that he was the most proud of where, you know, he played a guy who was—whose legs were amputated by a sadistic surgeon and he had to say that immortal line, “Where’s the rest of me?” and that became kind of a catchphrase for him, as did “Win one for the Gipper” from the Knute Rockne movie.  

But his—you know, his—he was actually rising. I mean, he was getting—by the time of Pearl Harbor he was getting equal building with Errol Flynn. They were two of Warner Brothers’ biggest stars. But then his Hollywood career was derailed by World War II and not because he went overseas or served in combat. He actually served in a movie studio in Culver City working for an Air Force propaganda and film unit.  

So this was not exactly, you know, frontline combat duty but nevertheless it took him out of the civilian film market and so his career languished after, you know, he left active duty in 1945. 

LINDSAY: So tell me about Reagan’s journey to politics.  

BOOT: Well, that’s really when his journey to politics began. When his movie career ended his political career began and he—you know, when he left the Air Force in 1945 he was still kind of an idealistic New Deal Democrat and he worshiped FDR and had these very idealistic notions about one-world government and abolishing nuclear weapons and working with the Soviet Union and so forth.  

But then he moved to the right very rapidly, especially as he rose within the Screen Actors Guild where eventually he became president by the late 1940s and this was a time, obviously, when the nation was being roiled by communist witch hunts and McCarthyism battles over the enemy within, and Hollywood was no different.  

There were certainly communists in Hollywood but Reagan always believed that he had played a central role in stopping a communist takeover of Hollywood which, again, based on my research I didn’t really find that to be the case.  

Again, there were communists in Hollywood but no evidence that the Kremlin was actually plotting to take over the movie industry, which would have been hard in any case because at that point the entire movie studios—all the movie studios were controlled by about six men and they were all Republicans. So it would be hard for the communists to take them over.  

But Reagan got very much involved in the Hollywood blacklist. He was an FBI informant. He testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee and became close to the FBI, became close to various red hunters in Hollywood, and that really moved him into the political arena and made him a very hard line anti-communist.  

And then the next stage of his political transformation would occur in the decade to follow. I mean, this is actually fascinating to unravel how Reagan went from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican because the explanation that he himself gave has very little explanatory value because what he often said was, “I didn’t desert my party. My party deserted me,” to imply that he had been kind of a centrist or conservative all along and all of a sudden the Democratic Party went off the far left end and he couldn’t be part of that anymore, which might have made sense if you were converting to the Republican Party in, like, 1972 and he could say, you know, I was disgusted by George McGovern and the hippies. 

But he converted to the Republican Party in the 1950s, an era when Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson were the most powerful Democrats in Congress. Remember, in 1960 John F. Kennedy ran to Richard Nixon’s right on national security policy. So it’s pretty clear it wasn’t the Democratic party going to the left. It was Reagan going to the right and the transformation really began with this—you know, with his political battles in Hollywood but it accelerated in the 1950s after the end of his film career when his next job was working for General Electric and he became one of only two men to ever host a nationally televised show before becoming president. I’ll leave you to guess who the other one is. (Laughter.) 

He was—so he became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS on Sunday nights. But he also went around the country giving speeches on behalf of GE at their plants and various civic organizations, and in those days GE was a very right-wing company. For them they actually thought it was a business imperative to embrace laissez-faire ideology because they saw this as an inoculation against labor unions and strikes, things that would cost them money.  

And so they proselytized their employees with a lot of right-wing literature—books, pamphlets, and all these other things—and Ronald Reagan would have a lot of time to read things because he would make these long cross-country treks on the train from L.A. to New York to speak for GE because in those days he was afraid to fly. 

And so on the train he would read a lot of this right-wing literature that GE was foisting on their employees and then giving speeches espousing some of those ideas, and so by the early 1960s he had entirely left behind his old Democratic ideology and become a very hardcore right-wing Republican.  

LINDSAY: But he really sort of catches national attention in politics at the ’64 convention. He backs Barry Goldwater, gives the speech that’ll lead him to becoming governor of California. Talk to me a little bit about the speech and its consequences for his political career.  

BOOT: Well, that was really Reagan’s introduction to the national political scene when a couple of weeks before the 1964 election he gave a nationally televised address which came to be known as the time for choosing speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, and in many ways it was a very hardcore far-right speech.  

I mean, if you actually read it carefully, you know, he complains that Democrats are taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland forward under the banners of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin. That’s a pretty hardcore accusation to make but he delivered it with very practiced one liners with ease with jokes to make the hard line message go down easier, and a lot of Republicans who heard Ronald Reagan speak started thinking like—started thinking, well, maybe they nominated the wrong guy in 1964 because Reagan’s message was very similar to Barry Goldwater’s but he had a much more pleasing personality. In fact, one of the journalists at the time who covered him said that Reagan’s personality was like soothing, warm bathwater.  

And so he had a very winning debut on the national political stage and that in turn set him up in 1966 to run against two-term incumbent Governor Pat Brown in California.  

LINDSAY: How do you explain or how would you assess his time as governor of California?  

BOOT: Well, I asked that very question of Jerry Brown, who was Pat Brown’s son and Reagan’s successor as governor, and his answer surprised me. It may surprise you. Jerry Brown said Ronald Reagan was a pretty good governor, and, by the way, Willie Brown, who was a powerful Assembly Democrat, said pretty much the same thing, that he thought Reagan did a pretty good job and he actually got along pretty well with Reagan, which is the last thing you would expect from somebody who was accusing Democrats of taking America down the road to communism.  

But there was this—again, one of the most significant paradoxes with Reagan was the divide between Reagan the campaigner who could be very ideological, very hard edged, and Reagan in government where he was actually very centrist and very pragmatic. He was able to pivot towards solving problems.  

And so, for example, when he became governor and faced a large budget deficit guess what he did? He raised taxes because that was the responsible thing to do and, in fact, he passed—as both governor and president passed more tax increases than tax cuts. Also as governor he signed the most liberal abortion law in the country and a very tough gun control bill.  

This was a pattern that would continue in Washington, where as president he was—just as in Sacramento he worked very closely with Jesse Unruh, the powerful speaker of the California Assembly in Washington he worked very closely with Tip O’Neill, the powerful Speaker of the House and, you know, did lots of things that fly in the face of at least current Republican orthodoxy, for example, in 1986 signing legislation that offered legalization to millions of undocumented immigrants.  

So, you know, his—and I would add his most impressive achievement as president, working with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War peacefully, that is the last thing you would have expected from somebody who was involved in the Hollywood blacklist, who was involved in anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood, who his entire career identified as a strong anti-communist and early in his presidency called the Soviet Union the evil empire.  

And, yet, towards the twilight of his political career in his second term as president he was working hand in glove with the world’s leading communist to reduce tensions and reduce nuclear weapons.  

So that’s really, I think, what made Reagan ultimately such a successful governor and president was that he was able to put ideology aside and just get things done.  

LINDSAY: Let’s talk a bit more about his presidency. You’ve mentioned some of his successes. What is your overall assessment of Reagan’s presidency?  

BOOT: Well, I agree with the consensus of historians. There was a poll by C-SPAN of presidential historians a few years ago which ranked him in the top ten—I think around eight or nine—and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. I mean, his presidency certainly had major failures and I go into those and we can talk more about those if you like, including the fact that he ignored the AIDS pandemic.  

He was a good leader but a terrible manager and so presided over many scandals, whether it was at the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Iran-Contra affair, which nearly derailed his presidency. He also had pretty consistently a poor record on civil rights.  

So there were a lot of things that you can point to that were shortcomings in his presidency, and just on the civil rights question there was a real double standard where he was very good in calling out human rights abuses in communist countries but had a blind spot for human rights abuses in South Africa and in fact vetoed a very tough sanctions bill on apartheid South Africa.  

So, again, there are a lot of things you can point to that were problematic in his presidency and I go into all that. But at the end of the day, I think he was still a great president for two fundamental reasons, the first of which being that he helped to revive the nation’s spirits after the terrible turmoil of the 1970s after Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, the Iran hostage crisis. 

The nation was really reeling, and there’s been—you know, there’s been some reassessment in recent years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency to suggest that he did a better job than people thought at the time but—and I think there’s some justification of that. But Carter was really bad at communicating.  

He was good about nuts and bolts governance but he was really bad about communicating, and Reagan was a genius at communicating and he really elevated the nation’s spirits, in fact, using—you know, kind of inspired by communications techniques pioneered by his boyhood hero FDR.  

He was kind of channeling FDR throughout his presidency and did a tremendous job of fostering this very positive vision of America as a shining city on a hill that inspired people and ultimately allowed him to bring the nation together and achieve what now seems like science fiction, like, this fantastic, unbelievable accomplishment of winning in 1984. He won forty-nine out of fifty states. I mean, imagine any political candidate today winning forty-nine states and yet he did. He really brought the nation together and inspired it.  

So that was one massive achievement. I think the other massive achievement, which I already alluded to briefly, was working with Gorbachev to peacefully end the Cold War and that required a major pivot from a lifetime of anti-communist rhetoric and, in fact, a pivot from his first term where he did—you know, he called out the evil empire, said that the Soviet Union was—communism was going to be consigned to the ash heap of history, launched the largest peacetime defense buildup in U.S. history, launched SDI—the missile defense initiative—and during 1983 the United States and the Soviet Union probably came closer than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis to an actual war. We were actually blundering towards what could have been a disastrous nuclear war.  

But then after that Reagan pulled away from the brink and realized that he had to defuse tensions and work to avert Armageddon and when Gorbachev came to power he was able to do that finally. His first—I would argue that his first-term policy of the Soviet Union, his tough policy, didn’t bear a lot of fruit and his confrontations didn’t really produce results. 

But his more conciliatory approach with Gorbachev that paid off big time and I think, you know, as I argued in a Foreign Affairs article recently I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Reagan ended the Cold War. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that his defense buildup bankrupted the Soviet Union. Just as an empirical matter I don’t think any of that is true, but I think what is true is that he had the wit to understand that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader even though many, including his own Cabinet like Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary, was saying, you can’t trust this guy—he’s just trying to snooker you. 

Reagan met Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and understood he could actually do business with him and together they helped to set our two nations on a trajectory towards the end of the Cold War and I think that’s ultimately the historic achievement for which he deserves some credit.  

LINDSAY: I want to bring the rest of the room into the conversation. Before I do I have one last question to ask you and it’s a question that you pose at the end of Reagan: His Life and Legend and that is does Donald Trump represent a repudiation of Ronald Reagan or a continuation? 

BOOT: Well, at the risk of sounding overly academic I would say yes. I think there’s—(laughter)— 

LINDSAY: I’m an academic so— 

BOOT: I think there is some element of truth in both statements. There is certainly massive differences between Reagan and Trump in both politics and personality. I mean, remember, Reagan was pro-trade, pro-immigration. He was pro-alliance as pro-NATO, pro standing up to Russian aggression.  

It’s hard to imagine him equivocating about supporting Ukraine, for example. He also had a very sunny, optimistic vision of the country. Would never go around talking about America as a failing country.  

And, yet, I mean, you can still see some continuities. You know, I don’t think that Trump necessarily came out of nowhere and you can see the continuities with, you know, Reagan’s embrace of populism. And by the way, his campaign slogan in 1980 or one of them was make America great again.  

So his embrace of populism, some of the white backlash politics that he practiced. He also had kind of a cavalier attitude towards factual accuracy. He didn’t go around accusing, you know, immigrants of eating pets—(laughter)—but he certainly had a lot of—he sort of had a lot of faux quotes and kind of made-up quotes that he employed even when it was pointed out to them they were not, strictly speaking, factual.  

I think—the big picture, I think, what’s really happened in America in the last sixty or so years is that ever since 1964, ever since Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee, the Republican Party has been drifting to the right and so Reagan was well to the right of Nixon and Ford and Trump, in turn, is well to the right of Ronald Reagan.  

And so today I’m sure if Reagan were still alive he would be denounced as a RINO, a Republican in name only, and yet you can still see, looking at his two terms in office, some of the elements that eventually led the Republican Party to embrace Donald Trump.  

LINDSAY: At this time I’d like to invite our members to join the conversation with their questions and I’m supposed to point out to everyone that this meeting is on the record.  

We’re going to take our first question here in New York. I’ll go to the back of the room.  

Wait. Someone will bring you a microphone. If you could identify yourself and ask a question. 

Q: I didn’t expect to be called on first but what the heck. 

BOOT: The pressure is on. It’s got to be a good question.  

Q: Right. The pressure’s on. Amar Bhidé, Columbia School of Public Health.  

So I’m fascinated by the idea that a biography reveals as much about the intellectual journey of the biographer as it does about the subject, and Boswell comes to mind with Johnson.  

And to what degree do you think that your fascinating personal intellectual journey is reflected in the way you have covered Reagan?  

BOOT: Well, I mean, anything anybody writes is a reflection of their outlook and personality and experiences and, of course, this book is no different.  

I mean, I grew up, you know, as a huge Reagan fan growing up in Southern California in the 1980s, all the more so because my family came here from the Soviet Union. So like a lot of émigrés from communist countries I tended to gravitate towards the right side of the political spectrum. 

And so I was thrilled when Reagan called out the evil empire and, you know, castigated the Soviet Union for human rights abuses. You know, he made me a conservative and a Republican in the 1980s and, of course, I went on to work at various places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and serve as a foreign policy advisor to various Republican candidates.  

I guess I’m grateful to Mr. Trump for pushing me out of the Republican Party because in the process of doing that I think he has given me an objectivity and a distance from Reagan and from the Republican Party that I think enables me to write a much better book than if I were writing, you know, in kind of—as an admirer as I was in the 1980s. 

And to be clear, I still have some residual affection for Reagan but I’m really—you know, I really sought to write this in—as objectively and as balanced a manner as possible and I think being a political independent now—I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican. I’m truly independent. I think that allows me to—you know, to have a critical distance that has made this a much better book.  

LINDSAY: OK. We’ll come here to the front, sir. If you wait someone will bring you a microphone. It’s coming from your right.  

Q: Andrew Nagorski. I’m a writer and had the pleasure of absorbing one of your earlier books. 

I wanted to ask you about the perception of Reagan abroad because I have quick two observations. Say, in Poland in the ’80s—I remember going to Poland in ’87. The most frequent question at a time when in the States a lot of people were really getting rather weary of Reagan was, why can’t he run for a third term, because precisely the evil empire rhetoric, everything. They felt this was the first president in a long while who really stood up for them. 

And then ten years later—I guess it would be ’97—I’m in Berlin. I’m listening to the radio and there’s—I think it’s just a pop music station and suddenly Reagan’s voice comes on, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It’s the tenth anniversary, and the DJ says, when Reagan said that ten years ago a lot of us scoffed at him but he knew something we didn’t, and I’m wondering to what extent you pursued this image of Reagan and how it evolved outside our own country.  

BOOT: Well, there’s no question that Reagan has a big fan base in Eastern Europe because of his moral clarity in calling out the failures of communism and he is very fondly remembered, and many people in Eastern Europe give him a lot of credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, again, I looked into this pretty carefully, looking at as much of the historical scholarship as I could and talking to as many people as I could and reading as many documents as I could, and the conclusion I drew from all that was, although this is not going to make me very popular in Eastern Europe, I actually think that Mikhail Gorbachev was more responsible for the end of the Cold War than Ronald Reagan.  

I think that if Gorbachev had not come to power in 1985—if somebody like Vladimir Putin had succeeded Chernenko as the leader of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union might very well still exist and the Berlin Wall might very well still stand because the Soviet Union wasn’t bankrupt and there’s plenty of communist regimes that were poor at the time like Cuba and North Korea and China that still are very much, sadly, in existence today.  

So I think Gorbachev was really the transformational figure because he was kind of that black swan, somebody who rose to the top of a dictatorial regime but lost faith in that dictatorship and, ultimately, I think what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the reforms that Gorbachev instituted. Not that he wanted it to lead to the dissolution of the USSR but that was where the reforms inevitably led and I think Gorbachev basically had a—made a fundamental vow with himself that he wasn’t going to use force to keep the Soviet Union together and that’s what enabled the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s what enabled—that’s why you had the Berlin Wall falling and you didn’t have a Tiananmen Square massacre as occurred in China.  

So I think that was the key difference and that doesn’t—there’s very little constituency for that because Gorbachev is kind of a prophet without honor. Russians hate him because they blame him for the dissolution of the Soviet empire.  

Eastern Europeans don’t like him either because they see him as the last leader of the Soviet Union. He’s not that popular in America but he was truly a transformational leader and I think Reagan deserves credit for working with Gorbachev and recognizing what a transformational leader he was. 

But I don’t—again, I don’t think that Reagan set in motion Gorbachev’s reforms, which I think were really driven by Gorbachev himself.  

LINDSAY: We have a question from someone online.  

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from George Hoguet.  

Q: Hi. This is George Hoguet at Chesham Investments in Boston.  

I’d be interested in your views on the evolution of Reagan’s thinking with regard to supply side economics, tax cuts, and budget deficits. And just to put this in perspective, when Reagan took office debt held by the public as a percent of GDP was 24 percent. When he left it was 40 percent and now it’s close to 100 percent of GDP.  

So I’d be interested in your thoughts of how his thinking changed over time and what kind of his legacy is in that area. 

BOOT: Well, I guess you can argue it’s not surprising what happened with the budget deficit because his economic program in 1980 simply did not add up. You could not dramatically cut taxes, dramatically increase defense spending, and expect to get rid of the budget deficit and balance the budget.  

That was why George H.W. Bush called it voodoo economics and he was right. But at the end of the day, most people did not care because in spite of the increasing budget deficit the nation still staged a pretty robust economic recovery and in the book, as you’ll see, I give most of the credit to that to Paul Volcker for taking the inflation out of the economy.  

But Reagan certainly presided over that and benefited from it politically and, you know, Democrats in the 1980s were castigating Reagan for the high budget deficits, and I would add this was the only regret that I ever heard Reagan express about his time in office, that he could not balance the budget because he had been saying for decades that it was imperative to balance the budget and attacking Democrats for deficit spending and, of course, he engaged in deficit spending himself.  

But as you pointed out, the level of deficit spending and the level of debt is much higher today than it was then. So the levels under Reagan don’t quite seem as shocking. In retrospect, I think there is another element of his—of fallout from his economic program that I think looms larger today than it did at the time, which is that if you look at charts of income disparity in the United States they tend to diverge pretty radically, beginning in the early 1980s with the wealthy getting much wealthier and everybody else pretty much stagnating or getting poorer. And, again, that was not something that Reagan was very concerned about. He was worried about wealth creation, not equality of outcome.  

But I think, you know, a lot of his policies including the major—the tax cuts, which benefited disproportionately the wealthy, policies designed to reduce unionization, lax enforcement of antitrust laws—a lot of these things came together and there were, of course, a lot of other changes going on with the information economy developing a lot of other, you know, economic trends unrelated to Reagan. 

But the result of all that was a nation of haves and have nots and I think that’s been very destabilizing politically. It’s led to the growth of populism on both the left and now especially on the right and has dramatically reduced trust and faith in our political system. So that’s—I think that’s one of the fallouts from Reaganomics that Reagan certainly did not intend or anticipate but I think has proven to be very significant and corrosive. 

LINDSAY: In the back of the room there. 

Q: Jean Monier with McKinsey. 

Max, thanks for the book. You’re spot on, by the way. Listen, I’m maybe one of the member that was in the (Pioneer ?) camp in the ’80s in the German Democratic Republic, and I can tell you what Gorbachev did. By the way, what Pope John Paul did has far more impact than Reagan.  

But let me ask you a question about our country. I mean, people like Reagan, like Bill Clinton, like Kennedy, what does it say about our country being able to get this kind of profile—you know, from Illinois to California to the White House? What does it say about our country being able to pick people like that that went to change a little bit of history? What’s your thoughts on that?  

BOOT: I mean, I think we could have done worse than Ronald Reagan and we have done worse in some cases. I mean, I think there was a lot of criticism of Reagan at the time when he took office that he was not qualified for the presidency. Clark Clifford called him an amiable dunce.  

But at the end of the day, as I mentioned, I mean, if you poll presidential historians today they place him in the top ten of presidents, suggesting that he was qualified. But he certainly had massive failures, and the way I would put it is he was a great leader but a very poor manager and both of those things are significant.  

He was a great leader in that he inspired the country with his ability to communicate. He understood the performative aspect of the presidency. One time he was asked, you know, how can an actor be president of the United States and his reply was, “I don’t understand how anybody but an actor could be president of the United States.” (Laughter.) 

So he was very good at the inspirational aspect of the presidency but he was—didn’t have a lot of interest in actually managing the government, and so things ran OK when he had people who were really competent working for him like Jim Baker, his first-term chief of staff, one of the best White House chiefs of staff in history.  

But then things went haywire in the second term when Jim Baker casually decided to switch jobs with Don Regan, the Treasury secretary, and Reagan approved that job switch in an Oval Office meeting lasting about twenty minutes. He didn’t give it a lot of thought and, unfortunately, Don Regan turned out to be a disastrous White House chief of staff.  

As Jim Baker said to me, you know, Don liked the chief part of the title but he didn’t understand that he was staff. He thought that he was, like, the real president but he was not—he didn’t have good instincts and the result was the Iran-Contra affair and a lot of other messes. 

So Reagan, I think, really, more than most presidents was really at the mercy of his aides. When he got good ones he got good results. When he had bad aides, bad—you know, bad assistance the results could be catastrophic.  

LINDSAY: I think we’re going to go back online.  

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Welby Leaman.  

Q: All right. Thanks.  

Was James Q. Wilson’s article and commentary back in the late ’60s helpful to you in which he, you know, called Reagan country and which he locates Reagan’s politics in the social milieu of Southern California? 

And in that context, you know, CFR has done—Ted Alden and CFR, more broadly, have done great work on place-specific trade policy and other trades—other place-specific policy. You know, to what degree do you see Reagan’s legacy both in foreign policy and other things taking on different forms in different regions of the United States?  

BOOT: I’m not sure I can answer the second part of that question so I’ll just answer the first one. You’re referring to this very influential article that James Q. Wilson, the Harvard political scientist, wrote about Reagan country, which appeared in commentary. I think it was in 1968, and he was really analyzing the socio economic milieu of Southern California, which is kind of strange to remember now when California is such a blue state.  

But, you know, in the 1960s Southern California was kind of the hotbed of conservatism in the United States. It was—you know, Orange County in particular a stronghold of the John Birch Society, little old ladies in orange tennis shoes and all the rest of it, and that was kind of the milieu that Reagan came from and many of those people were like Ronald Reagan.  

They were immigrants—white immigrants from the Midwest who moved to California but brought a lot of their values and religious outlook with them and often, you know, believed in evangelical Protestantism, very staunchly anti-communist, you know, believed in free market economics.  

Didn’t have a lot of associations that they were part of. They weren’t part of unions. They weren’t part of civic organizations. They kind of lived in these suburban ranch houses and watched TV and that was kind of how people like Ronald Reagan understood how to communicate with them because he was a TV star, understood how to talk to them and he embodied a lot of their hopes and dreams.  

And I think that was one of the early analyses of the Reagan phenomenon, which turned out to be prescient. I would add, by the way, I think Jim Wilson, who I had a lot of respect for, but I think he had a blind spot in that article which was that he didn’t talk about a critical part of Reagan’s appeal, which was that he was opposed to civil rights legislation.  

That was a lot of the reason why white suburbanites were supporting him because, frankly, at the time they were—you know, this was the time, you know, from the Watts riots in ’65 on and urban unrest in Newark and many other places, increasing crime levels. So there were a lot of, you know, terrified white suburbanites who were worried about the consequences of a civil rights revolution and thought that crime was out of control, the country was going to hell in a hand basket, and Reagan kind of represented the forces of, quote/unquote, “law and order” and that was a key part of his appeal, which I don’t think that Jim Wilson sufficiently emphasized. 

LINDSAY: Yes? 

Q: Thank you for this. This has made me think a lot. My name is Beth Hillman. I’m the president and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. 

And last Wednesday when I stood behind Mayor Bloomberg and President Biden, former President Trump, and Vice President Harris shook hands, making me think about what might be possible ahead of us. 

You already answered the question about what might happen with respect to having a poor manager in the White House and the impact in terms of empowering those aides. But you also mentioned that despite Reagan’s inability to build strong relationships with many he did have a strong relationship with his wife.  

Why, and what impact did that have on him?  

BOOT: Well, the relationship between Ronald and Nancy Reagan was absolutely critical to his professional success. In fact, one of his aides told me if it hadn’t been for Nancy Reagan would have never been elected governor or president. She was that important.  

I mean, first and foremost, there was—it was a love match and they were a wonderful love story. They were deeply in love throughout their lives for—you know, together for nearly fifty years and, you know, I was—I read, like, card after card that Reagan sent after—on every single holiday to Nancy telling her how much he loved her and it was actually sweet and touching. 

But she was also very important to his political rise because she was a very different political—a very different personality type from him because Reagan was very trusting, almost gullible and Pollyannaish. Often drove Nancy to distraction because he always assumed that whoever he met had the purest of intentions and Nancy was just the opposite. 

She was kind of jittery, suspicious. She always assumed that everybody was out to get him unless proven otherwise, and so she played a critical role. As one of his aides said, she was—Nancy was kind of the human resources department of Reagan Inc.  

She was the person who often hired and fired on his behalf. She did kind of the dirty work that he would not do because he shied away from personality conflict. He didn’t want to get into it with aides whereas she would get in their face, confront them, and if they weren’t getting the job done she would get rid of them including Don Regan, most famously as White House chief of staff.  

So he really needed somebody who was kind of tough and served kind of that enforcer role and she did, and she was a very valuable political helpmate to him.  

LINDSAY: Jonathan? 

Q: Hi, Max. Jonathan Chanis, New Tide Asset Management. 

You listed some of the pros and cons of the Reagan administration and you talked about his contribution to nationalism and populism but you didn’t mention PATCO, which was very interesting.  

Some of us may remember that on the cover of the New York Times when he fired the air traffic controllers were the pictures of the union leaders led out in leg irons, and it might be a small exaggeration but this was the beginning of the end for the organized labor movement for the next forty years, which it’s still recovering from, and it possibly contributed or greatly contributed to the China shock and the inability of the United States to adjust to what went on with China and destruction of U.S. jobs.  

So where would you put PATCO in this? 

BOOT: Well, I mean, I think you analyzed it pretty accurately. I mean, this was the air traffic controllers strike in August of 1981 and it was sort of interesting because the air traffic controllers were actually one of two unions, along with the Teamsters, that had endorsed Reagan.  

I mean, the air traffic controllers were basically, like, middle-aged white guys who had served in the military so they tended to be putting pro-Reagan and they thought that they would get a very generous contract out of Reagan, and they did but not generous enough for the union leadership.  

So they went on strike and Ronald Reagan basically channeled his inner Calvin Coolidge who as governor of Massachusetts had said there is no right to strike against the public will and breaking a Boston police strike.  

And so he basically fired the air traffic controllers and took a huge gamble because if there had been, you know, an airplane crash in the following few weeks or months he probably would have been blamed and there would have been—aside from the human disaster it would have been a political disaster.  

But it worked. He managed to get military air traffic controllers and others to keep the system more or less functioning. At the end of the day, it actually cost more to replace all the air traffic controllers than it would have cost simply to pay them a little more. But the result was it did send a powerful message to unions and basically helped to spur a decline in union activity and union activism, which had the consequences that you alluded to. 

But it also had—I think it sent a message about Reagan as a leader. In fact, George Shultz said something very interesting to me because he said that the PATCO strike was actually Ronald Reagan’s first big foreign policy decision because it sent a message to leaders around the world don’t mess with this guy. He’s actually pretty tough.  

LINDSAY: Come here to the front. 

Q: Hi. My name is Hall (sp). I’m a term member. 

I did not grow up in the U.S. I grew up in this mighty country called Canada. And it always fascinates me the religiosity in the U.S., which is clearly a primary faction to the current party.  

Can you please speak to Ronald Reagan’s religiosity, how the Republican right emerged when he was president, and if—what was his relationship and how did he shape their growth to today’s time?  

Thank you.  

BOOT: Well, Ronald Reagan grew up in a pretty religious environment. I mean, his father was not particularly religious. He was a Catholic, but his mother was very religious. She was Disciples of Christ, which was a Protestant denomination, and she certainly bought up Reagan with strong religious convictions.  

He did not wear his religion on his sleeve. He did not talk a lot about the Almighty as president. He didn’t even go to church very often because he said it would inconvenience the churchgoers if he showed up there with his Secret Service detail. Stu Spencer, who was his political consultant since 1966, Stu told me, you know, Reagan really just liked to read the funnies on Sunday morning. (Laughter.) He didn’t want to go to church. 

And he did not—you know, he did not make a huge investment in social issues. You know, he opposed abortion and expressed regret for having signed a very liberal abortion law in California. But he really didn’t do much about it. One of his aides—I was talking to one of his aides about this and this aide was saying to him, you know, Mr. President, you say that you’re horrified by all these abortions. Well, why don’t you do something to, you know, to illegalize abortion? And Reagan’s reply was, you know, politics is the art of the possible and I just have to focus on areas where I can get things done and that’s just not my priority, and he didn’t make it a priority. 

But he did make, certainly, common cause with the Moral Majority and other Christian right groups and, certainly, you know, used them to win the 1980 election and to win reelection in 1984 and helped to bring them into the Republican mainstream.  

But he certainly, I would say, in part because he had a lot of aides around him who were very wary of these groups he kept them, I would say, at an arm’s length removed, which is obviously no longer the case in the Republican Party.  

LINDSAY: Go back there to, I guess, my right. Yep. 

Q: Thank you. Cynthia Roberts. 

Max, thank you for this book, which I’m looking forward to reading. I haven’t read yet.  

The idea of Gorbachev being more forceful in changing history than Reagan on that question is pretty well established now but the puzzle that—one of the puzzles that really remains in their engagement is at Reykjavik and Reagan’s attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear war. 

And did you discover anything that helps us explain beyond the films he watched, apparently, his transformation at the horror that nuclear war could do—the impact of an all-out Armageddon?  

Thanks.  

BOOT: Well, I think, you know, Reagan—he was not a systematic thinker. He was really moved by anecdotes and by stories, and in dealing with the Soviet Union he had kind of two competing impulses, one of which was horror at Soviet human rights abuses and he would meet with Soviet dissidents and call for dissidents to be let out of prison.  

But his other impulse was horror of the prospect of nuclear war and I think he was very influenced early in his presidency when he participated in a war game where he saw much of the United States incinerated in a nuclear strike, and, you know, even after he was shot in 1981 and he survived, of course—very close to death but he survived—he vowed—he thought that that was a message from the Almighty. This goes back to your earlier question about his religiosity.  

He thought that his surviving the shooting was a message from the Almighty that it was his obligation to do something to reduce the risk of nuclear Armageddon. 

And I think—and there was, I think, another moment in 1983 when there were several points where the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war. There were concerns that the Soviets misinterpreted a NATO war game called Able Archer as a cover for a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union and were actually mobilizing their nuclear arsenals.  

And it’s unclear exactly when Reagan found this out but certainly by early 1984 he was giving a very conciliatory speech—the Ivan and Anya speech—in which he was talking about how much ordinary Soviets and ordinary Americans had in common and trying to damp down the risk of nuclear war and this really became more and more of an obsession for him.  

But the interesting thing is, of course, that he opposed the nuclear freeze movement, and so when he opposed the nuclear freeze movement a lot of folks on the left assumed it was because he was this evil warmonger. The reality, which almost nobody realized at the time, was one of the reasons he opposed—well, there were two reasons he opposed the nuclear freeze movement. One is that it was unilateral. It didn’t involve a freeze of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.  

But the other reason was he didn’t think that the nuclear freeze movement went far enough. He actually wanted to abolish nuclear weapons, not just freeze them at the current levels, and at Reykjavik—the Reykjavik summit in 1986 he and Gorbachev actually came close to embracing the somewhat utopian proposal to abolish nuclear weapons within ten years, which gave palpitations not only to the Soviet generals but to the American generals.  

And, of course, it fell apart because Reagan would not trade away his beloved SDI, which was not a very realistic prospect of a space-based nuclear shield, but he was very devoted to it. And so that led to the failure at the Reykjavik Summit.  

But, as you know, the next year Reagan and Gorbachev came together and signed the INF treaty abolishing for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons. And so I think his nuclear abolitionism certainly became more pronounced the longer his presidency went on and he was just horrified by the prospect that he held in his pocket the keys that could lead to the destruction of humanity.  

LINDSAY: That takes us to the end of our hour. I want to thank everyone here in New York, everyone online, for joining us for this on-the-record meeting. I would ask all of you to please join me in congratulating Max on writing a really terrific book. (Applause.) 

For everyone here in New York, let you know that the reception will continue and there are books for sale outside . 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.