The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution
1980-1989
Steven F. Hayward
(Crown Forum, 639 pages, $35)
Books about Ronald Reagan do not yet rival the Amazonian flow of
works about Abraham Lincoln, but they continue to pour forth as
historians, political scientists, and journalists try to answer
such questions as: Was Reagan a great president or only a Great
Communicator? Was he prescient about the decline and fall of the
Soviet Union or merely lucky? Did his tax cuts unleash an era of
unprecedented prosperity or a decade of greed? Was there an Age of
Reagan and if so, will it have a lasting influence on American
politics?
In The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, the liberal
best-selling author James Mann credits Reagan for “a crucial role”
in ending the Cold War but protects himself against being called a
“consymp” (conservative sympathizer) by insisting that the Soviet
Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev played “the leading role” in bringing the
four-decade-old conflict to a close.
In The Age of Reagan the prizewinning Princeton
historian Sean Wilentz — a liberal — concludes that Reagan was
the preeminent political figure for more than three decades,
dramatically changing “the sum and substance of American politics,”
but leaving behind a polarized country and a vital center “badly in
need of rescue and repair.”
In addition to such scholarly works, there have been attack
books like Tear Down This Myth by the prizewinning
Philadelphia journalist Will Bunch, who writes that the most urgent
task facing America is to “exorcise” the mistaken notions that
Reagan’s tax cuts caused the economic recovery of the 1980s and
that his military buildup helped end the Cold War.
There have also been charming memoirs like The Reagan I
Knew by William F. Buckley Jr. and revelatory books like
Reagan’s Secret War by Martin Anderson and Annelise
Anderson, the latest of their invaluable contributions to the
Reagan literature (and reviewed
in these pages last month).
Conservatives have been waiting for the definitive
history of the Reagan years. In the mean-time, they have cut and
pasted from reporter Lou Cannon’s detailed trilogy, Ed Meese’s
insider account of his decades with Reagan, Paul Kengor’s
thoughtful examination of the role of Reagan’s faith in his
decision making, and other works.
Hopes for a nonpareil history were raised — mine among them —
when the first volume of Steven F. Hayward’s splendid The Age
of Reagan was published eight years ago. (Note: You cannot
copyright a book title — thus Professor Wilentz was within his
authorial rights to call his work The Age of Reagan.)
Covering the years between 1964 and 1980, The Age of Reagan:
The Fall of the Old Liberal Order was big, bold, and ambitious
— Hayward proposed to do for Ronald Reagan what the liberal
historian Arthur Schlesinger did for Franklin D. Roosevelt: to make
the man and his times one and the same. Hayward described Reagan’s
political skill, his persistence, the conservative philosophy that
undergirded his every action. Hayward was especially good in his
presentation of the reasons for the rapid decline of liberalism in
the 1960s and 1970s.
AND NOW WE HAVE the second volume of Hayward’s The Age of
Reagan, subtitled
The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989. The
639-page book starts with a ringing fanfare, promising to show how
Reagan “transformed the Republican party in his own image.” Hayward
suggests that rather than being called the Great Communicator,
Reagan should be known as the Great Liberator, by virtue of having
won the Cold War and having freed Americans from looking to the
government in a time of crisis for a solution. The prologue is
titled “Lion at the Gate,” and the author frequently compares
Reagan to the indomitable British statesman Winston Churchill.
The early chapters examine in close, almost excruciating detail
the first year of the Reagan presidency because it confronted the
question that has occupied the nation since the Great Depression:
how much government do we need?
As Hayward himself admits, the pace of the book is “slightly
lopsided.” The rhetoric of the early pages is often highly
technical as Hayward explains the positions of the contending
economic factions. I learned far more than I wanted to know about
monetary theory, investment incentives, “free banking,” and whether
supply-side economics is or is not microeconomics applied to
macroeconomic “aggregates.”
But Hayward captures the intense political battle between the
administration led by the president and the Democratic majority in
the House led by New Deal liberal Speaker Tip O’Neill over the size
and duration of the tax cuts. The administration prevailed because
Reagan went on national television and urged the public to lobby
Capitol Hill for his bill. They responded so enthusiastically that
O’Neill admitted, “We are experiencing a telephone blitz like this
nation has never seen. It’s had a devastating effect.” The final
House vote on the Economic Recovery Act of 1981 was 238-195, with
48 “conservative” Democrats defying the party leadership and
backing Reagan.
The Reagan tax cuts set in motion economic forces that resulted
in the longest period of peacetime prosperity in American history
— and they were heard around the world. “Nearly all industrialized
nations would emulate the Reagan plan,” Hayward writes, “and reduce
their marginal income tax rates” in the following decades.
A compelling chapter is the one dealing with the attempted
assassination of Reagan and how he rebounded to secure approval of
his economic plan — counseling everyone to “stay the course.” At
the same time, the president laid the foundation for a new U.S.
foreign policy based on ending the Cold War through negotiation
from a position of military strength.
Hayward is somewhat critical of Reagan for taking what he says
is so long to formulate a policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. But we
know from Martin Anderson’s Reagan’s Secret War and Peter
Schweitzer’s several books that Reagan chaired almost every meeting
of the National Security Council in 1981, during which time a
policy of containment plus was debated and agreed upon. It was then
set down in a national security decision directive, NSDD-32, by NSC
staffer (and Harvard historian) Richard Pipes in early 1982-barely
one year after Reagan took office.
In Hayward’s now fast-paced narrative, 1983 emerges as the most
significant year of the Reagan presidency because both the Cold War
and the U.S. economy reached turning points. This was the year that
Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” — inspiring cheers
by dissidents in the Gulag and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain —
and launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It was also
the year when the economy began to kick into high gear as a result
of the Reagan tax cuts.
THE LAST THIRD of The Age of Reagan properly deals with
the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, meetings that worried conservatives
always suspicious of Communist motives and confused liberals who
could not believe Reagan when he said he wanted to eliminate all
nuclear weapons. For the president, the policy of Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD) was truly mad. The controversial summits produced
the INF Treaty, which eliminated an entire category of nuclear
missiles and signaled the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
In Hayward’s opinion, the Iran-contra scandal “nearly snuffed
out the lamp on top of Reagan’s shining city on a hill.” He faults
Reagan for dealing with a terrorist government to secure the
release of American hostages but absolves the president of any part
in the diversion of funds to the Contras in Nicaragua.
At the end of 1987, following the “triple whammy” of
Iran-Contra, the failed Bork nomination to the Supreme Court, and
the stock market crash, the liberal media were dusting off their
headlines about “the stench of failure at the White House.” Even
some conservatives joined the chorus of dismay, unable to
comprehend the import of the arms control agreement signed by
Reagan and Gorbachev. One conservative who understood what was
transpiring was the veteran Cold Warrior Brian Crozier, who in
August 1988 described a “gigantic funeral service” for Communism
that was being conducted by the Soviet Communist Party.
The American people evinced their desire for the continuation of
the Age of Reagan by giving him “a third term” in the
person of his vice president, George H. W. Bush. Further proof of
Reagan’s lasting influence was the election of a Republican House
in 1994 — which some observers called Reagan’s “third landslide.”
There was also the enduring conservative philosophy of the
Republican Party and the 1996 welfare reform, which incorporated
the principles Governor Reagan had advocated in the early
1970s.
The Age of Reagan is a brilliant history marked by
superb writing and prodigious research (66 pages of endnotes). But
it ends on an uncertain note, quoting Midge Decter that “there was
no Reagan Revolution” and Gary McDowell that Reagan did far less
than he hoped and promised but “a hell of a lot more than people
thought he would.”
Reaganauts would have preferred Margaret Thatcher’s summation
that Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot” and
presidential historian Stephen Ambrose’s comment that “Reagan will
be remembered as the president who reversed the decades-old flow of
power to Washington.”
As good as The Age of Reagan is — and it’s very good
— we are still waiting for the definitive history of the Reagan
presidency.
